Buying a bag of whole bean coffee gives you the best shot at maximizing flavor and freshness of those beans. But how do we grind those whole coffee beans into something ready to brew?

Why grind coffee beans at all?

It helps to understand a little bit about why we are even grinding coffee beans. Coffee is full of aromatics and soluble compounds that we want to extract with water to make coffee.

You can likely boil or steep whole coffee beans and get some kinda bean water as a result, but it’s probably going to take a long time. Grinding coffee beans increases the amount of surface area and the area to which water can make contact, so we can brew a cup of coffee in about five minutes, rather than what might take hours or days if you leave the beans whole.

Our target: uniform coffee grounds

Whether you’re brewing via pour over, french press, cold brew, espresso, or anything in between, the goal is to extract an even and optimum amount of volatile compounds from all of the coffee grounds. If we don’t extract enough, our coffee tastes sour and if we extract too much, there’s a point where the coffee becomes extremely bitter.

Brewing with uniformly sized and shaped grounds gives us the best chances at a great tasting cup of coffee.

Best way to grind coffee beans uniformly: a burr grinder

Burr grinders are the easiest way to achieve uniform coffee grounds at home. For many types of home brewing, a burr grinder will be the best tool for the job:

• Hario V60
• Chemex
• French press
• Aeropress
• Drip coffee machine

A burr grinder uses a set of metal plates or cones that are set at a specific distance from each other to feed and grind beans through. This fixed distance is what gives us a more uniform ground. There will inevitably be pieces that are smaller than this grind size / burr distance that happens to fall through–these are called fines. Every burr grinder will create some portion of fines, but for the most part, the ratio of fines is low enough that our cup of coffee will still taste amazing.

How to grind coffee beans without a grinder

The whole point of this blog is to help you get great tasting coffee, but realizing that there are real-world constraints or preferences we should accommodate with folks. If you don’t want to buy or cannot afford a burr grinder, there are other ways to grind coffee beans.

There have been instances where I’ve had to brew coffee or have been served coffee which was ground with less than optimal machinery. Maybe you’re out camping, or at a friend or family’s house who never brews coffee, or something similar and yes–sometimes this is better than not having coffee at all. But you’re going to have to make that judgement call for yourself.

Some kitchen tools you might consider using when you find yourself without a grinder. I’d roughly rank this from best to worst:

• spice blender – This might be your best bet if you don’t have a burr grinder. A small spice blender means its electric, so very easy for you to use. The distance between the blade and the container is small relative to a large blender so it will be easier to get a finer grind with more consistency.
• blender – A larger kitchen blender might be your next best option to grind coffee beans. There is typically a large gap under the spinning blade where beans will sit causing a very likely scenario with uneven grinds and lots of fines. However it’s electric, it will break down the beans in a pinch.
• food processor – In terms of uniformity, a food processor might do a better job than a blender with coffee beans. The large food processors anyway. However these machines cost more than an entry or mid-level burr grinder and I would be wary of wearing down the blades by using this as my main coffee grinder.
• mortar & pestle – This is a lot of manual labor but you’ll sort of be able to spot the variable chunkier bits of coffee and focus on those so you get a more relatively even grind. Beans will fly and this will be tiring, but it can work. Mortar and pestles can be difficult to clean so be cautious of previous spices in here imparting flavor, or imparting coffee flavor into future recipes using this tool.
• rolling pin – This is a lot of manual labor. You can try to contain the beans in a plastic bag while hitting and rolling, but you will be limited in how fine you can get the beans and there will be drastically different grind sizes and fines.
• hammer – This is going to be a lot of manual labor which creates a lot of noise too. This method will limit how fine the grinds get because you’re going to get tired of hitting the beans with such a small target.