Antique Coffee Grinder

by Ethan Cole
 
 

My mom has a collection of many things related to coffee. She has mugs and old cans from long ago brands, but the coolest thing she has in her collection is an antique coffee grinder that she keeps on top of the fridge. She doesn’t use it because it has a hand crank and you have to use quite a bit of force to hand-grind the beans. And there are electronic devices out there that can do the same thing that the antique coffee grinder can do, except in a fraction of the time and using only a fraction of the physical energy.

But there’s something about that old antique coffee grinder that makes me think of really great coffee every time I see it. I imagine that the beans aren’t as pulverized when they’re ground up in the antique coffee maker, and maybe this difference would be evident in the resulting cup of coffee. Eager to test my theory, I decided to taste test coffee brewed with grinds ground in the antique coffee maker and those ground in a cheap electric grinder. I evaluated the coffee side-by-side and the results were somewhat surprising.
 

First of all, it took me quite a while to grind up enough beans to make a pot of coffee using the antique coffee grinder. It took me about five minutes of constantly cranking the handle to move the blade at the bottom of the grinder, and even after five minutes the grinds weren’t as fine as I had hoped they would be. The electric grinder took ten seconds to grind the same amount of beans and they were course enough so that they weren’t powder, but not so course that they would cause the coffee brewed from them to be weak.

Once I had the grinds ready, I brewed two pots of coffee. And don’t ask me why I have more than one coffee maker, it’s the result of a sick hoarding mentality that overtakes my brain whenever something good is on sale. It’s also why I have four hair dryers, two DVD players and so many new toothbrushes in the packaging that I could start my own dental store. Anyway, I prepared each cup of coffee identically, and then I did a taste test. And the final result was coffee that tasted exactly the same whether the beans were ground in the old-fashioned antique coffee grinder or the high-tech electronic grinder. At the start of this experiment I thought the results would show at least some difference, though I wasn’t sure which method would be favored. But I guess I was wrong, because there was no noticeable difference between the coffee made from grinds prepared in the antique coffee grinder and the electronic one. The taste of the coffee probably has more to do with the beans than the way you grind them up.