coffee beans

I do. Grinding the beans right before brewing does help the flavor significantly over beans ground weeks ago. I have a Baritza Encore grinder which goes for $129 on Amazon and I can recommend. Unlike one negative featured review there, I personally have had consistently good results for about two years with the Encore grinding two scoops a day of city-plus roast beans on coarse grind for French press brewing. There are more expensive grinders, and there are less expensive grinders, but less expensive ones might only last a year or two especially with darker roasts, and they might have more trouble with coarse grinding. It is important to dissemble and clean the machines without water every couple of pounds of beans especially if you go towards darker roasts which have more oil.

It also helps flavor to grind beans that have been roasted within the past week. If you want to start roasting green beans, too, this is also well worth doing. I like the FreshRoast SR300 for, again, about $125 on amazon. (You can get a LOT more expensive roasters. Not many for much less than this, although some people experiment with hot air popcorn makers.) It's best to roast green beans outdoors on a nice day because it generates a LOT of smoke. I like to buy about 5 pounds of green beans at a time (they keep for months if stored sealed in a cool, dry place) from sweetmarias.com or coffeebeancorral.com. Also lots of good advices on those websites on roasting and grinding your own coffee.

Some people spend more on the coffee brewer than I do. I find an inexpensive French press brewer gets better results than pricey electric brewers. Again, it's very important to the flavor to keep the brewer clean, and stainless steel is best for this.

Good luck.

electric Bosch grinder that has multiple settings.

I grind beans daily to make 12 cups of coffee, using the Braun KMM30. It does a good job. The only down side is it can't be disassembled to clean the mill wheels. We use 8 O'Clock Columbian beans, which makes a great cup of coffee from a drip coffee maker. Occasionally I use a French press, but it's a mess to clean.

I am a true believer in grinding your own coffee immediately before brewing. I have the Cuisinart CCM-16 (current equivalent model has been renumbered to DBM-8C). Mine is about 10 years old, has been used almost daily and still works great. My only complaint about it is that it is quite noisy while grinding ... tends to be a rude awakening if you are still sleepy when grinding your morning brew.

On a related question ... I have been thinking about trying to get some raw (green?) beans and trying my own roasting in small batches in an old popcorn air popper. Has anyone tried that?

When I drank coffee, I just used a basic electric coffee grinder (I believe it was a black and Decker)

Alas, I have given up coffee for a couple years now so I clean up the grinder and just use it as a spice grinder now.

I use a small Baun coffee grinder. Looks like a mini-blender and probably holds 1/4 cup?

It is also useful to grind up the Canadian Chicken Seasoning spices into fines (almost sugar/salt like) to be sprinkled onto hamburgers.

Gotta clean the coffee grinder out really well after using it for spices or the next pot of coffee really sucks.

I've been tempted... but decided why bother when I have a local mom&pop coffee place that roasts in-house in small batches and I can get what I want, when I want it...

There was also advice above:

The websites mentioned appear to be good resources to start with if you're going to home-roast...

Somehow I had missed dagarmin's post.

I've been told by a friend who owns a coffee shop buy one that uses burr plates instead of blades, you get a more consistent grind that way and it's also the best grind to use with a french press, which produces more coffee flavor by making the water work it's way through instead of dropping fastly through.

Automatic grinder. We also use community coffee when we can get it. It is nice getting up in the morning and coffee is ready to be pour.

I do both...but primarily grind on the weekends. I also use the poi's when I'm lazy. LOL.

Most of the time I use a simple personal Krups grinder right before I make coffee with a small French press or drip machine. I have a Cusinart large grinder that has two bean chambers and can do different grinds and mixes of the two chambers but I hardly ever use it.

Used to grind my own (8 o'clock). Now we use a Keurig.

Currently using a Mr. Coffee Burr grinder for weekend coffee. Eight O'Clock is what I'm generally grinding brewing. Well worth it if you enjoy coffee.

For work, I burned out a grinder and went with the simple K-cup system. Not the best coffee, but not bad at all, and pods can be obtained for ~$0.35 or so occasionally.

I tried Keurigs (at my dad's house) after looking down my nose at them and expecting almost nothing in the way of taste from the pod solution. If I was blind-taste-testing it, I'd still pick out home-roasted, -ground, and -French-press brewed as my preference, but I would not pick out Keurig as an inferior instant solution. The taste is okay for the advantages it brings to the table, including the ability to avoid the mess--is there anything worse in the kitchen than dealing with spent coffee grounds??--as well as the ability to go with a different flavor every day if you want, harder to do when buying beans by the pound. Keurigs are worth considering if convenience is the most important factor.

I ground the 8 o'clock Columbian with a Mr. coffee grinder.

Interestingly, one of my major factors in getting a Keurig (as opposed to one of the other types of pod coffee makers) was the fact I could brew my own coffee or tea if I liked--I REALLY didn't like the Tassimo or Gevalia formats because I couldn't hit my favourite coffeeshop (which is NOT Starbucks ) and get my favourite coffee and brew a single cup of it at a time.

The nice thing re the Keurigs is that they isn't just limited to the store stuff--there were reusable K-Cup containers even when I got mine, and now there are miniature coffee filters (disposable ones such as would be used in a drip coffee maker) if one doesn't want to deal with a very quick dump-and-rinse of a reusable filter, and a minor plethora of both "OEM" and third-party reusable filters available now that the original K-Cup format is out of patent.

(And yes, it is far less of a pain to clean out the reusable filters. )

It's not quite a French press, true...but it does work surprisingly well, and (at least in my experience) is rather less wasteful than a conventional drip coffeemaker as long as you use the reusable K-cup filters.

As it is, my preferred local coffee source (which I've done a POI file for the co-op association it's in) does sell pre-ground, but in past they didn't...and there are still some varieties they don't sell pre-ground (like some of the nicer fair-trade Blue Mountain coffee). Which is OK, because I only grind a little bit at once and use a small burr grinder, and this way I can keep two or three varieties in stock if I feel like something and the SO wants something different, and nothing goes to waste because of the little K-cup filter.

(Yes, I *like* my coffee. I can even argue--being an asthmatic--that coffee is GOOD for me; there are natural bronchodilators in coffee. )

Interestingly, the local stores around here have started carrying the Eight O'Clock dark roast in pre-K-Cupped format...if I can't hit my local coffeehouse, Eight O'Clock isn't too bad (if anything, it pleasantly reminds me of the coffee I used to have as a kid...of course, I didn't know then that my folks would have what is now known as "trucker coffee" and did not really discover this until marriage )

but got too messy. Got a keurig instead.

I grind in a Cuisinart Burr Grinder. It works OK but it's not what I would call great. I then use a Bunn coffee maker, the kind that makes a whole pot in 3 minutes.

I uused to use the Mr Coffee blade grinder, the one with the "Chamber Maid". BTW, that works great, $20 at Walmart. But they do wear out in about a year or two.

As to roasting, I have a home coffee roaster, "Caffe Roasto" which I found brand new at the Goodwill store. It works OK but there is a capacity problem, it can only do about 4 or 5 oz at a time. So if you had 2# of coffee to roast, that was a big workload. It's a good quality hot air type roaster but it's limited. I don't use it much.

I have bought beans from the coffee project in L.A. I do recommend them. They have some sample packs pretty cheap if like me you like to try different things. I am thinking of ordering from them again. Sample packs, you get several pounds of assorted green beans to try. Cheaper than you could buy them separately, I think.

http://coffeeproject.com/shop/magento/index.php

Used to all the time, now use Gevala French Roast and Kurig, spoiled

If you're ever in Lisbon, Ia... try Cabin Coffee.

We use a keurig with the ecobrew k cup replacement. We had to go to Houston to see my wife's brother in the hospital there, and we took a quick trip down to Laking's on the strand down in Galveston. There we discovered Duncan coffee's 1918 blend. Had 10 lbs of whole beans shipped home and I use a small hand Kroycea ceramic burr hand grinder along with the mini k cup paper filters.

I use a Cuisinart burr grinder and 8 O'clock nearly ever morning. Once in awhile I will get beans from a local roaster as a gift.

I bought a grinder years ago from them and it still works great. Ariete is the brand

create a consistent, selectable sized grind.

Also -- Zassenhaus old-style hand grinders are highly recommended and called "technically excellent" by coffee guru Ken Davids. They are bona fide grinders -- not the cheap decorative junk mills you see displayed as nick-knacks!

Sweet Maria's coffee website has tons of info and comparisons about them. Unfortunately, Zassenhaus' own website seems to be without a translation faculty to get from German to English?!....

They can make very small amounts of grind, but do require a bit of "muscle" if you are trying to get to a fine grind like espresso -- so they are not for every household!