This started, as these things do, with me telling myself I only wanted to make a slightly better cup of coffee at home. Nothing extravagant. A bag of decent beans, a cafetiere, done. That was the plan in November. It is now late January and there is a hand grinder on my desk that cost more than the cafetiere, the kettle and the beans put together.
I would like to explain how that happened, mostly so I can look back and understand my own poor decisions.
the bit nobody warns you about
The thing I got wrong is that I thought the beans were the variable. Buy nicer beans, get nicer coffee. It turns out the grinder matters more than almost anything else, and I refused to believe this until I had a side by side in front of me.
Pre-ground coffee is ground to one average size and then it sits, going stale, losing everything interesting about it within a couple of weeks. A blade grinder, the cheap spinning kind, is worse: it doesn't grind so much as smash, producing a chaotic mix of dust and boulders. The dust over-extracts and goes bitter. The boulders under-extract and taste of nothing. You get bitter and weak in the same cup, which is a genuine achievement.
A burr grinder crushes the beans between two surfaces a set distance apart, so the grounds come out roughly the same size. Consistent size means consistent extraction. That is the entire trick. It is not magic, it is just geometry.
what I actually bought
I went hand grinder rather than electric, partly on cost and partly because I liked the idea of the morning ritual before I had actually done it at half six on a Tuesday with no caffeine in me. The ritual is fine. I have made peace with it. The grind takes about forty seconds and I am awake by the end of it, which is arguably the point.
The honest results: the difference between pre-ground supermarket coffee and freshly ground beans from the same bag is not subtle. The first cup I made properly tasted like a completely different drink. Sweeter, rounder, none of that flat cardboard edge I had assumed was just what coffee tasted like.
I am aware of how this reads. I have become the person who grinds his own beans and has opinions about water temperature. I held out against this for years on the grounds that it was faff for the sake of faff. I was wrong, and I resent being wrong about it, because now I cannot drink instant without noticing.
If you are tempted: skip the cheap blade grinder entirely. It is the worst of both worlds, money spent for no improvement. Get a modest hand burr grinder, keep your existing cafetiere, and buy beans in small bags so you actually finish them while they are fresh. That is the whole rabbit hole. You are welcome, and I am sorry.