You are grinding your whole-bean coffee properly before brewing ensures that your coffee will be the freshest.
It also helps to decrease oxygen exposure, which is known to ruin the flavor and keep the coffee from becoming stale and boring.
However, only some machines include a coffee grinder, and you may not have a separate coffee grinder.
What other option is available in a situation like that? Can coffee beans be ground in a blender? Will it affect the overall flavor?
You can grind the coffee beans in a standard blender to respond quickly.
However, that is different from what you are looking for, especially if you seek a great cup of rich-tasting coffee.
There is a lot to know about why a coffee grinder is superior, and what you should do if you choose to use a blender, so we will go into detail on this issue below.
What is the point of grinding coffee in the first place?
One of the most frequent questions is why we grind coffee. The main goal of brewing coffee is to get out the good oils and flavorings locked inside the bean.
The process included stirring the entire roasted bean in a hot water kettle. You'll finally wind up with a high-caffeine, bitter coffee solution that will perk you up if you invest the time and effort.
Fortunately, we can avoid such an absurdly intricate and time-consuming coffee-making procedure. The procedure is now significantly more efficient.
Simply grinding the coffee beans in a professional coffee grinder allows the water to brew your coffee to extract what's inside the bean much more efficiently, resulting in a much superior scent and taste.
You can attribute the efficiency of extraction to two factors:
1. Expanded Total Surface Area
You increase the surface area by cutting a whole coffee bean in half. There is more surface area for the hot water to work on and remove all flavor components, and extraction efficiency is much increased. Now, these two halves are broken up, making a bigger surface area and the extraction process easier.
You will eventually find the ideal grind size for your brewing procedure. This extraction efficiency also contributes to a significant reduction in brewing time.
2. Reduced Particle Size
Smaller particle sizes reduce the distance to the center. This will make getting all the tastes dissolved from the particle easier.
Why Should You Avoid Buying Ground Coffee?
A fully roasted coffee bean is an exquisite, protective package that maintains all of the coffee oils inside the bean, where they belong. As long as you don't tamper with the volatile, fragile, and water-soluble flavor components of coffee beans, they'll be fine. If the protective shell cracks, all bets are off.
Here are four reasons why you should not buy or use pre-ground coffee:
The Aroma is Less Intense.
A thousand diverse volatile smells and scents are present in the cells of the roasted bean. These fragrances are quickly released after being ground and blended with the oxygen in the atmosphere, causing oxidation. Within 15 minutes of oxidation, the coffee can lose up to 60% of its aroma.
Contamination
Because the oils in coffee beans are so fragile, they are easily polluted. No matter what smells are on the ground, coffee will easily mix with them. This will make the coffee taste bad.
Depletion of Carbon Dioxide
Increased bean surface area resulted in increased CO2 liberation. Much carbon dioxide is produced during the roasting process. Because the bean is porous, some evaporate during the cooling process.
However, much of it is kept within the bean cells. Once the essential oils are released, the CO2 plays a vital role in getting them into the coffee.
The problem is that the larger surface area allows for greater CO2 gas escape. Within a minute of grinding, over 80% of the gas is discharged into the atmosphere. You will severely lose all of its flavors if you wait too long.
Moisture
Coffee oils, as previously stated, are readily soluble in water. This is good because otherwise, we would have difficulty extracting all the oils from the coffee bean.
On the negative side, moisture is a significant issue with pre-ground coffee. The oil quickly gets wet and watered down when ground coffee is exposed to air. This makes for a bland cup of coffee.
Can Coffee Beans Be Ground In a Blender?
As previously stated, you can grind your coffee beans in a standard blender. We'll go over the specific steps you can take later on. However, there is a significant drawback when you do this.
One of the most severe risks of grinding coffee in a blender is making a bad cup of coffee. It attempts to grind the beans into uniform-sized bits using a grinder designed for grinding coffee. This is true whether the particles are somewhat coarse, such as those used in Turkish coffee, or very fine in size, such as those used in espresso.
As coffee enthusiasts, we like the grind particles to be around the same size, if not identical. Because when the hot water meets the uniformly sized ground coffee beans, they will all react similarly. As a result, the coffee has a consistent flavor.
If some of the particles in the coffee are larger than others in the same brew, then when you pour hot water over it, some of them will remain in contact for much longer than the other particles. As a result, your coffee will taste over-extracted and sour, bland and flat, or even a little bitter.
A standard kitchen blender would not grind your coffee beans with the same customizable accuracy as a high-quality coffee grinder. Instead, you'll be left with coffee beans ground in odd sizes.
You can try as much as you like, but you cannot avoid this when using a standard kitchen blender, and the result is a mediocre or bad-tasting cup of coffee.
The Trick to Using a Blender to Grind Coffee
If your only choice is to use your kitchen blender to grind your coffee, here's how to do it properly.
Among other things, a blender is a much-adequate coffee grinder replacement when in a pinch.
The blade in a blender will cut the coffee beans like a blade grinder, but it will not be as consistent as a burr grinder.
If you're lucky, your blender may come with a grinder setting designed just for grinding coffee beans, although this is extremely rare.
It is critical to note that while using a blender, you must grind the bean in small bursts rather than continuously running the machine.
This is due to the blade's faster speeds than a coffee grinder, and it can even heat the beans. This causes the oils in the bean to overheat, resulting in a harsher, more bitter-tasting cup of coffee.
By grinding the coffee beans in brief, bursts will allow you to grind the beans relatively accurately while also delivering a significantly coarser grind. After grinding the beans, thoroughly clean the blender to avoid the smell and flavor of stale coffee. Nobody wants to drink a shake that tastes like a dirty percolator.
Grinding Coffee Beans with a Blender: A Step-by-Step Guide
Let us assist you if you need a more detailed and step-by-step approach to sanding your coffee with a standard blender.
Again, if your kitchen blender has a coffee grinder function, always use it, and it will guarantee that your coffee beans are as uniform in size as possible.
Put a tiny amount of coffee beans in your food grinder, and ensure the lid is securely on top. Never grind the beans without a cover since the beans may fly out when the blender is turned on.
Grind your coffee beans with care to achieve the proper consistency. To make the grinding quick and easy, employ the pulse approach described above.
We recommend grinding your blender from one side to the other for even better results. This helps direct the larger pieces of the coffee beans into the blade's path, and you get a little more even grinding.
Drain the blender and add the new beans when satisfied with the ground consistency. Repeat this process until you have the desired amount of coffee.
Factors That Might Affect the Grind
It's also essential to understand the factors that influence the behavior of roasted beans as you grind them. These are some examples:
Roasting Level
The lighter the roast, the more resilient and malleable the bean. As a result, a lightly roasted bean will be more tenacious and adaptable than a darkly roasted bean because moisture is lost as the bean roasts longer, causing it to become more brittle.
Quenching by Air vs. Quenching by Water
When you remove the beans from the roaster, you must immediately cool them down to avoid over-roasting. This action is known as quenching. When you begin the cooling process, some coffee roasters add water to the air stream to cool the beans, a practice called "water quenching."
However, if done incorrectly, the latter might harm the surface of the roasted beans and return water lost during the roasting process to the beans. On the other hand, air-quenched beans are chilled by drawing air through them while stirring them, so no water is used in the process.
The overall message is that the method you choose to cool down the roasted beans can directly impact them, resulting in a more uneven grind.
Final Thoughts
Can you grind coffee in a blender? Yes, but it comes at a cost. Even if you meticulously follow the steps outlined in this article, keep in mind that nothing you do will result in a uniformly sized particle.
As a result, strive to use and invest in the best coffee grinders as much as possible to extract the most out of your coffee beans and make them worthwhile.
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