Grinder trouble

I sometimes think that equipment failure on coffee machines is a bit like London buses; nothing significant happens for months, and then along come three at once.

In the past couple of weeks I've experienced a number of grinder problems, the major ones being blunt blades and settings that have changed markedly from one day to the next.

Grinder discs wear out, fact! - This means that all food service outlets should have in place a programme to monitor the performance of their grinders, whether it's a case of calling in people like me or routinely changing them after a certain period of time based on the volume of sales. Grinders past their "sell by" date do horrific damage to great coffee. Rather than "cutting" the beans, they tend to simply crush them. It may not sound significant, but boy does the taste in the cup tell the story.

In an effort to break down the bean, worn out grinders use a lot of energy. That energy comes out in the form of heat and can raise the temperature of the coffee so much that it burns the coffee. The other major impact is on the flow of the water through the coffee. The range of particle sizes produced by a set of worn out blades is so great that you could spend a lifetime trying to get the water to flow through the coffee correctly but never achieve success. The moral of the story, set up a monitoring programme.

The second issue, that of wildly mis-set grinders usually comes about when someone is over-scrupulous with their cleaning routine . The button that holds the discs in position accidentally gets pushed thereby releasing the blades which in turn "unscrew" leaving you with "chips" of coffee beans. This has happened to me twice in the last 4 days. The problem is easily rectified by resetting the discs to their correct position and then marking the set position so that it can easily be re calibrated if necessary.

It's actually quite an eyeopener for many of my customers to see the impact that an incorrectly set grinder can have on the taste of their coffee, and proves the old adage that you learn more by things going wrong than you ever do when everything goes right.