Grind your Coffee
"JUST RIGHT".
Learning how to grind your coffee "just right" is very important!
Actually, every step in the process of coffee-making is important IF you want to have really Good Coffee at Home, ofcourse!
But, NONE is as important as learning how to grind your coffee "just right"!!
For some reason people seem to think that, if they buy a really good coffee machine and go out of their way to buy gourmet coffee beans, it does not matter much what sort of grinder they use.
Big mistake, VERY big mistake, in fact.
If you have read other sections of this site, you will have seen that coffee beans are almost a "living" thing... they mature after roasting, form volatile oils and gasses and after a while they dry out and all you are left with is brown dry little lumps which smell vaguely of coffee.
All the flavour and aroma is in the coffee-oils, and if you cannot get the water to flush these oils out of the beans, you are not getting a nice cup of coffee.
So, it is important that the coffee-beans are ground fine enough for the water to reach most of these oils, AND that the ground coffee particles are of even size so the water flows through them without channelling ( which in effect means it bypasses most of the coffee!)
Therefore, inevitably, most coffee lovers will tell you that, when you go out to buy a grinder,
A good grinder is more important that the coffee maker itself!
You can have the best coffee machine, or carefully hand-craft coffee from the choicest bean, but if the grinder hashes your precious coffee beans, you WILL end up with dishwater.
If you have money to spend on coffee gear, buy the grinder first; then decide how much funds you have left over for the coffee maker.
Chopper "Grinders"
The "chopper " blade coffee and spice grinders (little machines with a helicopter-style set of horizontal blades) literally hack your beans into uneven fragments, generally overheating the coffee-oils in the process and producing rancid clumpy grinds.
Quite often, when you empty this sort of grinder into the filter, you will have to scrape the sticky oily super-fine grinds from the walls of the grinder, while the coarser bits fall straight out.
If your only grinding-option is one of these little machines, only grind about 3 tablespoons of coffee at a time, and while grinding, (AND holding the lid firmly!!!) turn the grinder upside down every few seconds, so the bean-mass mixes as evenly as possible and you optimise the chance that every bean-particle gets 'hit' by the blades regularly.
As the old saying goes:
Good quality is cheaper in the long run!