Burr

Last week my grinder stopped working all of sudden and it made me realize that I never have: A. changed out the burrs and B. Never have cleaned the burrs. Blasphemy! Especially after I talked about cleaning out your portafilters on a consistent basis. The funny thing, unless cleaning out burrs on a monthly basis is part of your job cleaning out the burrs on your home grinder (probably the same as most grinders in coffee shops) is something most people forget about or overlook. I'm obviously guilty of that. Dirty burr blades are harder to notice at first because you physically can't see the build up on the blades unless you take it apart. The first sign that your grinder needs cleaning should be the consistency of the espresso. I was noticing that some of my shots were not coming out evenly and that one side would draw out before the other. So I would adjust my grinder assuming it was the humidity that was affecting my shots and sometimes that would work. Other times I would assume I was tampening my shot too hard so I would draw another. Again sometimes this would work but recently both of these things weren't doing the trick. I found a useful link (thank goodness for YouTube) that walks you through on how to clean out your burrs on Rancilio grinders. Depending on how often you use your grinder will depend on how often you should clean out your burrs but I'm going to make it a habit to clean mine every 6 months. It's easy to do and if you don't wait too long then the build up shouldn't be that bad and the cleaning process should be relatively quick. After I cleaned mine the grinder started to work immediately. The only thing I had to do was adjust my grinder since the burrs were clean. Shots draw evenly now and the espresso has never tasted better.

Happy grinding! (no not that kind of grinding).

Here's the YouTube video that shows you how to clean your Rancilio grinder.

Chris