The 2010 Grinder Smackdown: Coffee Gets Combative

Nate Jones compares lattes from the Swift grinder, rating consistency.

​It has long perplexed many a grad student why in-depth learning about a topic should work so in reverse, leaving you knowing (or at least feeling like you know) exponentially less than you knew when you began a course of study. As Confucius said, "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." Not especially comforting words. But assuming they are true, then I have to conclude that I am sitting on a wealth of new coffee knowledge, and that it is due in large part to something affectionately known as the "2010 Grinder Smackdown."

Hosted by Roaster Philip Meech at Caffe Lusso in Redmond, the "Grinder Smackdown" was the opening event in a projected series of coffee tastings designed to compare different elements of different brewing methods, and, by virtue of blind testing, determine the worth of a few industry claims. Great idea, but not an event for the faint of heart-- figuratively, or literally, considering how much caffeine ends up being consumed.

For most of us in the coffee drinking world, there are two basic kinds of espresso grinders--and they're pretty simple, right? Either the coffee shop uses the push-a-button kind, or it uses the pull-a-lever kind. Before last week, I was unaware that a Google search for "commercial coffee grinder" would yield so many hundreds of options, each claiming to be the absolute best and to solve some problem that another grinder creates.