Get the most out of the daily grind: A coffee purist investigates

Deciding to grind your own beans is one thing. Picking a good, dependable grinder is another, especially now that there are so many on the market. Time was, we grind-at-home folks chose from among a homogenous line of inexpensive, blade-style grinders and little else. As our taste for the subtleties of good coffee has become more sophisticated, though, manufacturers have started selling grinders for home use that use mechanisms similar to those in high-end coffee shops.

Why? Just as leaving a pot of coffee on the burner for half an hour cooks it and leaves it bitter, blade grinders can build up so much heat as they cut the beans that they burn them, degrading the flavor.

"We won't even carry them," says Shelley Banks, Web content manager for Aabree Coffee in Medford, Ore., whose website (www.aabreecoffee.com) includes an in-depth buyer's guide to grinders.

Aabree and other retailers say grinders that use burrs to crush the beans produce less heat and a more consistent grind and allow for better adjustment of the fineness, which is important to anyone who wants to make both espresso and French press coffee, for instance. Even among these grinders, however, there's a huge difference in quality and price, from $40 to more than $200.

"People hear that the burr grinder is better, but the cheaper ones just really aren't that good," says Owen Mack, owner of Kitchen Arts on Newbury Street. They clog easily, they create too much static electricity, and if you grind a lot of espresso, they can burn out, he says.

I had discovered almost as much already. I fell for the burr-is-better line a couple of years ago, and when I bought a spiffy new Capresso thermal-carafe coffee maker, I also bought a $40 burr grinder that now clogs so badly I have to shake it and bang it throughout each use just to get the beans to go through it. Since static-charged grounds swan-dive by the hundreds as soon as I open the machine, my counters also require constant wiping.

Time for a change. Does that mean I have to buy one of the more expensive burr grinders, whose slower grinding speed means less harm to the coffee's flavor and, as a bonus, less static electricity? Do I need to spend as much or more on a coffee grinder as I did on the $200 coffee maker?

Not necessarily. Capresso's Infinity Burr Grinder, which uses a gear-reduction system to treat the beans more delicately, goes for $100. Then there's the good old Zassenhaus line. These hand-operated coffee mills, which start at around $60, use precise grinding burrs as good as anything three times the price, and nothing is slower -- and therefore easier on the coffee beans -- than these.

Of course, the only way to decide for sure was to put some grinders through their paces for a week. I crushed and sliced almost 5 pounds of beans at every setting on four machines: a blade grinder by Ravel, a low-end burr grinder by La Pavoni, the gear-reduction burr grinder by Capresso, and a hand-grind model by Zassenhaus. Above all, I was looking for a grinder that's easy to use and produces an even grind, from powder to coarse. The verdict? The Revel made anything but the finest grind a near-impossibility (and indeed made the beans hot to the touch), while the La Pavoni couldn't produce an espresso-quality powder and covered my counter with a brown mess.

The other two performed admirably, yet they could hardly be more different. The Capresso whirred through the beans with ease, producing a perfectly even grind across all settings at the touch of a button.

The Zassenhaus, meanwhile, took a low-tech means to the same end: beautiful grounds ready for brewing.

That narrowed the question to this: Do I want a few minutes of forearm exercise every morning before I've had the caffeine I need to fully awaken, even if it saves me about $50 on the grinder?

A couple more cups of java, and I might just be alert enough to decide.

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.