In the quest to make the perfect cup of coffee you can try any variety of coffee makers, but if you aren’t putting in fresh, properly grounded beans, the prize will continue to elude you.

A hand coffee grinder is probably the best way to ensure that your beans are perfectly ground for whatever brewing method you choose to use.

Also known as a manual coffee grinder or coffee mill, a hand coffee grinder will require the regular purchase of whole roasted coffee beans. Forget about that pre-ground stuff.

You may be thinking, “Why buy whole beans and grind them myself when I can simply buy a pack of ground coffee?”

The answer is simple: freshness. Coffee beans contain special oils. Those oils are what give coffee its flavor. As soon as a coffee bean is roasted, those oils are drawn to the surface and began to escape. After about a month, roasted beans have lost just about all of their original flavor. Grinding the beans accelerates that process by further exposing the oils to the air.

The truth is that most of us have been conditioned to drink stale coffee and think that’s how it’s supposed to taste. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Buying freshly roasted beans (and there are plenty of providers) will cause you to rethink what coffee is supposed to taste like.

Ok, so buying freshly roasted whole beans is the way to go. But why suffer through grinding those beans by hand before every serving? After all, this is the modern age, and we now have electrical appliances to do what we once did by hand.

Yes, there are electric coffee grinders. The problem is that most of them use blades to cut up, not grind, the beans. As the blades slice through the beans, they tend to trap much of the oil inside the grinds, whereas the crushing action of a hand grinder promotes the release of those same oils.

There are electric grinders on the market that use burrs to properly crush the beans, and they are a viable alternative to manual grinders. However, the electric burr grinders crush the coffee much more quickly, instead of gently working the beans like a hand coffee grinder does. Not to mention, it simply feels more authentic and makes the whole process more special when you grind your coffee beans by hand.