Hario Skerton is a beautiful, high-quality ceramic coffee grinder – $34
If you have any ambitions to make coffee that actually tastes good then you need to buy freshly roasted, whole coffee beans and grind them yourself right before you brew your coffee. There are no shortcuts available here so just do it and enjoy a whole new level of coffee experiences. There are many other factors that you can experiment with to make better coffee, but fresh beans and a grinder is the absolute best way to start out. I’ll leave it to you to find good coffee beans that suits your own taste but I will recommend a few good grinders here on Pixels & Objects in the coming months.
When you start looking for the right coffee grinder you have a few options to consider. The first one is whether to get a burr grinder or one that cuts the coffee beans using metallic blades. The answer is always to go for a burr grinder since they produce much more evenly cut coffee particles and this results in far better coffee. The second choice is between an electrical or a manual grinder. Electrical grinders are fast and easy to use but they also take up a lot of space. Manual grinders are often nice design objects that are easy to store and pack when traveling, but they do require you to put in some work every time you use them.
The first grinder featured on this site is Skerton, a manual, ceramic burr grinder from the legendary Japanese glassware manufacturer Hario. Skerton is a beautiful piece of hardware that you probably don’t want to hide in a kitchen drawer. It lets you grind approximately 80-90 grams of coffee at a time which is enough to brew 5+ cups of coffee. You will have to put in a lot of manual work to grind that much coffee beans and my recommendation is to use it to make smaller batches of coffee. It’s perfect for brewing 1-3 cups, either as your main grinder or as a less noisy alternative to your electronic grinder when you don’t want to wake your family up. It can also be very useful while traveling or at a place where you simply need an extra grinder, like at work. The price is also pretty attractive compared to almost any electrical burr grinder available.
Hario Skerton is made out of metal, plastic and glass and all parts can be disassembled very easily if you want to perform some serious cleaning. It comes with a plastic lid that you can use on the glass container if you want to store some grounded coffee, but that’s not something I would recommend. Use a scale to measure exactly the amount of beans you need for your brew and you’ll get better tasting coffee every time.
Photo by: Pixels & Objects
