coffee grinder

so are all coffee grinders bad for grain milling??? are there any that have a variety of settings that works well for grain?? thanks for the help

Offhand, I'd say the motor in your average coffee grinder isn't up to the task of grinding 10+ pounds of grain at a go. If one were to work, it would be a burr grinder (which works like a motorized millstone), and a seriously robust one at that. Burr grinders allow for a variety of settings with relative precision; we french press devotees love the coarse grind, and espresso folk like it ground to dust. Unfortunately, a serious burr grinder with a big motor costs as much as a grain mill. A blade grinder doesn't give you very precise control over the grind, and doesn't hold enough grain to be useful.

I used a blade grinder once for an extract batch. It did the job, but I can't reccommend it for and all-grain batch. Let me also say I made sure I did not turn the grain into flour and only hit the pulse a few times.

it's two different machines for two different purposes. coffee grinders, both blade and burr do their job by cutting, so malt going thru both will have the husk chopped to crap, not good for sparging as you need intact husk to make a good filter bed. grain mills work by crushing, so the soft husk stays intact and the hard kernel gets broken.

for small batches of specialty grains, you could use a coffee grinder, but for all grain, it's not a good idea.

I had seen pictures where some brew club had taken a commercial burr grinder (like the 3 foot tall one you see at the grocery store) and modified it to grind even courser than it originally could. It's probably not as cost effective as a corona mill and really is using the same method to grind but it is do able.

I use a commercial grinder as described in the previous post. I found if you set it very coarse, it seems to do an adequate job for large (10 + gal.) all grain batches. Not perfect, as some of the husks are chewed up, which I believe is having an effect on my efficiency. The grinding head itself looks VERY much like a more aggressive corona grinding head. My company works a lot with a local coffee company, which is where we got the machine, for free, which is why I am using it. I have recently found out that they have a couple extra grinding heads for the unit, so I am gonna attempt to grind down the more aggressive teeth to something akin to the corona shape.

Definitely makes quick work of large grain bills!

I use an old Bunn machine too. Probably a 1 HP motor. Works good on big batches, but needs to be adjusted just right. The RPM is fast, gets the grain warm. Good idea to modify the burrs, maybe I'll do some R&D.

zombie, zombie, zombie

We use a burr grinder for our coffee. The instructions specifically state NOT to use it to grind more than one pot of coffee without letting it cool a while. This would make this home model completely unsuitable for crushing 10-16 pounds of grain. Now, if you could get your hands on one of those grocery store monster coffee mills, that would probably be a different story.....