Everyone bought a grinder that year. Most bought the wrong one, and it was not their fault — the entire market is arranged to sell you the wrong one.
What happened in 2020 was that several million people started drinking their own coffee every single day rather than buying it from somebody competent. Which meant that for the first time, they had to own their own mistakes. And when you look at where a bad home cup actually goes wrong, it is almost always the grind.
The three mistakes
Buying a blade. We have been through this. A blade chops at random and hands you dust and boulders in the same spoonful, which extract at completely different rates. There is no recipe that fixes two grinds at once.
Buying the machine first. A great many people spent 2020 buying an espresso machine and pairing it with whatever grinder was already in the cupboard. That is precisely backwards. The grinder is the constraint; the machine can only work with what it is given. A modest machine with a good grinder beats a good machine with a modest one, every time, and it is not close.
Buying an espresso grinder for filter, or the reverse. These are genuinely different jobs. Espresso needs to adjust in extremely fine increments around a very narrow band; filter needs a wide range and consistency in the middle of it. A grinder built for one is usually mediocre at the other, and the box will not tell you.
The genuinely good news
The best thing to come out of that year was the hand grinder. Not the wobbly ceramic one from 2010 — the current generation, with properly machined steel burrs and bearings that hold the shaft true, are astonishingly good and cost a fraction of an equivalent electric.
Thirty seconds of arm work, for a grind quality you would otherwise need to spend several hundred dollars to match. If you brew for one or two people, there is no argument for anything else. It also travels, which matters more than you think — see Coffee at Altitude.
The other quiet improvement was single dosing: weighing exactly what you need into an empty grinder rather than leaving beans in a hopper going stale under a lid. It sounds fussy. It takes four seconds and it is the difference between a Tuesday that tastes like Monday and one that does not.
The lesson of the whole year, if there is one: the café was never hiding a secret. It was hiding a good grinder, and somebody who used it properly.
