Ken Fox wrote:What is the point of any of this? Are you running something foul through your grinder?

I must admit to being baffled by reading about home users who feel they need to disassemble their commercial grinders in order to "clean" them. What exactly are you cleaning inside of the grinder? Do you have vermin running around your house who get into the recesses of your grinder? Are you grinding something other than coffee in your grinder?

I could understand it if one was to buy an old used and abused commercial grinder, received it in deplorable condition, and wanted to clean it up. What I can't understand is the compulsion to disassemble a commercial grinder, in light home service, with the only apparent justification being that the grinder can be disassembled and that there are other people posting on the internet about how they disassembled their grinders, so hey, why not do it yourself?

My personal opinion is that if you regularly use your grinder, there will be some coffee build up in certain recesses that will fill voids internally. Even if you "clean and remove" these small collections of coffee from the innerds of your grinder, the next time you use it new coffee bits and pieces and grinds will end up refilling these recesses, and you will have accomplished essentially zero. Taking commercial grinders apart is not as benign a procedure as it may appear. The soft brass burr carrier threads are easily misthreaded and if you do this, you are going to have a much bigger problem on your hands than a few stray grinds in the recesses of the innerds of your grinder.

Granted, sometimes you have to change burrs, and that's a good reason to open up a grinder. Granted, sometimes people buy old and abused grinders that are simply too GROSS, too unappetizing, to consider using them without a major cleanup. But in the case of a home user with his home grinder, often a grinder designed for much more use than the home user is going to give it -- what is the point of all this? What is the proof that this sort of ritual accomplishes anything that anyone can taste?

Here are my suggestions: (1) don't take your grinder apart unless there is a really good reason to do so; (2) don't run disgusting beans through your grinder, and then you won't feel you need to take it apart unnecessarily; (3) keep the parts of your grinder that are accessible to you clean; by this I mean the discharge chute from the burr chamber to the doser, the discharge chute from the doser to the PF, the doser itself, and the hopper; (4) if your grinder sits for a prolonged period unused, consider using one of the commercial grinder cleaner products, then grind some decent beans afterwards to clean out the cleaning product.

If someone, anyone, could post here about their experiences taking their commercial grinders apart regularly and what they have observed in the taste of their shots afterwards, that was different, I'd love to hear it.

ken