Whether you pick up coffee at your local roaster or the grocery store, you’ll find that you can take home your beans whole or have them pre-ground. Given that grinding at home means purchasing a piece of (often expensive) equipment, and there is some mess involved, you might wonder if it’s worth it to grind your beans at home. 

The answer is an emphatic “yes.” Grinding your beans right before you brew your coffee helps preserve volatile aroma and flavor compounds that give complexity to your final cup. Whole coffee beans are perfect little pods meant to preserve the chemical compounds inside. When you grind those beans, you drastically increase the surface area that’s exposed to oxygen, heat, and light, which all quickly begin degrading the quality of the coffee. Picture a wall of stone versus a wall of loose sand. Water beating against the whole stone will have little effect, but water scrubbing the surface of the sand will quickly erode it. The sand’s greater surface area makes it predisposed to breaking down. The same is true for a whole versus ground coffee bean.  

We did a blind taste test of coffee that was over three months old. Coffee that was old but ground that morning still had some bright flavor and noticeable citrus and tea-like notes. Coffee that was both old and had been ground three months ago tasted like cardboard. It clearly demonstrated how well whole beans preserve flavor. 

While it makes a little mess and takes a little time, grind your coffee fresh if you want to maximize the flavor potential of your beans! A little spritz of water on the beans before they go into your grinder can also minimize static electricity and reduce the pesky grounds that fly across your kitchen. Just use a tiny spray bottle or wet a spoon and stir it in your beans before you dump them in your grinder to help reduce the electric charge. 

Taste freshly ground and previously ground coffee side by side and you’ll be amazed how many more notes you capture in the fresh coffee. As coffee prices increase, it’s definitely worth the extra minute to grind your own.