Grinding Fresh
(insert joke about Saturday night at the club)
We always recommend grinding fresh to get the most out of your at-home coffee experience. We get questions all the time from customers wondering how we can help them make coffee at home that tastes like it does at our cafe. 

There are 3 simple fundamentals:

1. Use fresh roasted coffee
2. Use filtered water (Brita works great)
3. Grind your coffee right before you brew (and even better, grind with a burr grinder)

Why We Ship Whole Bean

Sweet or Not
Using pre-ground coffee, it's possible to make pretty-ok coffee. But for great coffee, grind your beans immediately before use. You’ll find so much more sweetness in the cup.

Why? Because coffee is an organic product and like fresh bread, it will go stale after it's been roasted. When the coffee is in whole bean form, it traps all of the goodness inside (lowest surface area possible). When the coffee is ground, it smells so incredible because it's releasing aromatics into the air and exposing the bean to oxygen so much more than whole bean form. 

Sound extreme? Well, in blind taste tests, people have been able to tell the difference between coffee ground for 2 hours and ground for 5 minutes. It's no contest a week later.

Size
Grinding the right size and shape for your brewing method is required for a great cup. Small grinds brew quickly; large grinds brew slowly.

Not brewing for long enough or too long can lead to a disappointing cup of coffee.

Why Grind Fresh?
Our roasts are carefully watched each and every time by our amazing roasters. The whole beans trap in the flavour, which gets released once it’s ground. That’s why grinding a bag of coffee smells so good! But don’t do it all at once - the fresher the grind, the more flavourful the cup.

Grinding Equipment
Burr grinders mill coffee beans to an even size, every time. Cheaper spice mills (blade grinders) will work, but produce a chalky, irregular grind that interferes with the taste and texture of your cup. Keep your burr grinders for coffee and spice mills for, you guess it, spices.

Check out DETOUR’s grinding gear here.

If you only have a spice mill available, grind in quick pulses, shaking while doing do. This helps the blade chop all the pieces more evenly and doesn’t heat the coffee grind up (with all the friction happening below the blade.

Happy Brewing.