February 17, 2014

For many of us, cleaning the grinder is a monthly if not weekly routine. That’s all good; please don’t ever change that very important routine. Instead be mindful of a few details regarding the process so as not to permanently damage your grinder.

Using rice to clean your grinder is not a good idea. Our experience repairing Baratza grinders has shown that using rice or other natural materials to clean a Baratza grinder can cause mechanical damage to your grinder. This damage would not be covered under our warranty.

Grindz is a product, from Urnex, that was designed to clean grinders and has been tested to ensure it will not harm your grinder and is safe for use. Grindz is flavor neutral, composed of food grade products, and does a great job eliminating stale oils, flavors, and residue from the burrs and grinding chamber. Make sure you follow the factory instructions on the amount of product to use while cleaning your grinder. For home use that is just around 40 grams of grindz tabs.

We recommend setting your conical (Encore, Virtuoso, Preciso) grinder around the setting of #20 and setting the flat burr grinders (Vario and Forte) at a setting of #5. That’s just around the middle of your grind range allowing for a solid cleaning as the pellets are ground to powder. At finer settings we have seen clogging occur and possible mechanical damage.

Follow your cleaning cycle with 30-40 gram coffee bean to purge any cleaner left in the grinder.

Thank you for caring for your Baratza grinder. We wish you many tasty cups of coffee!