If you want the freshest, most full-flavored cup of coffee, we always recommend grinding your own coffee beans. It’s best to do this right before you brew, as our testing has shown that the beans begin to lose flavor and aroma within an hour of being ground.

Home coffee grinders come in two styles: blade and burr. A blade grinder works like a tiny food processor, with a rapidly spinning blade that chops coffee into smaller and smaller fragments. You have to hold the grind button down, time the grind, shake the grinder periodically to distribute the beans, and visually inspect the coffee to see if it’s reached the desired consistency.

A burr grinder, by contrast, operates like a pepper mill—it forces each bean to pass through a gap of a particular size. While a blade grinder has one chamber where you load, grind, and dispense the beans, a burr grinder consists of three components: a hopper where you feed in the beans, the grinding chamber, and a removable container that holds the grounds so you can transfer them to the coffee maker. You simply switch the machine on and whole beans are pulled from the hopper through two gear-like metal rings (called burrs) that spin against one another to crush the coffee. The setting you choose on the machine determines the space between the burrs and thus the size of the grind. Since each bean passes through the burrs and gets crushed only once, it’s a more precise process than using a blade grinder.

Burr grinders are the gold standard in the coffee industry, but now household brands such as Breville, Hamilton Beach, and KitchenAid are offering them for home users. To find out more about this popular grinding method, we tested 10 models priced from $29.86 to $199.99, all with metal burrs and at least eight grind settings, and compared them to our favorite blade grinder from Krups ($17.99).