I was about to ask, seriously, is it useful for grinding non-cannabis herbs, spices, and coffee beans. I have an electric coffee grinder, but the recent ice storm with its threats of power outages made me realize I should probably have a grinder that doesn’t need to be plugged in. This actually seems like a nice, compact, manual grinder.
Also, the electric grinder is hard to clean out, so I don’t like to grind spices in it because they and the coffee will end up flavoring each other. Seems like this kind of grinder would be easier to clean because you can actually take it apart and scrub it.
I should probably just go with a nice old-fashioned mortar and pestle. I wonder whether one of these grinders would be faster or easier, though.
I found Mortar and pestle coffee grinding to be sub optimal. I have a manual burr grinder for emergencies it also takes a while since in it does not have a handle for any mechanical advantage but when coffee is your drug of choice you do what you must
My favorite part is imagining the looks of confusion possibly on the faces of the people who bought this for grinding kitchen herbs who then see their mundane reviews among a pile of stoner posts.
These are really more cutter-crushers than grinders. For use with dried leafy cooking herbs, the simpler, cheaper (and generally larger) models without the screen and the “pollen catcher” compartment are fine, since these don’t grind anything small enough to actually go through the screen - they’re pretty useless on (real) cinnamon, f’rex.
The idea behind the “pollen catcher” is to catch the tiny resinous blobs that tip the glandular hairs, the trichomes, which fall off when you bash and smash the dried herb, breaking the hair stalk. They’re very small, so they’ll pass through a fine screen, leaving most of the much larger cut/crushed plant fragments behind.
Not all herbs have such useful ‘pollen grains’ to collect.
These wouldn’t be much use for coffee - too small, really, and they’d break the beans into inconsistent coarse fragments like cracked pepper.
I was afraid that a coffee grinder would result in a cloud of pill dust… The mortar/pestle is working fine for her (I added a knob at the top of the pestle that seems to help)
