shopaholic_man's Full Review: Cuisinart DCG-12BC Electric Blades Grinder
Most of us start our day with coffee, but how good is that coffee? I don't know about you, but I want my day to start the best way possible. A great cup of coffee and a good breakfast goes a long way to that end. Normally, I will just put some Maxwell House Smooth Master Blend into my coffee filter, but sometimes I like something even better.
Why a Bean Grinder?
Many stores, even your local grocery store offers a wide variety of coffee beans for purchase. Yes, you can grind them there, but if you take your freshly ground beans from the store to sit for a week, you may as well have purchased the already ground coffee. The best way to get the richest flavor from the beans is to grind them right before you put them in your Coffee Maker.
How Does the Cuisinart Work?
The Cuisinart DCG-12 is a high tech looking stainless steel coffee bean grinder. The motor is housed in the bottom and the grinding cup sits on the top. You can put in enough beans for 18 cups. Hash marks on the inside of the metal cup let you know how high to fill it. After you fill it with your desired amount of beans, you put the plastic top on over it and then press a button built into the plastic top to grind the beans. With the button in the plastic top, you can't accidentally grind your fingers off as you put the beans in. You can look through the plastic top to see how well the grinding is proceeding. There is no timer of any sort, you just have to judge by eye if your beans are ground to the right consistency. You don't want them too fine.
Once you are done, you can either store your ground beans in the grinding cup or pour them into your coffee filter for brewing. The grinding cup comes with a plastic cap so that you can store your ground beans. To me, that is the same as having it ground at the store, I just dump it upside down into my filter for immediate brewing.
Some problems
You have to work it a bit to get all the coffee grinds out of the grind canister however, which involves sticking your finger into the bottom where the sharp cutting blade is, in order to loosen some of the grinds that stick to the sides at the bottom. The canister itself comes off the machine with a simple twist.
It is a bit of work to get your beans out, some more expensive models have the freshly ground beans come out into a container on the bottom, a container with no blades in it, so you can dump all the grinds out into your coffee filter. This was something I didn't think about when I bought this Cuisinart, because the other model was twice the price. ($30 for mine, $60.00 for the competitor's model). Nevertheless, it isn't that much extra work, although if you are not fully awake, it could be. I suppose you could grind the beans the night before, store them in the refrigerator, and dump them in the coffee maker in the morning. That would be easier than being awake enough to grind the beans.
Clean up Of course after you dump your beans in, you should also rinse out the grinder.
Things that Don't Make Sense
If you do decide to use the canister to store ground beans of your favorite coffee, and decide on a different blend one morning, you are out of luck, because the canister that you store the ground beans in, is the very same canister that you grind said beans in.
Again, I point out that to dump the ground beans out, you usually have to loosen the grinds at the bottom, which involves placing your finger near the grinding blades. Although I haven't cut myself yet, I would venture that such a cut would be even more effective in waking you up than the perfect cup of coffee. I am not sure if your blood would add or subtract from the flavor of the brew.
Summary
Yes, the Cuisinart DCG 12 grinds beans, and grinds them very well. It looks very high tech, and the price is about the same as most bean grinders. All the others I saw, were in the $24-$35 range. I saw one at Williams Sonoma that was $60.00 that looked more ergonomically designed. The ground beans fell into a container. Really, this machine is a bit of work to get your fresh ground beans at the very time of day, when NIGHT people like me are really NOT awake. Yet, I must admit that when I placed my freshly ground beans into my new Bunn GRX Coffee Maker, I did get a delicious cup of Java. I really can only give this machine 3 stars. It does what it is supposed to, but not in the most practical manner.
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