Cleaning your grinder with rice

I have heard several times, of the possibility to clean a grinder with white instant rice. As my old Bodum grinder is up for a cleaning, I thought of the rice experiment as a great opportunity.

Usually I just take this grinder apart and clean it manually, because it is really easy to disassemble. I use it only for frenchpress. 

Most common, as I understand, is Grindz for cleaning a grinder and it does a really great job, but it is expensive. There are some things to keep in mind using rice. It has to be instant and white, otherwise the rice will be too hard and the grinder will properly stall. Rice should do a fair job of sucking up the oils, as of what I have read. 

A picture of the burrs before cleaning. As you can see it’s about time.

I set the grinder at espresso setting (this is no way near fine enough for espresso; this grinder cannot be used for espresso brewing.)

I must admit that the noise is a little freighting. But no sign of damage though. Hard steal burrs should cope with rice in my opinion. 

The small well used motor, had a hard time getting thru the rice, I had to add it little by little to prevent stall.

As you can see, the rice powder gets more pure and white as I got along.

End result, looks pretty god, the burrs are clean, and there are no visible oils. It’s only the burrs that gets clean this way, the surroundings has to be cleaned by hand. But as a weekly routine this should do the job just fine. I used a vacuum cleaner getting the last rice powder out, washed the container and hopper and ran thru some beans before using it for coffee. 

I am really excited about this. I am going to use rice as my weekly routine for the next couple of months, and I am sure I won’t feel any difference from Grindz.

Enjoy