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Gunk can build up inside your coffee grinder over time. Here's how to remove that buildup, whether you use a blade or a burr grinder.

Taylor Martin has covered technology online for over six years. He has reviewed smartphones for Pocketnow and Android Authority and loves building stuff on his YouTube channel, MOD. He has a dangerous obsession with coffee and is afraid of free time.

Just like your coffee maker, the machine you use to grind the beans for your morning cup needs regular maintenance. Oils and particles cling to every nook and cranny inside, eventually leading to decreased performance -- unless you take just a few minutes to clean it out every so often.

Here's how to clean your coffee grinder.

With blade grinders, a motor rotates two or three blades in a confined space, pulverizing almost anything you put inside it. Technically, these are not recommended for grinding coffee, as they produce very uneven grounds.

Most people use blade grinders for grinding up spices, but they can work for coffee in a pinch.

To clean a blade grinder:

Repeat this process any time your grinder looks like it needs to be cleaned or starts giving off an unusual smell. (This can easily happen when grinding coffee, as the oils produced will cling to the blades and the inside of the hopper.)

A burr grinder is a slightly more complex contraption. Rather than chopping the beans with blades rotating at a high speed, coffee beans are fed into an adjustable fixture with an inner and outer burr. You can move the inner burr closer or further from the outer to adjust the grind size. Burr grinders give you a far more consistent grind size, which leads to a more controlled brew process.

Cleaning a burr grinder will vary by model, mainly due to different parts and construction, but it's all the same concept, even for manual hand mills. It starts with disassembling the grinder.

If you would rather not disassemble your coffee grinder, you can buy grinder cleaning tablets to run through your machine. These tablets cost about $9, £9 or AU$20 for three single-use packs. They knock loose any coffee particles left behind and absorb any lingering oils.

To use the cleaning tablets, pour the recommended amount into the coffee bean hopper and pulse the grinder until the tablets have fully run through the machine. Next, take approximately 1 ounce (30 grams) of coffee grounds and run them through. Discard the coffee grounds and tablet residue and rinse out the ground coffee bin.

This cleaning process should be performed every few months to remove coffee buildup from inside the grinder, or less often if you don't use it every day.