A coffee mill is a miniature home-made mill that is designed for grinding coffee beans. Its main advantage lies in the fact that it is possible to prepare ground coffee in it immediately before cooking, preserving its taste and aroma.

The body of the mill, which is featured in the Apartment-Museum of the Ulyanov Family, is rectangular in shape with protruding edges of the bottom and the lid. The walls of the object are decorated with convex geometric shapes. A detachable hemisphere is fixed in the center of the lid with the convex part facing up. If one shifts its movable part, one will see a porcelain funnel through which grains are poured into a drum which has a vertical worm shaft. The shaft rotates thanks to the movement of the handle with a wooden grip, which is connected to a part of the shaft and exits through a hole in the hemisphere. Inside there is a pull-out compartment, which is a container for ground coffee.

For a long time, coffee beans were not ground, but soaked or boiled whole. The nomadic Arabs were among the first to duly appreciate coffee and realize that it needed to be ground before brewing.

In the 15th century, with the development of the tradition of making coffee in the “oriental way”, a manual coffee mill with millstone discs was invented and quickly gained popularity. It was a hollow cylinder, often wooden, which was filled with grains. They were crushed with two millstones inside the cylinder. The millstones were set in motion by mechanically rotating the handle, which was located in the upper part of the cylinder.

In the middle of the 17th century, the first Turkish coffee mills appeared. They had a cylindrical shape that made it easy to hold them in hand.

Coffee mills began to be produced on an industrial scale in the 19th century. The first coffee mill factory was owned by the Peugeot brothers. It was located in France.

With the development of technology, automatic coffee grinders have become an important component of coffee making machines. Nevertheless, manual coffee mills do not lose their relevance in kitchens around the world.

“It is recommended to grind coffee right before brewing. Grinding can be done in the store, but do not try to stock a large amount of coffee powder. After all, it is impossible to keep it fresh for a long time. Note that in industrial production, for better preservation of coffee powder, it is placed in hermetically sealed jars, where the air is replaced by inert gasses, such as nitrogen. Sometimes vacuum packaging is used. All this helps to increase the possible shelf life of coffee,” recommends the author of the book “All about Coffee” Nikolai Nikolaevich Pucherov.