Should You Put Rice Through Your Coffee Grinder to Clean It?

Few things compare to the intoxicating smell of brewing coffee in the morning—whether you enjoy the taste or not. As a cornerstone to morning rituals across the country, coffee culture runs deep with fancy gadgets and equipment to make virtually anyone a barista in their own home.

One of the most annoying parts of owning kitchen equipment is having to clean it. So, when seemingly easy hacks pop up on TikTok, like cleaning coffee grinders with rice, many of us are quick to give it a try. Is cleaning your coffee grinder with rice a smart idea, though? Could it cause more harm than good? Let’s find out.

While it’s relatively easy to clean out a blade grinder, doing a full sweep of a burr grinder can require a toolbox, making it an infrequently done chore. Although commercial grinder cleaning tablets clear the dust from every nook and cranny, the costs of these can add up fast. That’s where the ingenious idea of using a pantry ingredient most of us already have on hand comes in: rice.

For many, adding uncooked rice to your burr grinder is a no-brainer because it picks up the coffee dust, residue, and oil, removing them from the grinder and leaving the machine squeaky clean with minimal manual labor. However, coffee grinders are made for grinding coffee beans, not rice granules. Many varieties of uncooked rice are harder than coffee beans and can damage your grinder, particularly burr grinders. Many grinder manufacturers don’t cover rice damage under their warranties, and these machines are typically not cheap.

While the trendy rice-cleaning hack is legitimate, choosing the right kind of rice is super important to avoid potentially costly damage to your expensive machine.

Coffee connoisseurs online have discovered that dry