federal food law has been in effect, the public has gained
confidence in ground and bean coffee in packages; and today a large part
of the coffee consumed in the United States is sold in one and two pound
cartons and cans, already blended and ready for brewing.

[Illustration: THE IDEAL STEEL-CUT MILL]

A progressive coffee-packing house may have three different styles of
grinding machines; one called the granulator for turning out the
so-called "steel-cut" coffee; the second, a pulverizer for making a
really fine grind; and the third, a grinding mill for general factory
work and producing a medium-ground coffee.

Commercial coffee-grinding machines are alike in principle in all
countries, the beans being crushed or broken between toothed or
corrugated metal or stone members, one revolving and the other being
stationary. While all grinding machines are alike in principle, they may
vary in capacity and design. The average granulator will turn out about
five hundred pounds of "steel-cut" coffee in an hour; the pulverizer,
from seventy-five to two hundred pounds; and the average grinding mill
from five hundred to six hundred pounds. Some types of grinding machines
have chaff-removing attachments to remove, by air suction, the chaff
from the coffee as it is being ground.

A large number of trade terms for designating different grinds of coffee
are used in the United States, some of them meaning the same thing,
while similar names are sometimes contradictory. A canvass of the
leading American coffee packers in 1917[332] discovered that there were
fifteen terms in use, and that there were thirty-four different meanings
attached to them. For the term "fine" there were five different
definitions; "medium" had five; "coarse", seven; "pulverized", four;
"steel-cut", seven; "ground", two; "powdered", one; "percolator", two;
"steel-cut-chaff-removed", one; "Turkish ground", one; while
"granulated", "Greek ground", "extra fine", "standard", and "regular"
were not defined.

The term "steel-cut" is generally understood to mean that in the
grinding process the chaff has been removed and an approximate
uniformity of granules has been obtained by sifting. The term does not
necessarily mean that the grinding mills have steel burrs. In fact, most
firms employ burrs made of cast-iron or of a composition metal known as
"burr metal", because of its combined hardness and toughness.

The "steel-cut" idea is another of those sophistries fo