The Brief History of Grinders
Before people started using grinders to chop buds, shedding herbs and spices for cooking has been done ever since ancient times.
Before modern grinders were invented, people were using other rudimentary tools such as pestles to crush their herbs. This method usually resulted in wasting quite a bit of your herb as it was hard to control – So people needed a better solution.
Herb grinders similar to ones we know and use today came around in the early 1900s, during the peak of the industrial boom. It was an early age of mass-production, experiments and industrial innovation. The first modern grinders were designed as industrial tools for cellulose, but people soon discovered they can be used for other things too – like herbs, spices and eventually cannabis. Pharmacies actually played quite a big role at the time in further development and larger adoption of grinders by using them to process herbs and other materials for their patients.
It’s quite interesting that herb grinders were considered as kitchen and pharmaceutical items but over the years of improving the original concept, they became more and more refined and nowadays are almost exclusively used by people who smoke cannabis.
Today’s average grinder is a cylindrical device, made out of typically two components – top half and a bottom section. Both parts are equipped with sharp teeth that are designed to be turned together, in order to shred the content inside the grinder. The most affordable grinders are made of acrylic or plastic but the results are proportional to their price so you can’t really expect much from them and they probably won’t last that long as they’re quite easy to break. Then you have grinders made of aluminum (which are somewhere in the middle) but the big problem with aluminum grinders is that they are usually only coated with stainless steel or some similar material safe for human health but if the coating gets chipped then you can potentially be at risk of exposure to its neurotoxic effects so it’s best to just throw it away and get a new one. Finally, we get to the best grinders on the market today, like The Ripper. This type of herb grinders are made of food-grade stainless steel, which is considered not only dependable and easy to clean but 100% safe for human health. Stainless steel grinder will never let you down, its teeth will never get dull and it will last you forever.
There you have it folks, the brief history of our favorite tool used to chop our favorite plant.
