Immersion brewing (french press) is really forgiving. Just don't grind the coffee too fine and you're pretty much good.
I cleaned my french press by knocking out the grounds into the trash, quick rinse with water, then more water with a bit of dish soap and pump the plunger a bunch to froth the soap and clean the screen. Pour out, rinse until soap is gone, air dry. Every couple of weeks I'd do a deep clean by soaking the various parts in Cafiza and hot water. Not that bad imo.
I grind it in a basic cheap grinder. Studies in this stuff have shown that consistency in grind matters more than the amount of money spent on the grinder. I’m not sure what you mean by French presses being a pain to clean - you rinse out the pot, run the filter under hot water and you are good to go. Worried about coffee sludge build up on the filter? I guess you could soak it in some kind of cleaning product. I find the coffee residue comes right off with hot water.
> Studies in this stuff have shown that consistency in grind matters more than the amount of money spent on the grinder.
But what's this super consistent 'basic cheap grinder' you have? The people buying expensive grinders know this too - that's why they're buying them, for their 'conical burrs' or 'ceramic' or some other promise of a great (consistent) grind.
Studies have shown (I guess I could go google - last time coffee came up on HN there was info shared too) that you can use a very simple heuristic - you give it a little shake. That is to say - expensive grinders have various ways they create a consistent grind size, and they may even have ways to create different grinds (espresso, for Turkish coffee, etc). You can approximate this successfully with a cheap grinder by doing a grind-shake-grind-shake, as the primary problem with these cheap grinders is that they don't rotate the beans through the grinder as smoothly as the expensive guys.
I am but a poor man and an amateur coffee drinker, but for my money (and again - according to the sources who blind studied this stuff...) you can get a perfectly good cup of coffee from a $10 no-name grinder. Now, whether the expensive grinder will make you more attractive to your desired mate or make your enemies jealous compared to the cheap grinder - that's a whole other conversation.
Ikea used to have a cheap (~$20?) hand-crank ceramic burr grinder. It was excellent for the money, but coffee snobs turned up their noses because it wasn't as good as ones costing 5x.
There just isn't a market for such things, or at least there isn't if it is only being compared to very expensive stuff. Ikea might still sell it in some markets, but definitely not in the USA.
Not OP but I have a electric burr grinder. You can also ask coffee shops to grind the beans for you (mention that it is for a French press so they get the grind right). It takes me about a minute 90 seconds to clean mine, I turn it upside down to get most of the grinds in the trash and then I rinse out the rest and dry. I clean it with soap maybe once a week.
I know this is sacrilegious, but we drink so much coffee around here that I’ve kinda come to the conclusion that buying pre-ground isn’t the end of the world. I’ve always been a buy beans and grind fresh guy (and we typically buy beans from the local roaster). That said - if you buy a bag of ground and use it within a few days / one week, I’m not sure the quality is degraded to the point that it’s noticeable in terms of everyday brew - again, especially if you are going through multiple pots per day.
