I want to save a section here for my experience with all of the various equipment used to reduce the particle size of incense ingredients. This is a work in progress, maybe for a long time. PLEASE do offer any corrections or content to add. Feedback is a gift!

About me: I’ve used incense since high school, but in 2021, my wife introduced me to incense made with natural ingredients from her village in Cambodia (Han Chey, Kampong Cham). They gather locally sourced materials from the rainforest, gardens, and farms. After experiencing this natural incense, I was hooked, and we started a business after encouragement from family and friends.

One of our first challenges was finding pre-powdered ingredients, and we soon realized they had weaker fragrance. By grinding our own, we made the incense smell better and saved on material costs. That’s when the adventure began.

OF NOTE:

The world of taking things and making them smaller is typically referred to as particle reduction. Particle reduction is a huge industry that touches everything. From pharmaceutical companies to landscape companies. It's all around you from visiting a local coffee shop to the cosmetic products you use in your home. Unfortunately there exists a gap between the consumer/small business world and the industrial/commercial world with some grinding equipment.

Some grinders excel with some materials while they might be terrible with other types of materials.

GRINDER CHALLENGES:

Here is a short list of challenges we face with particle reduction:

Heat - Too much heat will reduce the fragrance potency of the material you are grinding. I suspect different ingredients have different temperatures in which the ingredient will begin to lose it's potency. I have not tested this.
Labor - The less ingredients the grinder can output or the greater amount of time needed to grind the material can result in higher labor requirements. In almost all cases, grinders need to be attended to and will not do the work without your presence. It's also dangerous to leave grinders alone due to heat concerns.
Mess - Some grinders produce clouds of particles that settle onto everything in your work area. While others keep the process sealed up. Unloading the material can be a messy endeavor.
Cost - Grinding equipment can cost you as little as $10 for a coffee grinder at your local thrift shop to many thousands of dollars for commercial or industrial grinding equipment.
Material Types - Some materials such as resin or materials that contain high resin/oil content can be tricky to grind. Introduce heat and you have a very sticky mess with resin. Materials with high oil concentration can clump up and get stuck to the walls/floor of your grinder. They require additional cleaning.

MATERIAL CHALLENGES:

Some plants are very easy to grind while others will have you ripping your hair out. Let's go over the challenges we find in materials.

High fiber - Materials high in fiber like wood (especially hard woods) or even leaves that contain little sticks and twigs (like Patchouli or White Sage) will be very difficult to grind.
Oil - Plants that contain a lot of oil will clump up and cause issues like sticking to the walls of your grinder. Cloves are a good example of this

GRINDER TYPES:

Note: I am approaching the equipment as a small business consumer. I am keeping it under $500 and in a non-commercial / non-industrial classification.

Blade(s) - This is most common for inexpensive coffee grinders or electric grain mill grinders . Sharp or dull blades cut through the material to reduce particle size.
Hammer Mill - A blunt force grinder where the cylinder/chamber where the grinding occurs contains one or more hammers which spin at high speeds. The hammers are extremely close to the walls of the chamber and those walls will have ridges on them to direct the material down/up.
Burr Grinder - A moving grinding wheel that crushes the material between the wheel and very tight walls inside the grinding chamber.
Ball Mill - A hollow drum where you place the material inside along with balls. You then place the drum into a belt driven rotation platform. The drum is spun at lower speeds until the balls crush the material into the desired particle size.
Mortar and Pestle - An ancient method of crushing materials in a bowl (mortar) typically made of rock or concrete with a club (pestle) creating a crushing pressure between the two tools.

Updated 3/5/2025 - Removed frustrating images. Added more context. New section.

More updates to come!