The Last Coffee Grind Size Chart You’ll Ever Need

Perfect coffee grounds mean great coffee

First, we’ll take a quick look at the different grind sizes, when you should use each size, and what settings you can use with your coffee grinder to achieve them. It goes without saying that you must find the best coffee grinder for your needs.

What you are about to read is important knowledge for making coffee

Even if you have the best coffee drip machine in the world and the best coffee beans, it’s useless if you don’t know how to brew it. It’s time to understand about coffee brewing. By doing so, you can avoid under-extracting or over-extracting.

• Grind too coarse = Extracting. This is because not enough flavor is extracted from the ground coffee.
• Coffee powder too fine = extraction too strong. This is when you extract too much flavor from your coffee – and it becomes overpowering and unpleasant

What does underextracted coffee taste like?

You’ve probably tried bad coffee before, bad coffee is most often the result of brewing:

UNDER EXTRACTED

• Sour
• Acidic
• Salty

OVER EXTRACTED

• Bitter
• Hollow – A lack any notable coffee bean flavors

FLAVOR	BREW TIME	WATER TEMP	GRIND
Sour	Increase	Decrease	Finer
Bitter	Decrease	Hotter	Coarser

 

Blade Grinder or Burr Grinder

Before you continue reading: If you’ve ever used a blade grinder for coffee beans, you’ve made the most common coffee grinding mistake. Do not grind coffee beans with a knife grinder. This is worse than buying pre-ground coffee.

First of all, consistency is the key to making great coffee. If the small powders are not all the same size, some will be over-extracted and others under-extracted, and the result will be: Damn coffee. You can shake your knife grinder around as much as you want, but you’ll never get 100% consistency, but if you’re stuck with only a knife grinder available, there are things you can do, but be prepared please that.

James Hoffmann summed it up in this video: Apart from the obvious lack of consistency, there is another danger with bladed coffee grinders: Bladed coffee grinders generate heat and friction.

In addition to their apparent lack of consistency, burr coffee grinders have another flaw: They can only operate by spinning extremely fast, which creates heat and friction. As you might guess, this heat and friction is bad news. This means your coffee has been heated so it no longer tastes fresh, and the end result is overcooked coffee.

That’s too much to summarize:

• Choose a blade grinder instead of a blade grinder. It doesn’t matter if you have a manual coffee grinder or an electric grinder, as long as there are burrs when grinding.
• It is difficult to grind evenly with a blade grinder. Uniform coffee grounds make coffee extraction easy.
• If you don’t have a blade grinder, there are some tips you can use to improve your grind

Making espresso? What’s more important is that your blending speed is even/consistent. If you use something like a blade grinder, here’s what could happen, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Common coffee grind sizes and their uses

You can brew a delicious cup of coffee with a variety of brewing methods using just the seven grind sizes below.

You can’t just choose one grind size and use it for any purpose; Certain grinds are best for certain coffee makers.

Yes, you will find that some coffee brewing methods come in a variety of grind sizes. This is because for certain coffee brewing methods, you can control the brew result by grind size + brew time.