The Last Coffee Grind Size Chart Youll Ever Need

Most fans of home brewing fail to make great coffee before they even start. they invest in the best coffee grinder they can find and find that they still make average tasting coffee. the worst part: they don’t know why, and it drives them crazy!

with just a little tweaking you can fix this. Read on to avoid making this common mistake and make great-tasting coffee.

Reading: Best grind for drip coffee

the backbone of great coffee = the perfect coffee grounds (1). don’t underestimate the importance of grinding:

your land is your most valuable and most overlooked tool to this day. I am going to share with you where you went wrong and everything else there is to know about grinding coffee. by the time you’re done reading this post, you’ll be making the best coffee of your life.

First let’s take a quick look at the different grind sizes, when you should use each one, and what settings you can achieve with your coffee grinder.

the relationship between ground coffee and too much or too little coffee

do notskip this section.

what you are about to read is essential knowledge for making coffee. Having the best coffee maker and the best coffee beans in the world won’t mean anything if you don’t understand extraction. It’s time you understood coffee extraction, and by doing so, you’ll be able to avoid under-extraction and over-extraction.

Both are bad news for your coffee and bad news for you. avoiding this is actually the only reason we use different grind sizes for different coffee makers.

its grains are too thick = in the process of extraction. this is when you haven’t extracted enough flavor from your ground coffee
Your grounds are too fine = over-extracted. this is when you have extracted too much flavor from your coffee, and it becomes overwhelming and unpleasant

what does poorly extracted coffee taste like?

You’ve probably had bad coffee before. most of the time, bad coffee is the result of extraction:

for a really in-depth tour of what over- or under-extracted coffee will taste like, the hustle barista has an excellent guide on extraction that’s worth checking out (2).

…so you’ve made a coffee and, to your chagrin, it tastes like it wasn’t properly extracted. she doesn’t want it to happen again, wasting more valuable coffee, but she has no idea where she went wrong.

we got you! you should vary the brew time, water temperature, or grind size, depending on your flavor:

blade grinders vs burrs

before you read any further: if you’ve been using a blade grinder for your coffee beans, you’ve been making the most common coffee grinding mistake out there. Do not grind coffee beans with a blade grinder. doing so is worse than buying ground coffee.

yeah, worse. why?

First of all, the key to making a great cup of coffee is consistency, and if your little beans aren’t all the same size, some will be over-extracted, some will be under-extracted, and the result will be good. … fucking coffee.

move your blade grinder all you want, you’ll never get them 100% consistent… but if you’re stuck somewhere with nothing but a blade grinder, there’s something you can do… but get ready to work . for it. james hoffman did it with this video:

In addition to a distinct lack of consistency, bladed coffee grinders have another pitfall: They can only work by spinning extremely fast, which creates heat and friction. this heat and friction, as you may have guessed, is bad news. this means your coffee is already heating up, so it won’t taste as fresh and the end result will be overcooked.

Now, compare all that nonsense to a grinder, which uses even pressure and rotation to ‘crush’ beans into a perfect consistency. They can accomplish this at low speeds, which means they add no heat and maintain a precise and consistent even grind.

Summarize it too

blade grinders suck at getting even grounds. The uniform grounds make it even easier to extract the coffee.
if you’re stuck with a blade grinder, there are a few tricks you can use to improve your soil

making espresso? it’s even more critical that your grinds are even/consistent. if you use something like a blade grinder, here’s what’s likely to happen, and don’t say we didn’t warn you:

popular coffee grind sizes and what they are used for

The following seven grind sizes are all you need to brew great cups of coffee with a variety of different brewing methods.

yes, you will notice that some coffee brewing methods fall into more than one grind size category, this is because you can control the outcome of your brew with grind size + brew time for certain methods of preparation.

Let’s take a look at the main grind sizes, from very coarse to very fine.