Coffee Grind Sizes.

Grind size! As seen on the pre-ground bags of coffee in the supermarket, with little dotted symbols or images of brewing equipment, the grind size is indicative of which brewing equipment you should use. Remember different brewing methods and equipment lead to different tastes so the choice is yours!

All ground coffee will vary between two extremes, one that is more like gravel in appearance, being sharp and jagged edged pieces and rough to touch, while the other is more like sand or even flour, feeling smooth to touch and compressing easily.

Imagine like a gravel beach that goes to sand closer to the water, that kind of gradient is what you can expect as you change your grind size from course to fine.

Very Coarse

Firstly lets go over coarsely ground coffee and its uses. Coffee that’s ground more coarsely like that of gravel, is mainly used for a French press or some Aeropress recipes.

Both of these methods use some form of immersion brewing which entails leaving the ground coffee fully saturated in water for usually around 4-5 mins if not longer.

Having a larger grind size (like that of gravel texture) in this method means its easier to filter out the ground coffee and will give a clearer and more mild flavour, this is due to course ground coffee having a lower surface area than that of finer grind sizes.

The finer you grind coffee, then the more the surface area is increased, which in turn increases the amount of flavour that’s extracted from the ground beans.

Medium Grind Size

Now, onto the kind of middle ground of grind size. This is what you’ll use for a v60, pour overs and some Aeropress recipes. It really just looks abit smaller than the gravel texture described above, here’s an image to help:

A lot of this grind size is quite trial and error as to what fits the brew style your using best, overall its mainly used for percolation methods of brewing such as pour overs, this is done finer than that of immersion brewing as smaller grind sizes do two things, they slow down the passing of water through them as the grinds fit tighter together, and they decrease the time needed to brew by increasing the surface area of the grinds. Again, the increased surface area means the more flavour extracted from the grinds in a given time.

Very fine!

The finer end of the grind size scale is that of espresso and even finer is that of Turkish coffee, this size is so fine that its very much like sand, tiny and gets everywhere. This is used in more intense coffee extractions like espresso where the brew time is much shorter, usually in the 20-30 second region. Due to the smaller grinds, the overall taste of the drink will be more rich and heavy, this is from tiny coffee solubles being suspended in the drink.

Turkish coffee is ground like flour but that is a topic for another day!

I hope you’ve enjoyed, have a great week and some even better coffees.