Pour-Over Coffee Grind Size Guide | How Fine Should Coffee Grinds Be for Pour-Over Brewing?

More and more people are falling in love with coffee and brewing it themselves. The rise of pour-over coffee has sparked a trend of "brew your own coffee." However, for beginners, despite their enthusiasm, they often struggle to master the correct brewing techniques, failing to bring out the wonderful flavors of coffee and sometimes even ending up with a terrible cup.

How Does Coffee Grind Size Affect Flavor?

Pour-over coffee uses water as a solvent to extract flavor compounds from ground coffee beans, resulting in a delicious cup of black coffee. Coffee grind size is crucial in pour-over brewing—the fineness directly relates to the amount and speed at which various components are extracted from the coffee.

When you visit coffee shops, you might notice that espresso coffee has its own dedicated grinder. This is because espresso needs to extract a concentrated espresso shot within tens of seconds, requiring very fine and consistent grinding. While pour-over coffee doesn't need to be as fine as espresso, achieving positive flavor characteristics still requires attention to grinding consistency and finding the appropriate grind size.

The coarser the grind, the larger the particles, resulting in less resistance to water flow, shorter contact time through the coffee bed, and a lighter extraction. The finer the grind, the smaller the particles, creating greater resistance to water flow, longer contact time through the coffee bed, more water-coffee contact time, and naturally a stronger flavor. Unevenly ground coffee particles result in different contact times with hot water for various particle sizes, inconsistent extraction efficiency, and affected coffee flavor.

What Grind Size Should Be Used for Pour-Over?

Only 30% of a coffee bean can be dissolved and extracted, and within this thirty percent, only a portion contains the desirable flavor characteristics we want, while the remaining portion contributes bitterness and undesirable flavors. Therefore, adjusting various parameters in pour-over brewing aims to achieve proper extraction. Through industry experience, an extraction efficiency of 18-22% is considered optimal.

During brewing, people often like to ask FrontStreet Coffee how coarse they grind. Since grind size isn't as precise as water temperature (which can be specified to exact degrees), determining the exact coarseness or fineness relies on personal observation and experience. FrontStreet Coffee typically uses sugar granules as a reference for comparison. For example, when FrontStreet Coffee brews light to medium roast coffee beans, lighter roasts have weaker water absorption, so to improve extraction efficiency, we choose medium-fine grinding—about the size of fine sugar granules, as shown in the image below:

When brewing medium to dark roast coffee beans, the increased roast degree makes the beans more porous and absorbent. To avoid over-extraction, FrontStreet Coffee recommends medium coarseness—about the size of coarse sugar granules.

For those pursuing more precision, simply using sugar granules as a description isn't enough. If you want to accurately determine the corresponding grind size for your home grinder, FrontStreet Coffee suggests using professional testing tools—specifically, Chinese Standard #20 0.85mm aperture sieve. When using the sieve, particles smaller than 0.85mm will fall into the powder collection bowl below, while particles larger than 0.85mm remain on the sieve surface. The sieve pass-through rate is the proportion of coffee powder that falls into the collection bowl relative to the total amount. For light to medium roast coffee beans, the grind size should achieve a 75-80% pass-through rate on a #20 sieve, corresponding to FrontStreet Coffee's EK43s grinder setting of 10-10.5. For medium to dark roast coffee beans, the grind size should achieve a 70-75% pass-through rate, corresponding to settings of 10.5-11.

In addition to the two methods mentioned above, you can also directly observe whether the grind is appropriate during the pour-over process, using extraction time as a reference factor. According to FrontStreet Coffee's brewing parameter standards, normal coffee extraction time should be around 1 minute 50 seconds to 2 minutes 10 seconds. If the grind is too fine, extraction time will be longer; if the grind is too coarse, extraction time will be shorter. This allows you to make an initial judgment about whether the coffee grind size is appropriate based on extraction duration.

What Other Details Should Be Noted in Pour-Over Coffee?

Many factors affect the flavor of pour-over coffee, with the most significant being coffee beans, grind size, water temperature, coffee-to-water ratio, brewing technique, and extraction time. As the source of coffee flavor, coffee beans have the greatest impact. A bag of quality coffee beans can directly affect the final taste in your cup, making bean selection very crucial.

FrontStreet Coffee's bean menu features nearly fifty different coffee beans, covering multiple major producing regions. You can choose based on your preferred flavor profiles. To ensure everyone has a better tasting experience, FrontStreet Coffee only ships coffee beans roasted within 5 days. Adding transportation time, the beans you receive are generally in their optimal flavor window.

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat official account: cafe_style)

For more specialty coffee beans, please add FrontStreet Coffee's personal WeChat (FrontStreet Coffee), WeChat ID: qjcoffeex

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473