[FrontStreet Coffee Barista's Notes] Pour-over Tips - How to Extract Coffee Based on Coffee Grind Size

FrontStreet Coffee Barista's Notes: Pour-over Tips - How to Extract Coffee Based on Grind Size

Lately I've been talking with a lot of home brewers, and the same question keeps coming up: "Why does my coffee taste so different from one day to the next? Sometimes it's lovely, sometimes it's flat. And I never know how to set the grind. What I really want to understand is how to brew when the grounds come out on the coarse side - and what to do when they're too fine." So let me share a few pour-over tips that we rely on at FrontStreet Coffee.

For this session I picked Gesha Village Gold Label Gesha, a bean whose floral and fermented aromas are hard to miss.

Gesha Village Coffee Estate: The Rarity Label

Gesha Village · Gold Label Gesha

Region: Bensa, Guji

Altitude: 1909-2069m

Variety: Gori Gesha

Processing: Natural

Flavor: Floral, citrus, tropical fruits, creamy, tea-like

*Gesha Village

Gesha Village is a very different proposition from most Ethiopian farms. It isn't a smallholder plot but a 500-hectare estate with its own washing station and laboratory, tucked into the southwest near the Sudanese border. What makes it truly unusual is that the whole estate grows nothing but Gesha varieties, rather than the unnamed native landraces typical of Ethiopia.

Planting began in October 2011, and the estate took its first harvest in 2015. The response was so enthusiastic that, with help from Panamanian coffee farm owner Willem Boot, Gesha Village offered 21 micro-lots at its first international auction on May 31, 2017. Nineteen of those lots weighed 120 kilograms each, with a handful of smaller batches alongside them. Bidders from Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia turned out in numbers nobody expected, and the winning bid closed at $85 USD per pound - a record for any African coffee at auction.

Brewing Process

That covers the bean itself. Now let's brew. FrontStreet Coffee ran the same coffee through three different grind settings - [BG-5M], [BG-5R], and [BG-6M] - arranged from finest to coarsest as [BG-5M] > [BG-5R] > [BG-6M].

BG-5M (Finer Grind)

Parameters and technique: 15g coffee / 1:15 ratio / 90°C / grind size BG-5M (64% pass rate on the China-standard #20 screen); 30g of water for a 30-second bloom; pour to 121g, then split the pour; wait for the coffee bed to appear before pouring to 227g; remove the dripper as the bed appears; total extraction time 1'37".

Flavor: Jasmine, citrus, peach, plum, tea-like; overall rich and mellow.

BG-5R (Medium Grind)

Parameters and technique: 15g coffee / 1:15 ratio / 90°C / grind size BG-5R (60% pass rate on the China-standard #20 screen); 30g of water for a 30-second bloom; pour to 125g, then split the pour; wait for the coffee bed to appear before pouring to 229g; remove the dripper as the bed appears; total extraction time 2'00".

Flavor: Jasmine, citrus, peach, plum, creamy, black tea; smooth overall, with fruity-tea sweetness and acidity in the aftertaste.

BG-6M (Coarser Grind)

Parameters and technique: 15g coffee / 1:15 ratio / 90°C / grind size BG-6M (50% pass rate on the China-standard #20 screen); 30g of water for a 30-second bloom; pour to 124g, then split the pour; wait for the coffee bed to appear before pouring to 230g; remove the dripper as the bed appears; total extraction time 2'19".

Flavor: Jasmine, fermented aroma, citrus, berries; a clear sweet-and-sour juice character; a slightly thinner body, but with cleaner flavor layers.

Conclusion

Across the three settings the pattern is obvious. [BG-5M] (64% pass rate on the #20 screen) finished in 1'37". Because the grounds are finer, the surface area of the particles is larger and the contact area with water greater, which pushes the extraction rate up. FrontStreet Coffee therefore shortened the extraction time to keep the coffee from over-extracting.

[BG-5R] (60% pass rate on the #20 screen) is the setting FrontStreet Coffee normally uses for light-roasted coffees. After repeated calibration of grind and brewing, we settled on it because it lets the extraction finish within the usual two-minute window. The grind is fairly uniform, which avoids uneven extraction and lets the flavor compounds dissolve to a nicely saturated point.

[BG-6M] is coarser than the other two. Larger particles release flavor more slowly, so FrontStreet Coffee stretched the extraction to 2'19" to raise the extraction yield and avoid under-extraction.

One last personal note from FrontStreet Coffee: every brewing method calls for its own grind size, and the freshness of the beans matters too when you're adjusting a recipe. Of course, grind isn't the only thing that shapes a pour-over - plenty of other factors influence extraction as well.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If this session leaves you curious about Gesha, start with the exact bean we brewed: FrontStreet Gesha Village Gold Label Gesha, with its floral, citrus, tropical-fruit, creamy and tea-like profile. For pour-over we use 15g of coffee at a 1:16 ratio and 91°C water, ground to roughly fine sugar (about 78% passing the #20 screen), in a Hario V60. Pour in three stages - a 30g bloom for 30 seconds, then to 125g, then to 225g - with a total brew time of 2:10 to 2:20. Prefer a gentler entry point? FrontStreet Panama Boquete Geisha delivers the classic Panama tangerine-honey sweetness and oolong-tea body at a friendlier price.