How to Adjust the Grind Setting on the Commander Hand Coffee Grinder? Is the Commander's Hand Grinder Good to Use?

Professional Coffee Knowledge Exchange

For more coffee bean information, read on — today's topic is how to dial in a hand grinder.

FrontStreet Coffee Discusses Commander Coffee Grinder Grind Settings Today

When we buy manual grinders, we often find they perform inconsistently — mostly a matter of design. Most hand grinders use conical burrs, which are fast but not especially uniform. The more consistent option is flat burrs, but flat burrs have a drawback of their own: they're slow, taking 3-5 times longer to grind the same amount of coffee. That's why hand grinders essentially never use them.

Using the Commander as an Example

Take the Commander as an example of how a manual grinder's settings work.

The burrs are the Commander's core selling point. They're conical burrs made from high-nitrogen stainless steel. Adding nitrogen to stainless steel — typically an iron-chromium-nickel alloy — sharply improves its hardness and corrosion resistance, though refining high-nitrogen stainless steel is also fairly difficult. This high-nitrogen burr is one of the Commander's standout features, and one reason it commands its price.

Grind size is adjusted through the engagement of three small ball bearings on the three-pronged knob with grooves on the conical burr. Each rotation is 12 degrees, supporting roughly 35 degrees at maximum. Thanks to the gear pattern on the knob and the matching pattern on the burr, you always know exactly which setting you're on. This design is far better than the Porlex — with a Porlex, anyone with a touch of obsessiveness goes mad trying to remember how many degrees they've turned (and counting as you adjust isn't much easier).

The Commander has now been upgraded to its third generation, the MK3. After reading comparison reports from users abroad, the MK3 makes fine adjustments to the burrs and overall structure compared with the previous two generations. Relatively speaking, both stability and precision have improved further.

Grind Size Testing

Here is the official recommendation for grind settings. I ran my own grind size test, measuring 12 settings from 3 to 36 degrees. Each setting used one coffee bean, with table salt, white sugar, a dime coin and a one-yuan coin as reference objects.

Settings 3 to 9 don't look very different at first glance, but carefully observing the small particles scattered around gives a rough sense of the fineness.

Above setting 10, the particles gradually become distinct, slowly approaching the size of salt granules. Compare settings far apart — 3 and 12, say — and the difference is obvious.

Above setting 20, the grind gradually reaches the fineness of sugar granules. I usually adjust to around 25 degrees for pour-over. With the naked eye and a magnifying glass, you can see that between 15 and 30 degrees the particles are quite beautifully uniform, though without a higher-powered magnifier it's impossible to see how the finer settings behave.

At home, I now basically use this manual grinder instead of my original Small Flying Eagle electric grinder for pour-over. I feel there are fewer fines, and I no longer need to do the sieving step. Without high-precision sieves and scales, though, I can't make more precise comparisons.

Between 30 and 35 degrees suits Kono pour-over, but above 30 degrees you can clearly see particle inconsistency, with some overly large and some extremely small pieces. Above 36 degrees it becomes less usable.

During testing, apart from the finest few settings, which were somewhat strenuous to grind, everything above setting 10 was very easy. For pour-over grind sizes, grinding 15g of coffee beans takes about 30 seconds.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Once you have a hand grinder you're happy with, the beans matter just as much. For light-roast lovers, FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe Natural Red Cherry is a classic — one of the earliest coffees to be made with 100% ripe red cherries dried in the sun. Roasted light-medium, it opens with ripe fruit on the nose, then fermented notes and berries on the palate, followed by citrus acidity, a creamy smoothness and a juicy ripe-grape finish.

Prefer something sweeter and rounder? FrontStreet's Strawberry Candy Geisha blend pairs a washed Panamanian Geisha with a Costa Rican honey-process coffee from two high-altitude origins. A medium roast lets it keep its floral and fruity character while pushing forward roast-driven sweetness — caramel, raisins, candied fruit and a luscious rose aroma in the cup.

Rounding out the list are FrontStreet's Musician Series Mozart, a Costa Rican raisin-honey coffee with grape-like sweetness and notes of pineapple and osmanthus, and the Brazil Queen's Estate Yellow Bourbon — a remarkably sweet, versatile bean that works in a pour-over, French press, moka pot or espresso machine alike. Any of them will reward a good grinder.