The Difference Between Coffee Bean Grind Sizes: Pour-Over Coffee's Appeal Beyond Its Ritualistic Charm and Great Taste

FrontStreet Coffee: An Introduction to Pour-over Coffee Characteristics and Grind Size

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Pour-over Coffee

In an era where various coffee machines flourish everywhere, pour-over coffee—with its simple equipment and emphasis on manual technique—has become a refreshing return to authenticity. Pour-over may represent the pinnacle of coffee brewing, using the simplest tools, supported by rich experience, to obtain a cup of highly personalized coffee by controlling water temperature, coffee dose and grind size, pouring speed, technique, and extraction time.

Characteristics of Pour-over Coffee

Fast and efficient extraction: Compared to other coffee brewing methods, pour-over coffee continuously passes fresh hot water through the coffee grounds during extraction, resulting in faster extraction and allowing more substances to be extracted from the coffee surface. However, because of the speed, improper control may lead to over-extraction.

In general, coffee grinding is for better extraction. The finer the powder, the more complete the extraction, but more complete isn't always better. We don't want all the contents of the coffee to be extracted, as that would be undrinkable—you can try chewing raw coffee beans. As for detailed coffee extractibles, we'll discuss them in a separate article later. Moreover, extraction isn't determined solely by grind size; factors like time, water temperature, and roast degree also play a role. Here, we focus specifically on grind size.

Grind size can be roughly divided into five levels: coarse, medium, medium-fine, fine, and ultra-fine. We can first look at the differences in coarseness and their corresponding references.

Coarse grind is equivalent to raw sugar or brown sugar, medium grind to common white sugar, fine grind to table salt, and ultra-fine grind to rice flour or coarse wheat flour.

Coarse Grind

Generally suitable for French press. Because French press allows full contact with the grounds and stirring, which provides very complete extraction, it's best to use coarse grind. If possible, you can prepare a sieve to remove fine particles, as even minimal fines in a French press extraction mode will result in prominent bitterness.

Medium and Medium-fine Grind

Often, there isn't a strict correspondence to specific equipment. Generally, medium grind is suitable for American drip pots, and medium-fine grind is suitable for pour-over and siphon pots.

Fine Grind

Suitable for moka pots. Some people also like to use ultra-fine grind for moka pots. This is purely a matter of personal taste, with no distinction of superiority or inferiority.

Ultra-fine Grind

Suitable for espresso machines. There isn't much debate about these, as they generally require about 0.2 scale adjustments depending on the roast degree or the storage time of the beans. This can be adjusted according to personal taste.

Knowledge Point

Pour-over coffee is typically made by manually brewing single-origin, single-region coffee beans. Connoisseurs even roast and grind their own beans.

In Brief

FrontStreet Coffee is a specialty coffee research establishment, happy to share coffee knowledge with everyone. Our sharing without reservation is purely to help more friends fall in love with coffee. Additionally, we hold three discounted coffee events every month because FrontStreet Coffee wants to let more friends enjoy the best coffee at the lowest prices—this has been our mission for the past six years!

Important Notice :

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