How To Grind Your Coffee – The Best Coffee Grind Instructions

At Entrepreneur’s Brew, we want to be sure you’re brewing the best coffee possible, even before the brewing actually begins. To make sure that happens, we’ve written this article to instruct you on the best grinding tips for your preferred brewing method.

We recommend always purchasing whole bean coffee, and grinding it before each brew at home. If you can’t grind at home, or you’re brewing in large batches and would like us to grind for you, we have multiple pre-ground selections of each of our roasts. However, if your brewing method requires specific grind sizes like coarse ground for your delicious cold brews, you’ll need a way to grind the beans at home.

Once the internals of the coffee bean comes in contact with the air, it starts to lose flavor. While roasted coffee beans can last about 2 weeks of optimal freshness, ground coffee begins to lose its potency within 15-30 minutes of grinding. When we grind coffee for you in our bags, we use a degassing valve and heat sealed bags to lock in freshness upon delivery. This is why it is absolutely crucial for you to have some sort of air-tight ceramic or glass container to store your coffee in long term.

This all comes down to why each type of brewing method requires different grinding sizes. The amount of contact that water has with the ground coffee, plus the temperature, how the grounds are agitated while brewing (releasing gas) as well as how the water sits and moves through the grounds, depends on the size of the grind. We’ve broken this science down into our easy to read chart above!

How Proper Grind Size Impacts The Flavor of Coffee

We’ll cut right to the chase: if your coffee tastes bitter, the grinds are too fine. If your coffee tastes sour, acidic, or salty, the grinds are too coarse. This is correlated to the brewing method you are using as well. A fine grind is perfect for espresso, but will cause your French press coffee to taste way too bitter.

Under Extracting Coffee:

• Sour
• Acidic
• Salty
• Too short of brew time
• Coffee grounds are too coarse

Over Extracting Coffee:

• Bitter
• Hollow
• Lack of coffee notes
• Brew contact is not proportional
• Coffee is too finely ground

Now that you understand how brewing works, use these tips on what grind size you’ll need for your preferred way to brew your coffee:

1. Coarse

Chunky, visible pieces of coffee beans present.

Coarse ground coffee is great for when your water is sitting with your coffee grounds for an extended period of time. The two best methods for using coarse ground coffee are a cold brew, and French press.

You can perfectly identify coarse ground coffee due to large pieces/chunks of coffee beans visible in the grounds, with a non-uniform grind.

2. Medium Coarse

Less chunky, no large pieces of beans. Large clumpy sea salt.

Medium coarse ground coffee is going to be the happy place between your machine drip and French press. There aren’t many brewing methods that require a medium coarse ground but usually Chemex brewers prefer a medium coarse ground.

Chemex is not the same as a pour over, which should use a medium-fine grind. Chemex brewing uses a specific Chemex filter which is much thicker and has a longer contact time than a standard pour over filter.

Other popular methods for a medium coarse grind are the Clever Dripper, and Cafe solos.

3. Medium Grind

Sea salt consistency, no visible chunks. Should be uniform size.

Medium grind is going to be your standard off the retail shelf grind. It’s going to be the best starting point if you experiment with your brewing, or don’t know if you are under or over extracting coffee.

Medium grind is going to be perfect for most machine based drip coffee makers, longer brewed Aeropress (3+ minutes), or cone based pour over makers.

4. Medium Fine

Uniform sand consistency, easily visible grounds.

If you like pour overs like us, this is going to be the best grind size for you. Popular methods for medium fine grind are the v60, Kalita wave, and Aeropress brewing for under 3 minute brew times.

We also like brewing Siphon based coffee with a medium fine grind.

5. Fine Grounds

Uniform table salt, or regular sugar consistency.

If you like espresso, reusable capsule coffee (Nespresso, Keurig machines, with reusable coffee pods) this is the best size to go with, at least to start. This is commonly called the espresso grind because it’s so popular.

Fine grounds are also perfect for a short Aeropress (sub 2 minutes).

6. Extra Fine

Almost like powdered sugar. Very fine dusting.

This last grind size is going to be for the extravagant. Turkish bending is the most common application for an extra fine grind size.

Here’s the chart again for reference:

Now that you’re a grinding expert, your coffee should start to taste exactly how it’s supposed to. But don’t start dumping hot water on those grounds just yet, you need to make sure you’re brewing those ground properly.

We are working on video tutorials for each brewing method, but for now, don’t hesitate to reach out with questions on how to get started brewing your coffee the Entrepreneur’s Brew way.