As coffee enthusiasts, we’re always after perfecting each cup of coffee so that no morning is without a delicious cup to help get us through the day. With some very small tweaks, you can really enhance the taste and flavor of your coffee.
Coffee Extraction
Your goal in choosing a grind size: extract the perfect amount of flavor from your coffee. Too little and you’ve under-extracted it, too much and you’ve over extracted it.
Both over and under extraction are bad news for your coffee. This is precisely why we use different grind sizes for various coffee makers.
- Your grounds are too coarse = Under extraction. This is when you have not extracted enough flavor out of your ground coffee
- Your grounds are too fine = Over extracted. This is when you have extracted too much flavor out of your coffee – and it becomes overpowering and unpleasant
What Does Poorly Extracted Coffee Taste Like?
You’ve probably tasted bad coffee before. Most of the time, bad coffee is the result of extraction:
Under Extracted
- Sour
- Acidic
- Salty
Over Extracted
- Bitter
- Hollow – lacking any notable coffee bean flavors
….So you’ve made a coffee, and to your disgust it tastes like it’s been poorly extracted. You don’t want it to happen again, wasting more precious coffee, but you have no idea where you went wrong.
We’ve got you! You need to tweak either the brew time, your water temperature, or your grind size, based on how it tastes:
| Flavor | Brew Time | Water Temperature | Grind Size |
| Sour | Increase | Decrease | Finer |
| Bitter | Decrease | Increase | Coarser |
Popular Grind Sizes and What They’re Used For
You can not just choose one grind size and use it for everything; some grinds are best suited for certain coffee makers.
You’ll notice some coffee brewing methods falls under more than one grind size category, this is because you can control the outcome of your brew with your grind size + brewing time for certain brewing methods.
| Grind Size | Brewing Method | Recommended Starting Point (Using West Coast Chef Manual Grinder) |
| Extra Coarse | Cold Brew Coffee, Cowboy Coffee | 28 digits |
| Coarse | French Press, Percolator, Coffee Cupping | 25 digits |
| Medium/Coarse | Chemex coffee maker, Clever Dripper, Cafe Solo Brewer | 20 digits |
| Medium | Cone-shaped Pour-over Brewers, Flat Bottom Drip Coffee Machines, Siphon Coffee, Aeropress (with 3+ minute brew time) | 16 digits |
| Medium/Fine | Cone-shaped Pour-over Brewers, Aeropress (with 2-3 minute brew time) | 12 digits |
| Fine | Espresso, Moka Pot (Stovetop Espresso Maker), Aeropress (with 1 minute brew time) | 7 digits |
| Extra Fine | Turkish coffee | 3 digits |
Final Thoughts
Yep – you’re a coffee grinding expert now. When you pay attention to the little things – the little things being your grounds of coffee in this case – you reap the rewards of great darn coffee. You have the knowledge, now all that’s left is to choose your coffee maker, a bag of quality coffee, and you’ll literally taste the improvement instantly!
Leave us a comment below with your thoughts and let us know if this helped!