The Last Coffee Grind Size Chart You’ll Ever Need

Most home coffee brewing fanatics fail at brewing great coffee before they even begin. They invest in the best coffee grinder they can find and find they still brew average tasting coffee. The worst part: they don’t know why, and It drives them crazy!

With just one small tweak you can fix this. Keep reading to avoid making this common mistake with coffee grinds and start making great tasting coffee!

Perfect grounds equals great coffee

The backbone of great coffee = the perfect coffee grounds (1). Don’t underestimate the importance of grinding:

Your grounds are your most valuable and overlooked tool, until today. I’m going to share with you where you have been going wrong, and everything else there is to know about grinding coffee. By the time you have finished reading this post, you’ll be brewing the best coffee of your life.

First we’re going to take a quick look at the different grind sizes, when you should use each, and with which settings you can achieve them with your coffee grinder. Needless to say, you must find the best coffee grinder to suit your needs.

The Relationship Between Coffee Grounds and Extracted Coffee

Do not skip this section.

What you’re about to read is critical knowledge for brewing coffee. Having the best coffee drip machine and the best coffee beans in the world won’t mean anything if you don’t understand extraction. It’s time you understood coffee extraction, and in doing so, you’ll be able to avoid under and over-extraction.

Both are bad news for your coffee and bad news for you. Avoiding this is actually the whole reason we use different grind sizes for different 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:

For a really in-depth journey of how over or under-extracted coffee will taste, The Barista Hustle has a great guide on extraction worth checking out (2).

….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 TEMP	GRIND
Sour	Increase	Decrease	Finer
Bitter	Decrease	Hotter	Coarser

Blade vs Burr Grinders

Before you read any further: if you’ve been using a blade grinder for your coffee beans, you’ve been making the most common coffee grinding mistake that exists. Do NOT grind your coffee beans with a blade grinder. Doing so is WORSE than buying pre-ground coffee.

Yes, worse. Why?

First of all, the key to brewing a great cup of coffee is consistency, and if your little grinds are not all the same size, some will be over extracted, some will be under extracted, and the result will be, well… shit coffee.

Shake your blade grinder around all you want, you’re never going to get them 100% consistent…but if you’re stuck somewhere with nothing but a blade grinder, there is something you can do…but be prepared to work for it. James Hoffman nailed it with this video:

Aside from a clear lack of consistency, blade coffee grinders have another pitfall: they can only work by spinning extremely fast, which causes heat and friction. This heat and friction, as you guessed, is bad news. This means your coffee is already heating up so it won’t taste as fresh and the end result will be overcooked.

Now, compare all that nonsense to a burr grinder, which use uniform pressure and rotation to essentially ‘crush’ beans into a perfect consistency. They can achieve this at low speeds, meaning no added heat, and maintain a precise and consistent uniform grind.

Too sum it up

• Choose a conical burr grinder, not a blade grinder. It doesn’t matter if you have a manual coffee grinder or an electric grinder, as long as it grinds with burrs.
• Blade grinders suck at achieving uniform grounds. Uniform grounds make even coffee extraction easy.
• If you’re stuck with a Blade grinder, there are a few hacks you can use to make the grounds better

Brewing for espresso? It’s even more critical that your grinds are uniform/consistent.
If you use something like a blade grinder, here’s what is likely to happen, and don’t say we didn’t warn you:

popular coffee grind sizes, and what they are used for

The following seven grind sizes are all you’ll need to brew great cups of joe with a range of different coffee brewing methods. 

Yes, 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
Extra coarse	Cold Brew Coffee, Cowboy Coffee
Coarse	French Press, Percolator, Coffee Cupping
Medium-coarse	Chemex coffee maker, Clever Dripper, Cafe Solo Brewer
Medium	Cone-shaped Pour-over Brewers, Flat Bottom Drip Coffee Machines, Siphon Coffee, Aeropress (with 3+ minute brew time)
Medium-fine	Cone-shaped Pour-over Brewers, Aeropress (with 2-3 minute brew time)
Fine	Espresso, Moka Pot (Stovetop Espresso Maker), Aeropress (with 1 minute brew time)
Extra Fine	Turkish coffee

Lets take a look at the major grind sizes from very coarse to very fine.

1. Extra Coarse Grind (cold brew grind)

As large as you can go on most popular conical burr grinders – similar to ground peppercorns.

Suits these brew methods:​

• Cold brew coffee brewing (e.g. using your Filtron or Toddy Brewer)
• Cowboy coffee

2. Coarse Grind (french press grind)

If you brew with a French Press, you should know your coarse grind. It should look similar to sea salt.

Suits these brew methods:

• French press coffee brewing
• Percolators
• Coffee cupping/tasting

3. Medium-Coarse Grind

Not quite medium but not quite coarse – similar looking to coarse/rough sand.

Suits these brew methods:

• Chemex Pour Over Guide
• Clever Dripper
• Cafe solo brewer

4. Medium Grind

The happy medium of grind sizes; a great starting point for testing your grounds. Similar to the consistency of regular sand.

Suits these brew methods:

• Flat bottomed drip coffee makers
• Cone-shaped pour-over coffee makers
• The Aeropress (With 3+ minute brew time)
• Siphon brewers

5. Medium-Fine Grind (pour over grind)

If you love your pour over coffee like us, you will need a medium fine coffee grind size. It’s finer than sand, but not as fine as an espresso grind size.

Suits these brew methods:

• Cone-shaped pour-over brewers (e.g. Hario v60, Kalita wave, etc)
• The Aeropress (with a 2-3 minute brew time)

6. Fine Grind (espresso grind Size)

The most common grind size you’ll come across. When you buy pre-ground coffee, it’s usually a fine grind size (unless otherwise stated). In terms of consistency, it’s a little finer than table salt.

Suits these brew methods:

• Espresso Brewing (with or without a machine)
• The Aeropress (with a 1-2 minute brew time)
• Stovetop espresso

7. Extra Fine (Turkish Coffee Grind)

You’ll rarely use an extra fine grind and you need a Turkish coffee grinder to achieve a fine and consistent grind like this. It’s similar to flour or powder in texture.

Suits these brew methods:

• Ibrik (Turkish coffee)

The Coffee Grind Chart: Comparing Each Grind’s Size

Don’t trust your eyeballs (not yet, anyway).

They won’t be great at judging a medium fine coffee grind from a medium coffee grind. So we created a simple yet effective coffee grind chart to help you differentiate one grind size from another.

Print it off and use it right now to find out which grind you’re dealing with. Simply enter your email below so we know where to send it:

>>> CLICK HERE GET THE GRIND CHART <<<

Popular burr grinder settings you can use

Well, look at that. We’ve gone ahead and made your life easier by putting together a coffee grind chart of our setting recommendations. Remember: due to calibration, no two coffee grinders are exactly the same. (3)

Compare your results with the grind images above.

BREW TYPE	Baratza Encore	Baratza Virtuoso	Capresso Infinity	Cuisinart Supreme Grind	Bodum Bistro	Mr Coffee Burr Grinder
Aeropress	#5 – 20	#5 – 20	Fine #1 – Medium #4	#3 – 15	Anywhere from espresso to drip	#1 – 13
Bee House	#14	#13	Fine #4 – Medium #1	#4 – 6	Drip icon – 2.5	#3
Chemex	#21	#20	Medium #2- Coarse #1	#8 – 10	Chemex icon + 1	#5 – 10
Clever Dripper	#14	#14	Fine #4 – Medium #1	#4 – 6	Drip icon – 2.5	#3
Cold Brew	#22 – 40	#22 – 40	Coarse #1 – #4	#18	Not ideal for cold brew, but you can try the french press	Not ideal for cold brew, but you can try the french press
Cone filter drip machines	#15	#15 – 30	Medium #1 – Coarse #1	#10 – 15	Chemex icon + 1	#8 – 10
Espresso	#5	#5	#5 – 7	#1	Espresso Icon (far left)	#1 – for better results, adjust your grinder
Flat filter drip machines	#20 – 25	#20 – 25	Medium #2	#10 – 13	Chemex icon – 1	#10 – 12
French Press	#30	#30	Coarse #1	#16	French press icon (far right)	#18
Hario V60	#14	#13	Fine #4 – Medium #1	#4 – 6	Drip icon – 2.5	#3
Kalita Wave	#14	#13	Fine #4 – Medium #1	#4 – 6	Drip icon – 2.5	#3
Moka Pot	#12	#12	Fine #2 – Medium #1	#2 – 5	Espresso icon + 1	#2 – 4
Siphon	#13	#13	Fine #3 – Medium #1	#4 – 10	Drip icon – 2	#5
Soft Brew	#15 – 30	#15 – 30	Medium #1 – Coarse #1	#12 – 16	Drip icon – 1	#4 – 6
Turkish Brew	#1	#1	Extra Fine #1	Not ideal for Turkish coffee	Not ideal for Turkish	Not ideal for Turkish coffee
Vietnamese Phin	#30 – 40	#30 – 40	Coarse #1 – #4	#17	French press icon (far right)	#18
Walkure	#20 – 30	#20 – 30	Coarse #1 – #4	#17	Drip icon + 2.5	#12 – 14
Woodneck	#14	#14	Fine #4 – medium #1	#4 – 6	Drip icon + 2.5	#3

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 grinder, a bag of quality coffee, and you’ll literally taste the improvement instantly!

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This article was last updated on January 30, 2023.

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