![]() While we heartily recommend burr grinders, that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to make your blade grinder work for you. So if you have inconsistent coffee grounds, you’ll extract too much bitterness from some of those fine particles and just acidity from some of the coarse ones, making it hard to get a consistent, delicious cup of coffee. And those tastes are all extracted from the coffee at different rates (with acidic compounds mostly being easier to extract, and bitter compounds taking a little more effort). If you add and dissolve salt in a glass of water, that salt is only going to change the flavor of that water in one way: the more salt is dissolved, the saltier that water gets.Ĭoffee on the other hand, has tastes of sourness, sweetness, and bitterness, not to mention a ton of different aromatic compounds. Compare it to something super-simple: table salt. Why is grind size consistency so important? Well, as we try to hammer home fairly often, coffee is a very complex substance that has a lot of different flavor compounds. In a blade grinder, there are going to be way more different-sized particles in that batch of coffee. But most of the coffee you grind will be roughly the same size: the size of that gap between the burrs. So even in a burr grinder some oddly shaped, bigger particles will slip through the burrs, and some small dust-like particles will be created as well. While grind size on a blade grinder is determined by time, in a burr grinder, the distance between the burrs determines how big your coffee grounds end up.Ĭoffee is amorphous - it physically just does not break into even particles. Burr grinders are basically two interlocking discs (they can be flat or conical, but for the purposes of this explanation they work pretty similarly) that have sharp teeth on them made from materials like ceramic or stainless steel. The longer the grinder works, the more coffee particles come into contact with the blades and the smaller they get. Blade grinders work like a food processor or blender, using spinning blades to cut the coffee into smaller and smaller particles. Grinding coffee at homeĬoffee grinders can be divided into two main camps, blade grinders and burr grinders. If you grind too fine, not only will it provide more extraction, but it will also slow down your flow and increase your total time (which will also increase extraction). ![]() The same thing is noticeable when you change the grind size in a pour over or, especially, in espresso. The grains of sand, however, will have very tiny gaps between them, and it’ll take a lot more time for the water to get through. If you try to pour water through the rocks, it will go right through, because there will always be big gaps in between the rocks. If you take two batches of coffee and grind one way finer than the other, the way those coffee particles interlock will be different.Īn analogy that doesn’t really come from the real world, but seems to make sense to everyone I’ve ever told it to: imagine you’ve filled one tube with rocks and another with sand. In certain brew methods - specifically ones where water flows vertically, down into and through a bed of coffee - grind size has a secondary effect. So in any brew method, finer coffee grounds will extract faster, while coarser coffee grounds extract slower. The more pieces you divide that coffee particle into, the more surface area will be exposed (while the total mass of coffee stays the same). You’re left with the same amount of total coffee, but there’s now a whole lot more surface area from the inside of that particle that the water immediately has access to. ![]() So, say you have one coffee particle and you cut it in half. It has to start from the outside of that coffee particle and wash away those soluble coffee solids first. When water is trying to get those flavor particles out of an individual coffee ground and into your cup, it can’t just magically teleport to the center of the ground. Grind size’s impact has to do with physical processes taking place on a fairly small scale during brewing. ![]() Usually, instead of “big” and “small” we use the words “coarse” and “fine” to describe the size of grind particles. Grind size is important mostly because it’s one of the main variables that determines how fast your water will dissolve those particles that turn your water brown and make coffee taste like coffee. To start at square one (or, more aptly, irregularly and inconsistently sized particle one): grind size refers to how big or small the individual coffee grounds are. Today, we're going over one of the most important and easy-to-adjust brewing method variable: the grind. One of our goals at Trade is to empower home brewers to work on your own brewing recipes and have more fun discovering coffee that tastes good to you.
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