

Most espresso grinders will allow you to adjust this size setting until you find a grind that works best for your bean variety and preferences. Fine grind is smooth to touch but it feels like salt or sugar when you rub it with your fingers. Fine grind creates a large surface area that allows coffee flavors to impart into the hot water. You can grind any dark roasted coffee beans to a fine grind size to make espresso. In this case, the water is in contact with too much ground coffee in too short a time period. On the other hand, if the grind is too fine, you could have an “over-extraction”, which leads to an overwhelming and bitter espresso flavor. This is referred to as “under extraction” since the water isn’t able to contact enough of the coffee to pull out a strong flavor. You’ll end up with a sour and acidic cup of espresso. If the grind is too coarse, you usually won’t get enough flavor from the coffee.

The size of the grind will determine how much flavor the water is able to pull out. Hot water flows through the grinds to extract the coffee flavor. The size of the coffee grind will determine how much espresso is actually extracted during the brewing process. Finely ground coffee that clumps together on your finger is perfect for espresso. If the coffee fails to clump together, it’s too coarse, and if it leaves an outline on your fingerprint, it’s too fine. Take a small pinch of coffee grounds between your thumb and finger, then separate your fingers.
Espresso grind how to#
When the water flows through the fine coffee grounds, it’s able to extract maximum flavor in a little amount of time.īut, how to know if the espresso grind is good? The espresso brewing process is very short. In texture, it is a bit finer than the table salt. To make an espresso use a fine coffee grind from dark roasted coffee beans. How Do You Know if Espresso Grind is Good? If things are dominatingly sour you need to adjust your grinder settings and grind a little bit finer, if you find that the taste of your espresso is bitter or harsh, or if your getting a lot of channeling then you may grind your beans a little bit coarser. So, at first use a fine-grind coffee size to get close to a good-tasting espresso. You want to use just a little bit of water to have a strong, concentrated, thick, delicious, gooey, and sweet espresso at the end of it. Which can be again – quite frustrating!īut without grinding finely enough you cant do the extraction work that you need to to get all the good flavor out using only a little bit of water as that’s the nature of espresso. This will increase the contact time between the water and coffee, so when you make this one change to the surface area, and it impacts the flow rate and contact time as well. So far, that’s very good news, more surface area is very useful for extracting more coffee flavor.īut when you change the surface area you also change the way the coffee grounds interconnect with each other and when you tamp them down in your puck of coffee the finer the pieces are the better they fit together and harder it is for the water to flow through them. If you think about cutting an apple into big pieces it’s not much surface area, but if you dice it down to tiny pieces you will expose a lot more of the inside of the apple and the same is true with the coffee bean. So let’s say you make a grind setting change, going a little bit finer on your grinder in doing so you will expose a lot more surface area of the ground coffee. The Perfect Grind Size For EspressoĮspresso is a lot of fun but it’s also immensely frustrating especially when you are just starting out and I would say this variable is by far the most frustrating of all of them to work with. In this article, we will give you some great tips on how to get the right grind size for your espresso. Getting the perfect grind size for espresso is the most complex variable in the espresso-making process.
