The Four Grinds We Offer (and What Each One Is For)

You can buy the same coffee four ways. The coffee does not change. What changes is what we are asking it to do when it hits your water.

Grind is the single biggest lever in a cup of coffee — bigger than the ratio, bigger than the water temperature, bigger than the brewer you spent money on. A coffee ground for a French press and a coffee ground for espresso are the same green coffee behaving like two different products.

So we sell four grinds. Here is what each one is actually for, which of our coffees come in which, and what to do if you are not sure.

Why we grind before it ships

If you own a grinder, buy whole bean. That is the short version and it is the right answer for most people. Coffee goes stale in stages, and ground coffee goes stale faster than whole bean because grinding exposes a lot more surface area to the air. The gap is small over a week and it is not small over a month.

But most people do not own a grinder, and buying a grinder is a bigger decision than buying a bag of coffee. So we grind to order, right before the bag is sealed, at the grind that matches the brewer you are going to use. You open the bag on Thursday, you brew on Thursday, and the cup is the cup you bought.

We wrote more about how grind changes what comes out of the coffee in what grind size changes about coffee, and about the physics in how grind distribution changes extraction. This post is about which one to pick.

Whole bean

Whole bean is the coffee exactly as it came out of the roaster. Nothing has been touched.

Buy it if you have a grinder, full stop. It is the freshest option and it gives you the ability to change the grind between brewers, which matters more than people expect when you own two things — a pour-over on Sunday and an espresso maker on Monday.

If you do not have a grinder, whole bean is still a defensible choice if you are the kind of person who plans to buy one. If you are not, a pre-ground bag will make you happier this week and a week from now.

We sell coffee in five sizes — 12 oz, 1 lb, 2 lb, 5 lb, and 12 lb — and the grind never changes the price. A 12 oz bag is $24.99 whether you want it whole bean or ground for espresso. How many cups that works out to is its own post.

Coarse

Coarse is the grind for a French press and for cold brew.

The reason is contact time and clogging. A French press sits on a metal mesh, so anything fine falls through into the cup and you drink silt. Cold brew sits for twelve hours, so anything fine turns the concentrate into a sludge you have to strain twice. In both cases the brew wants a grind with room around it — big particles, water moving through them slowly, and nothing escaping the filter.

Coarse is also the grind that survives an accidental over-extraction better than you would think, because the water has less surface to work with. If your cup tastes harsh, coarse gives you somewhere to go before you have to change anything else.

Eight of our nine coffees come in coarse.

Standard

Standard is the middle grind, and it is the one that goes in a drip machine or a pour-over cone.

Pour-over is the method we reach for most often, because the water moves through a paper filter and the bed of coffee behaves predictably. Standard is the right call for a V60, a Chemex, a Kalita Wave, and for a drip machine.

It is also the grind our mushroom coffee comes in, and the only grind it comes in. Our mushroom coffee is 8 oz at $24.99, ground standard, because the mushrooms extract inconsistently under espresso pressure and we would rather you brewed it in a drip machine or a press.

One catalog note worth knowing: our Latin American Blend does not come in coarse. It comes in standard, espresso, and whole bean. The blend's job is drip, pour-over, espresso, and batch brew, and if you want it in a French press, the coarse bags of our single origins are the right call. We explain the blend itself here.

Espresso

Espresso is the fine grind, and it is for espresso machines and moka pots.

It is finer than standard because the pressure and the short contact time do the work that surface area would otherwise do. Water gets pushed through the puck in about thirty seconds, so the grind has to be fine enough to resist the water long enough for the sugars to come out.

A double shot is about 18 grams in the basket, which comes out as roughly 36 to 44 grams of liquid in the cup. Our own numbers are in how much coffee is one cup, actually.

If you want the short version of moka pot coffee instead of a machine, how to brew espresso in a moka pot is the walkthrough, and the grind you want is the same fine one.

The one coffee we will tell you not to put in an espresso machine

Our Tanzania.

It is our only medium-light roast, it is fully washed and dried on raised beds in the Mbeya region, and it is the brightest and most aromatic coffee we carry — pear, floral, jasmine, strawberry. Under pressure that brightness turns harsh. The high altitude and the light roast do not have enough time to soften under the shot.

So for Tanzania, buy it for pour-over, where the strawberry and jasmine come forward, or for a French press, where the body rounds out. We wrote about why it is the only medium-light roast we carry, and how to brew it has the recipe.

Every coffee in the catalog is a good coffee. Not every coffee is a good espresso. That distinction is worth five dollars, and knowing which side of it a coffee falls on is most of what knowing coffee is about.

Which grind should you order

If you read your brewer on the box and you have never heard any of these words, here is the whole decision.

• Espresso machine or moka pot: espresso.
• Pour-over cone or drip machine: standard.
• French press or cold brew: coarse.
• No brewer, or you use more than one: whole bean and a grinder, or standard and accept that you are brewing one way.

If you already own coffee and it tastes wrong, the grind is often the reason, and it is the first thing to check. We have a longer version in how to choose the right grind size for your brew method, and the short version is this: sour and thin means grind finer, bitter and dry means grind coarser, and change one thing at a time.

One last practical note

If you buy whole bean and your grind clumps, your beans are wet. That is usually the beans, not the grinder, and it usually costs you one bag while you figure it out.

If you buy one of our pre-ground bags and you want to store it, keep it sealed and out of the light. We have written about how to store ground coffee for maximum freshness, and about whole bean versus ground coffee in more depth.

Pick the grind that matches your brewer, brew it, and change one thing at a time from there.

Brew slow. Sip slow.

— Seraphina