Coffee Grind Size Chart

In short Grind size is the one brewing variable with no agreed units. Recipes say medium-fine, grinders count clicks, and laboratories measure microns — and none of them converts into another without a table. This page holds the table and does the one piece of arithmetic that is genuinely derivable: a burr grinder moves its burrs a fixed distance per click, so clicks and microns are linear. Divide the target size by your grinder's microns per click and you have the setting. Everything else here is convention. The micron ranges published for a brew method differ between sources by a hundred microns or more, and the microns per click of a given grinder is reported by owners and reviewers rather than by manufacturers — it varies between units of the same model, and every grinder has its own zero where the burrs first touch. Treat the microns as the target and the clicks as a starting point. THE RANGES OVERLAP, AND THAT IS THE USEFUL PART. Pour over, drip and AeroPress share a great deal of ground between about 500 and 800 microns, which is exactly why one setting can serve all three and why a single grinder can cover most of a filter-brewing life. French press, percolator and cold brew overlap in the same way at the coarse end. What has no overlap at all is espresso against French press: there is no setting that does both, which is the real reason a grinder good at one is usually poor at the other, and the reason espresso grinders cost what they do. What actually matters more than the number is consistency. A grinder producing a tight distribution at roughly the right size beats one producing a wide distribution centred perfectly, because fines extract almost instantly and boulders barely extract at all — a wide spread puts bitter and sour in the same cup and no amount of adjusting will fix it. Adjust by taste rather than by number: sour and thin means go finer, bitter and drying means go coarser, one change at a time.