Ground coffee: Do you know the ideal type of grinding?

Many coffee lovers consume ground coffee. The fact is that knowing how to appreciate this drink does not mean that we have to have a mill at home.

This allows them to enjoy a good coffee without having to install a mill.

We recommend that any professional who works with coffee has a mill. Grinding the coffee at the moment improves the conservation of the raw material and avoids that it oxidizes prematurely.

But this doesn't mean that you can't serve an excellent coffee from a previously ground product. There are just a few things you need to consider: on the one hand, you need to order more frequently. On the other hand, you have to be aware that once opened, the ground coffee will last much less.

In fact, we offer all our pure origins in this format.

But even so, even if the coffee is perfectly preserved and consumed quickly, if the grinding is not correct the result in cup will be disastrous.

Ground coffee: not all good

That's right, if you're going to buy your coffee previously ground, you have to know is that not anyone is worth. The right grind will depend on your coffee maker.

This is despite the fact that the supermarket shelves are trying to make us believe that they are not.

Ground coffee" is not in itself a coffee format... there are many of them. You should choose the one that best suits your way of preparing coffee.

Types of grinding

We could classify coffee by as many grindings as we like. But to be really functional we usually segment the grinding in 3 basic types: fine, medium and coarse.

How do we know when the grinding of a coffee should be considered fine, medium or coarse?

In reality, there is no standardized scale that determines the exact type of grinding. But there is a simple and practical method that can help you. With it you will be able to check if the milling obtained is the one you need.

Take some ground coffee by pinching with your index finger and thumb and rub them gently.

Coarse: when the grind is coarse the coffee does not stay in the fingers and these continue clean once the test is done.
Medium: Coffee with coarse grind slightly stains the fingertips, but much of the coffee does not stick to the fingertips.
Fine: if the coffee sticks easily to the fingertips and stains we are dealing with a coffee with fine grinding.

How to choose your perfect coffee grinder

The truth is that the type of grinding that best suits you will always depend on the way in which you prepare your coffee.

If, indeed, you have to decide how you are going to use the coffee that you buy before buying it.

Sometimes they ask us how they can do if they are going to use that coffee, sometimes in a type of machine (for example espresso) and other times in other (for example Italian). Well, the answer is simple: buy different types of coffees with different types of grindings... or ask them to divide your coffee into packages with the appropriate grindings.

In this way we could go a little further and define the following five machine-grinding associations:

Extra-fine grinding: it is a talc type grinding. It is normally used for Turkish coffees, in which a granulate so fine that it almost dissolves is necessary.
Fine grind: this is the ideal grind for preparing espresso coffee. The grind must be fine in order for the water to come into contact with as much of the coffee as possible so that the extraction can be carried out quickly.
Medium grind: It is an intermediate grind that facilitates the contact with the coffee, but without the need to shorten the extraction time. It is suitable if we are going to use filter coffee machines such as Chemex.
Medium-thick grinding: Some types of extraction such as the Cona coffee maker (or vacuum coffee maker) or the coffee we use in a percolator, find their ideal grinding point halfway between the coarsest granulate and the medium grinding.
Coarse grinding: this is the necessary grinding for coffees prepared in coffee machines such as the French press or the Italian coffee machine. To put a finer ground coffee in this type of preparations is going to make us find flocks in our coffee. This happens because the filter maya is not able to retain such fine particles and these pass into the drink.

Conclusion

Be wary of any coffee sold to you with the text "ground" on the package. Always ask yourself "ground for which coffee maker?

Because of course, in the end what can happen is that the coffee has a very fine grind and you end up swallowing solid particles.

Or maybe you find that your coffee is too thick and you can't get a coffee that isn't under-extracted.