Grind Size and Water Temperature
One of the great pleasures of the coffee industry is being able to share coffee with people. More often than not, we find ourselves across from someone who has questions about brewing coffee. They’ll ask about the “right” kind of coffee, which piece of equipment gives the best flavor, or what is the perfect recipe?
Unfortunately, there is no one correct answer to any of these questions. Various factors affect the taste of a cup. What matters is knowing what you enjoy.
As soon as you have answered this question for yourself, it becomes simple. In this article, we will focus on how you can use water temperature and grind size to get you closer to that ray of sunshine.
In my personal experience, I have found that changing my grind size can completely change the balance of sweetness, acidity, and bitterness. Using a fine grind size allows us to get deeper into the coffee in a shorter time, allowing us to highlight bitter elements in the cup. It will also bring out a large body from the coffee, often giving one the sense that the coffee is thick in its texture.
If you enjoy body in a cup and lean more towards a robust flavor profile, we recommend using a fine grind size.
Using a coarse grind size will allow you to experiment with acidity and sweetness elements without overwhelming your pallet with an intense body. Using coarsely ground coffee can create a cup that is “tea-like” in body but allows the drinker to enjoy the subtle, complex flavors that you lose when brewing a more robust cup.
There is no specific grind size that will satisfy every coffee drinker all the time. To find what you enjoy most, you will have to experiment. You’ll have to be your flavor pioneer.
How hot is too hot?
When do you start to “burn” the coffee?
There are simple answers to these questions if we want to approach coffee from a scientific point of view.
However, today we want to find your happy place in a cup.
Water temperature has a profound effect on each cup you brew. Using boiling water allows you to penetrate deeper into the coffee particle quickly. Using cold water (about 80°C) will require you to extract longer to get a similar taste to boiling water.
We can extract coffee at ±90°C within 3:45min to highlight acidity without too much bitterness. The high temperature allows us to derive the flavor quickly without the coffee feeling flat or without body.
We can make a coffee sweet and bold by using cold water (80–86°C) and extracting the coffee for 4:45min. The colder temperature allows us to gain sweetness by deriving sugar without eliciting chlorogenic acid, which causes bitterness.
Many coffee professionals will tell you what they prefer. We take all their advice and experiment with it. Experimenting with their ideas allows us to taste something in our coffee that we would otherwise not have tasted. We have used their advice to create recipes to give us our happy place in every cup.
Experiment with your grind size, and the temperature of your water, then combine your recipes. Each of these will renew your appreciation of the complexity that coffee holds.
