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Coffee grind size by brew method: a chart built from maker numbers

By Chris Y. · Founder & editor Updated September 12, 2026

A burr coffee grinder beside a pile of freshly ground coffee on a kitchen counter — Photo: The Morning Pour

Every grind chart on the internet gives you micron ranges — 200 for espresso, 800 for French press, and so on. Almost none of them says where those numbers came from, and when you go looking, the manufacturers do not publish them. Hario, Chemex and AeroPress describe grind in words; Technivorm, Bialetti and ESPRO publish no grind guidance at all. Not one of the brewer makers checked for this page publishes a particle size in microns for its own product.

What does exist is better, and almost nobody quotes it: Baratza publishes starting grind settings by brew method, as actual click numbers, for up to eleven of its grinders at a time. On an Encore — the most common home burr grinder in the US — the published starting points are 12 for an AeroPress, 23 for a Hario V60 and 25 for a Chemex. Three brew methods inside thirteen clicks of a forty-click grinder. That spacing is the real lesson of any grind chart.

Below is what each brewer's own manufacturer says, then the grinder settings that have actually been published, then how to move from a starting point to a good cup. Every figure is linked to the page it came from.

Questions people ask

What grind size is 800 microns?

A figure like that appears on hundreds of charts and on no manufacturer's page. None of the brewer makers checked for this page — AeroPress, Hario, Chemex, Bialetti, ESPRO or Technivorm — publishes a micron figure for its own product, so the honest answer is that nobody official has said.

What setting should I use on a Baratza Encore?

Baratza publishes 12 for an AeroPress, 23 for a Hario V60 and 25 for a Chemex, with the caveat that those were brewed with a lighter roast and lean slightly coarse. For a dark roast, start a click or two coarser than the published number.

How different are V60 and Chemex grinds?

Two clicks on a Baratza Encore, according to Baratza's own brew guides — 23 and 25 out of 40. Much less than most charts suggest. The Chemex's thicker filter is doing more of the work than the grind is.

Why does my coffee taste different with the same grind setting?

Roast level, filter paper, pouring style and kettle all move the result, and Baratza says so directly in its own V60 guide. Roast is the biggest one: darker beans are more brittle and produce more fines at the same setting, which extracts faster.

Do I need a scale to use a grind chart?

Yes, practically. A grind setting is only meaningful at a fixed coffee-to-water ratio — change the dose and the same grind gives a different cup. A scale that reads to 0.1 g and starts its own timer is the cheapest upgrade in home coffee; our scale guide ranks them on the minimum weight each one actually notices.

Part 1: what the brewer makers say, in their own words

These are the manufacturers' own descriptions for their own brewers. Where a maker publishes no grind guidance at all, the table says so — it is not an oversight in the research.

Brewer	Grind, in the maker's words	Dose the maker publishes
AeroPress Original	Medium-fine	10 oz capacity, 1–2 cups
Hario V60	Medium fine	30 g coffee to 500 mL water
Chemex	Medium coarse	1 rounded tablespoon per 5 oz cup
Technivorm Moccamaster (drip)	Not published	55 g per liter, or 2 tbsp per 6 oz
ESPRO French press	Not published	32 oz max, 24 oz minimum brew
Bialetti Moka Express	Not published on the product page	3 cup = 4.4 oz, 6 cup = 9.1 oz

Three descriptions for six brewers, and all three are variations on "medium". That is the whole vocabulary the industry has agreed on, which is why a chart made of words tells you almost nothing you can act on.

Part 2: the numbers that do exist

Baratza publishes a starting grind setting for each of its grinders on each of its brew guides. Three brew methods have guides at the time of writing, and the settings below are quoted from them. This is the closest thing to a real cross-method grind chart that any manufacturer in the category publishes.

Grinder	AeroPress	Hario V60	Chemex
Encore	12	23	25
Encore ESP	22	25	30
Encore ESP Pro	44	50	52
Virtuoso+	12	23	25
Vario+	4M	9M	9M
Vario W+	3M	8M	7M
Forté AP	4M	9M	8M
Forté BG	3M	8M	7M

Three things are worth pulling out of that table.

The pour-over range is narrow. On an Encore, V60 and Chemex are two clicks apart. People expect a Chemex to want a dramatically coarser grind than a V60; the manufacturer says two clicks out of forty.
AeroPress is a long way finer. Eleven clicks below the V60 on the same grinder — the biggest published gap of the three, and the reason an AeroPress brewed at pour-over grind tastes thin.
The numbers are not portable between grinders. An Encore ESP Pro's Chemex setting is 52 and an Encore's is 25. They are different scales measuring the same thing, which is exactly why a micron chart would be more useful than a click chart, and exactly why nobody publishes one.

Baratza also publishes the recipes alongside those settings. For the AeroPress: 18 g of coffee, 270 g of water at 200°F, about two minutes total. For the Chemex: 50 g of coffee, 800 g of water at 205°F, about five minutes. Both are starting points rather than rules.

Part 3: why the same setting gives two different results

Baratza's own caveat on the V60 guide is the most honest sentence in any of these documents: the published settings lean slightly coarser and were brewed with a lighter roast, and the final setting may change depending on the coffee, the roast level, the filter paper, the pouring style and the kettle.

That is five variables sitting between a published number and your cup, and the roast level is the largest of them. A dark roast is more brittle, so the same grinder setting produces more fines from a dark bean than from a light one, which extracts faster and tastes harsher. If you switch from a light roast to a dark one and nothing else, expect to go coarser.

The second-largest variable is the grinder itself. A blade mill has no setting at all — it produces a distribution of sizes determined entirely by how long you hold the button, which is why none of these charts can help you with one. We wrote about that in detail in burr vs blade.

Part 4: how to use a starting point

Take the published setting for your grinder and brew method, brew it once, and then change one thing. The measurement to use at home is brew time, because it needs no equipment beyond the scale and timer you already have, and because it moves in a predictable direction: finer grind means slower flow means longer brew.

Weigh the coffee and the water. Without this, nothing else you change is measurable. Most brew problems are ratio problems wearing a grind costume.
Time the brew from the first pour. Chemex's own recipe runs about five minutes, the AeroPress about two. If yours is far off, the grind is the first suspect.
Move two clicks, not ten. On an Encore, two clicks is the entire published distance between a V60 and a Chemex. Large jumps overshoot and you lose the thread.
Change one variable per brew. Grind, then dose, then temperature. Changing two at once means you learn nothing from either.

The longer version of that procedure, with the SCA's own numbers, is in how to dial in a grinder for pour-over.

Part 5: the rest of the brew methods

For the methods with no published grinder setting, the tools themselves tell you which direction to go:

French press. A metal screen with holes big enough to pass oils will also pass fines, so coarser is the fix for silt in the bottom of the cup. Espro's double micro-filter exists precisely because a single screen cannot be made fine enough without choking the plunge.
Cold brew. Coarser again, because the grounds sit in water for 8 to 24 hours. Fine grounds slip through a mesh basket and keep extracting for the whole steep.
Moka pot. Finer than drip, coarser than espresso, and never tamped — fill the funnel level and knock it flat. Too fine and the pressure has nowhere to go but the safety valve.
Drip machine. Medium, and the ratio matters more. Technivorm publishes 55 g of coffee per liter of water, or two tablespoons per 6 oz, and that figure will fix more bad drip coffee than any grind adjustment.
Espresso. Far finer than everything above, and the reason Baratza sells a separate Encore ESP — the standard Encore's steps are too wide near the espresso end to dial a shot. We compared the two directly in Encore vs Encore ESP.

What to take away

There is no authoritative micron chart because no manufacturer publishes microns. What exists is a small set of maker-published starting points, a handful of words, and a method for moving from one to the other. Start at the number your grinder's maker publishes for your brewer, weigh everything, change one thing at a time, and treat every chart you see online — including the tables above — as a place to begin rather than a specification.