The Grind: Why One Small Adjustment Changes Your Entire Cup

There's a question we get almost every week at Yugen: 'I bought the same beans I had here, but it tastes nothing like what you made me.' Nine times out of ten, the answer is grind size. Not the water, not the brewer, not some secret barista magic. Just the grind.

Let us explain why, because once you understand this, you'll never look at your coffee the same way again.

Coffee is basically a sponge

When hot water meets ground coffee, it's doing one job: dissolving soluble compounds out of the particles and into your cup. Flavour, sweetness, acidity, bitterness — they're all locked inside the grounds, and water is the key.

Here's the thing: not all of those compounds dissolve at the same speed. The bright, fruity, acidic notes come out first. Sweetness follows. Bitterness and heavier, woody flavours come last. So the question becomes — how long do you want water to spend with the coffee?

That's where grind size becomes everything.

Finer grind = more surface area = faster extraction

When you grind finer, you're breaking coffee into smaller particles, which means more surface area exposed to water. Water moves through more slowly, and it dissolves compounds more rapidly. Go too fine and you over-extract — pulling out all those bitter, harsh compounds you didn't want. The cup tastes dry, hollow, almost chalky.

Grind too coarse and the opposite happens. Water rushes through, barely touching the grounds. You get a under-extracted cup — sour, thin, a bit flat. All that brightness with none of the sweetness to balance it.

The perfect grind sits right in between, and it's different for every brewing method.

Why we grind differently for V60, Chemex, and AeroPress

This is where it gets genuinely interesting. Our Chemex uses a thick paper filter and has a slower, more restricted flow. So we grind slightly coarser — water spends more time in contact anyway, so we don't need the extra surface area. The result is a clean, structured cup that lets a bean like our Colombian single-origin show off its caramel and stone fruit notes with real clarity.

The V60 brews faster and has more control in your hands — the pour itself is part of the recipe. We grind a touch finer here, which gives us more to work with when we're coaxing out the florals in our Ethiopian bean. That coffee already wants to bloom and open up; the grind just gives it the right amount of time to do so.

AeroPress is the wildcard. Because we control pressure and steep time directly, we can experiment with finer grinds and shorter brews, or coarser grinds with longer contact. It's the most forgiving and the most fun.

Espresso sits at the extreme fine end — almost a powder — because water passes through in around 25–30 seconds under nine bars of pressure. A single notch too coarse and the shot gushes and tastes sour. Too fine and it chokes and turns bitter. It's precise in a way that never stops being humbling.

What this means for you at home

If your coffee at home tastes sour, go finer. If it tastes bitter or flat, go coarser. That's genuinely it — your grinder is doing more work than your brewer.

And if you want to taste the difference side by side? Come in and ask us. We love brewing the same bean two ways just to show you what's actually happening in the cup.