Coffee Grind Size Chart: Espresso, Moka Pot, AeroPress, Drip, and More

There's No Universal Grind Number

Mahlkönig, a commercial grinder manufacturer, measures grind in microns (a micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter; a human hair is roughly 70 microns across) and is upfront that the numbers below are, in their own words, "broadstroke ranges that the industry uses, though some brewing methods, roast profiles or professionals may go off-script." A micron figure only means something relative to a specific burr set: two grinders set to hit the same 300-micron target can still produce noticeably different-tasting coffee depending on how narrow or scattered the actual particle sizes are around that average, which is a separate property (consistency) from the average size itself (coarseness). The numbers in this guide are real, sourced reference points, not a setting you can dial into any grinder and expect to match exactly.

The Grind Spectrum, Finest to Coarsest

Micron ranges for espresso, drip, cold brew, and French press come from Mahlkönig, a commercial grinder manufacturer that publishes them for exactly this kind of comparison. Moka pot and Chemex don't have a manufacturer-published micron figure we could independently confirm; their placement above is based on documented relative descriptions rather than a hard number, and is noted honestly rather than invented.

AeroPress's own site orders five methods from coarsest to finest without giving microns: French Press, then Chemex, then drip coffee, then AeroPress itself ("medium-fine—finer than drip coffee but coarser than espresso"), then true espresso. That ranking lines up with the Mahlkönig numbers above everywhere the two overlap, which is one reason to trust both.

Where the Moka Pot Actually Sits

No manufacturer we found publishes a micron figure for moka pot specifically, so the "medium-fine" placement above is qualitative, not a hard number. It comes from Nadia Bachur, a barista interviewed by Perfect Daily Grind for our moka pot troubleshooting guide, who put it directly: finer than a pour-over, but noticeably coarser than an espresso grind, since anything that fine over-extracts a moka pot into a bitter cup. Bialetti's own documentation independently backs the same boundary from the other direction, warning that an actual espresso-machine grind can clog a moka pot outright rather than just over-extract it.

A Common Comparison, With a Caveat

You'll often see grind size compared to kitchen staples: espresso to fine table salt, drip to regular sand, French press to coarse sea salt. It's a genuinely useful mental picture, and worth using to sanity-check a grind by feel. We're not treating it as a documented standard here, though; different writers describe the same grind against different pantry items, and there's no single source of record pinning the comparison to an exact grind size the way the micron figures above are pinned to one.

If You're Troubleshooting a Specific Symptom

A shot running too fast, or tasting thin and watery, usually starts with grind, but it isn't the only variable — see our guide to why a shot runs too fast and to watery or thin espresso for the full diagnostic order, including dose-to-basket match and tamp. A grind that's uneven rather than simply wrong — clumped, or scattered across a wide range of particle sizes — is also a documented contributor to channeling, which is a separate problem from picking the wrong average grind size.