Finding Your Coffee Grinder's Sweet Spot

In this episode, I dive deep into one of the most critical yet misunderstood aspects of brewing great coffee: finding your grinder's sweet spot. I share my recent experiences with multiple grinders, including the Timemore Chestnut Clarity King and the Timemore CP6, and reveal why most grinder settings are essentially useless. Through weeks of testing and countless cups of coffee, I discovered that every grinder—regardless of price or reputation—has a narrow range where it truly performs at its best. I break down why manufacturers mislead us with excessive click counts and settings that we'll never actually use, and explain why the majority of those 120+ clicks on your grinder are just wasting the mechanism.

You'll learn how to identify and work within your grinder's optimal range, why you should ignore online recommendations and trust your own palate instead, and how understanding this concept will transform your daily coffee routine. I explain the practical reality that most grinders only have about 16-20 usable clicks in their sweet spot range, and once you find that zone, you can finally stop fighting your equipment and start making consistently excellent coffee. This episode will change how you approach dialing in your grinder and help you get the most out of the gear you already own.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:31 My Current Grinder Setup
• 3:04 The Useless Settings Problem
• 5:03 Discovering the Sweet Spot Range
• 7:01 The Versatility Myth
• 9:02 How to Find Your Sweet Spot
• 11:02 Stop Being Dogmatic About Settings
• 12:30 The Path to Better Coffee

Transcript

[00:00:00] Grinders. I think grinders are always gonna be something we talk about. They are—it's just because they're so important. They're so critical in all the things that we do.

[00:00:18] And it's cool to play with a new brewer from time to time, figure it out. It's always cool to just play around, geek out with that coffee of the week or coffee for a couple of days.

[00:00:33] But as we talk about coffee gear, one of the things that we talk about here and there is grinders. And there's a video that I did earlier about how most grinders are bullshit, right? Which is still more or less the same.

[00:00:53] But we have to work within those restrictions, limits, drawbacks, if you want to look at it that way. And I have some grinders in front of me. These grinders are not immune to this whole thing too.

[00:01:13] Some of them I'm not going to really touch just because I have a good setting that I have dialed in right now. So that's more or less the situation. But I've been playing around with my new grinder. This is a hand grinder. This is the Clarity King, so to speak.

[00:01:34] And believe it or not, I have another grinder that I will be getting also. Just one more, right?

[00:01:42] And this is the Timemore CP6. This is a $200 hand grinder. And for the past couple of weeks, I actually haven't been using it. I've been grinding coffee because a lot of times they say that after a certain amount of coffee, the grinder really does start to come alive.

[00:02:07] So I ground some coffee for my wife. She had no clue. She doesn't care. And I use this grinder. I never really tasted the coffee. Probably just once towards the end of me doing all of this. And it was very promising what I tasted, I think.

[00:02:25] And I started using it the past couple of days. And I've noticed that all of these grinders, I can talk about all I want about all these grinders. They all have a sweet spot, every single one of them. No matter what you're looking at here and there, right?

[00:02:45] And it's kind of interesting now that I'm talking about it, I thought about a little bit yesterday: why do these grinding companies give you these bullshit readings, especially for like French press?

[00:03:03] I think most people don't even grind to a French press type of setting anyway. What I mean by that is that for instance, let's take this CP6. I already notice settings. I know I'm on four so I can play around with it, right?

[00:03:54] Okay, six and beyond are completely to me garbage usage. Can't really use the grinder anymore.

[00:04:06] Again, I don't go into this whole thing of using anything that's like a French press grind. Because percolation does need some type of time because it's so short with that particular grind size. So it's one of those things where like, what are we really doing here? I think we're wasting time. We're wasting time. We're wasting the mechanism of the coffee grinder, just so we can say we have 130 clicks.

[00:04:43] More than half of them are useless. We know that. Okay.

[00:05:02] But today what we're talking about is a medium roast that I roasted a couple weeks ago. It gives you a different type of look and appreciation of that coffee. A lot of times we try to match the grinder with the coffee maker.

[00:05:33] As we do that, then we start to realize that for the most part, especially if we're a pour over type of people, we tend to lean towards a particular grind size. And in this case, sweet spot.

[00:05:49] We're going to have to grind a decent amount to get some type of uniformity in the cup of coffee. And in this case, I think the sweet spot for this particular grinder is between five and probably three and a half.

[00:06:12] So that's about 16 clicks.

[00:06:35] I haven't tried the finest setting, but most of us, we don't really even go that fine. So you would think that you have a little bit more range out there when you're actually using the particular grinder, but you don't. You have to. So you have about 26 clicks at say four and a half. 26, three. About 16 to 20 clicks.

[00:07:00] That's what you're playing in. That's the room that you're playing in. And if we understand that, then we're in better shape.

[00:07:09] But it's kind of crazy how this was designed and everything. Every grinder for the most part is going to be the same. I don't care. If I like it, I like it. If I don't, I don't. I'll tell you the reason why.

[00:07:22] This one particular, same thing. This one goes up to 120, 130. I would say, oh, that's a lot. I should brew with it. I'm sure that this one probably gets there too.

[00:07:55] But, you know, it is what it is, right? The K6 right here. It's probably the most versatile grinder that we have up here.

[00:08:08] Because just the way that the clicks are, right, just the way that we see the clicks are. And I think I have it at a decent sweet spot. I think this one has a bigger—not less of a narrow sweet spot, but it's still there. All of them have it, right. Has it for espresso, has it for a pour over. I mean, pretty much every type of way that you're thinking of. But since this is a pour over type of monster right here, this is the P6.

[00:08:38] The range is even smaller. I guess what I'm saying here is that every single coffee maker or coffee grinder has a sweet spot. You got to know where it is. You got to find it. You got to figure it out. You got to taste plenty of coffees, right? And as you do that, if you really think about it, you'll start to get pissed because you're looking at this whole grinder. And you're like, what? What do you do about it?

[00:09:25] The first thing you do is find it. Brew some cups of coffee, test it out. Don't go on whatever everybody says online. Doesn't matter. They're not in your house, they're not with you. You're using a different coffee, even if you're using the exact same, it doesn't matter whatsoever. You're using the gear that you have.

[00:09:48] It is what it is, right? At the end of the day, you're just one with your coffee, you're trying to get one with your coffee. And as you test things out and figure them out, then that's where the magic really comes into play. Because now, once you figure out that actual sweet spot, you can teeter back and forth.

[00:10:12] You can dial it in depending on the water chemistry, depending on the temperature, depending on the device and all that, depending on whatever you're tasting in the cup. If you want more sweetness, balance, whatever, whatever it may be, it doesn't matter. But that's all you're doing. You're just playing around with those sweet spots.

[00:10:33] And as you do that, then you can start to really understand that particular coffee. Because it's kind of crazy when you think about it, when you're actually grinding and brewing a cup of coffee, is that we want to play around with the gears, we want to play around with the mechanisms of what it does, right? But at the end of the day, if majority of the things that we're trying to do don't make sense, then we need to stop doing the sweet spot.

[00:11:12] What I'm tasting and the differences and all that stuff because I'm getting really used to this whole clarity thing is that it's still the same way. And once I stopped beating myself up about not being able to use a full gamut of the grinder, I started to realize that I can kind of get to that promised land a lot faster.

[00:11:36] So once we know that sweet spot, understand that particular grinder and what it does to our coffees, then we're in a better place because now we can play that dance of like, okay, this is the range that I have to deal with. And I know this can make beautiful, decent cups of coffee. And once we're there, we're on the right path, right? We're on the path to where it's less about the gear. It's also about our thinking about all the things together. And now we could play that real good dance of like doing that two-step or whatever the hell that you may do when you actually come to dancing or making a cup of coffee, right? That makes sense.

[00:12:22] Sweet spot. It's absolutely everything. And once we realize that every single grinder has a sweet spot, every single coffee maker has the pros and cons and drawbacks and things that we have to do in order to get there.

[00:12:40] I think we're going to be making a lot cooler coffee, fabulous coffees, coffees that we may be able to get everything from the bag that it says that it is. And once we get there and understand coffee, our lives are going to be better.

[00:13:02] Even just making a simple cup of coffee. So find that sweet spot. Don't be so dogmatic and like, oh, this person online told you that this is the best way to go about this coffee maker and all that stuff. Even me, I just told you that this is a sweet spot for this particular grinder, which I believe is what I just said.

[00:13:26] And once you find it, stay there, understand that coffee, grow with it. And then enjoy coffee. So there's not so much of a rant, but this is more of a realization of you figuring out your coffee for what it is. And I think that's what I'm going to be doing by using the grinder.

[00:13:48] Knowing that it does have a sweet spot in this whole game that we're playing. So this is me signing off. I'll talk to you later. Bye.