MILAN – Filippo Mazzoni, Coffee Technology Specialist Gruppo Cimbali Spa, explains the importance of grinding in the coffee field. He indicates that proper grinding enables to achieve an ideal extraction in an extract from the book CoffeExperts, the encyclopedia book focused on coffee we talked about here. Soon in these pages, there will be other insights from the various coffee expert authors who contributed to the writing of CoffeExperts.
Coffee grinding: a crucial operation explained by Filippo Mazzoni
MILAN – “Grinding is a crucial operation for two reasons. It increases the coffee-water contact surface which facilitates the migration of solids to the water, thus maximising the extraction. The cake of suitably ground coffee resists the flow of the water, thus generating the well-known 9 bar of pressure on the coffee cake. It is this pressure that generates the crema, an essential feature of the espresso.
Clearly, by resisting the water flow, the coffee cake somehow determines the contact time, i.e. the extraction time. The extraction time is one of the basic parameters and defines the degree of extraction of the coffee.
Therefore, proper grinding enables us to achieve an ideal extraction. In the opposite case, inadequate grinding, whether a little too coarse or too fine, would inevitably lead to under-extraction or over-extraction.”
