The One Step You Shouldn’t Overlook When You Brew Coffee

It doesn’t matter how good your gear is. If you don’t have quality beans, you won’t brew quality coffee. And it’s not enough to just buy the most expensive beans you can find, store them in a vacuum-sealed canister and freshly grind them before you toss them in a coffee filter. To yield a consistent cup of coffee, you should also pass them through a tool you’ll find in the workflows of many a coffee snob: a sieve.

What is a coffee sieve?

No grinder is perfect. Even with a top-of-the-line grinder, grounds that come from it will never be 100 percent uniform. This leads to fines (the dusty residue in your grounds) and boulders (those big chunk bits in your grounds).

Coffee sieves are devices that sift ground coffee to separate the grounds that are either too small or too large, the fines or the boulders, respectively. If you’ve ever sifted flour before, a coffee sieve is sort of like that.

Fellow

Fellow Shimmy Coffee Sieve

Fellow makes a ton of nerdy coffee gear, and its Shimmy is one of its newest products. The sieve only works on eliminating the fines from the coffee, so thicker grounds may still end up in your coffee bed. The Shimmy is equipped with a 200 micron filter, and the user shakes their grounds to eliminate grounds that are smaller than 200 microns, which is what you don’t want no matter how you’re brewing your coffee.

• $45 at Fellow
  $60 (25% off)

Amazon

Kruve Sifter Plus

The Kruve Sifter has 15 grind sieves, and you put two into the sifter — one to remove the fines and one to remove the boulders. The double filter makes the Kruve Sifter produce some of the most uniform grounds you’ll ever find. This specific model also includes 10 sieves to organize beans by their size for bean grading.

• $180 at Kruve
  $215 (16% off)

How do sieves affect taste?

Consistency comes with removing outliers — namely, those fines and boulders. Fines lead to over-extraction and muddier flavors. Boulders, meanwhile, lead to under-extraction.

Photo by Henry Phillips for Gear Patrol

There is no “one size fits all” approach to grinding coffee. In other words, it’s impossible to recommend the perfect size grounds. That’s because myriad variables, including a bean’s roast level and the chosen brew method, mean that every coffee should be dialed in, accordingly.

What is important is being consistent once you settle on the perfect size for that bean. Having varying sized coffee grounds can mar the potential of that final cup of joe. A sieve can help you avoid that.

Are sieves really that important?

A coffee sieve won’t save you if you’re using old beans, and it certainly won’t help if you haven’t nailed down every other aspect in your brewing. But it can still help …

Blade grinders produce notoriously bad ground coffee compared to burrs. So if you use one, a sieve can drastically improve the consistency.

At the end of the day, casual coffee drinkers probably won’t taste the difference between brewed with grounds that were passed through a sieve vs those that weren’t.

However, if you’ve already invested all that money into your brewing essentials, a coffee sieve is a relatively affordable addition that can help you dial in a new bag of beans and brew a consistent cup of coffee.

Using one, you might finally nail the tasting notes you read on the bag. “Brown sugar,” anyone?

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