Grind your Brazilian coffee for pour-over at medium to medium-coarse, roughly the feel of coarse sea salt, or about 700 to 900 microns. That is slightly coarser than you would grind dense, high-grown washed coffees, and it exists for a reason you can taste in the cup.
Brazilian beans are grown at lower altitudes, mainly between 800 and 1,350 meters, according to green coffee importer Cafe Imports. Lower altitude produces a softer, more porous bean, and softer beans shatter more in a grinder, creating more fines, the tiny dust particles that can clog a filter and over-extract your brew.
Brewing research from Jonathan Gagné and Scott Rao, published in The Physics of Filter Coffee (2020), explains that lower-density natural-process beans produce a wider spread of particle sizes with more fines. To keep water flowing at the right speed, you shift the average grind slightly coarser and pour gently.
What That Grind Looks Like In Your Grinder
Use the table below to set a starting grind on the most common hand and electric grinders. These are baselines, so expect to fine-tune one or two steps either way after your first brew.
| Grinder | Starting Setting for Brazilian Pour-Over |
|---|---|
| Comandante C40 MK3/MK4 | 24 to 28 clicks |
| Timemore Chestnut C2/C3 | 17 to 20 clicks |
| 1Zpresso JX-Pro | 3.2 to 3.8 rotations |
| Baratza Encore | 16 to 20 |
| Fellow Ode Gen 2 | 5.0 to 6.2 (stock burrs) |
If you have no numbered dial, aim for a texture between coarse sea salt and rough kosher salt. That is coarser than espresso and finer than French press.
A Comandante C40 hand grinder or a Baratza Encore both make this easy, because their steps are small enough to dial in without overshooting.
Why Softer Brazilian Beans Change The Grind
Most Brazilian specialty coffee is natural or pulped natural (honey) processed, as Cafe Imports notes for the main growing regions like Cerrado Mineiro, Sul de Minas, and Mogiana. Those processes leave more soluble fruit sugars in the bean, so water dissolves things faster than it would in a dense washed coffee.
A standard medium-fine grind can therefore push a natural Brazilian past its sweet spot, and the result is harsh bitterness and astringency. Grinding a touch coarser slows the extraction and protects the chocolate, nut, and caramel notes these coffees are known for.
This is the key insight: the problem is not that Brazilian coffee needs a special grind because of its country name. It needs a small adjustment because of its softness, its processing, and its solubility, and those trace back to how it was grown and dried.
A Starting Recipe For Brazilian Pour-Over
Dose 15 grams of coffee to 240 grams of water, a 1:16 ratio, and keep the overall ratio between 1:15 and 1:16.5.
Use water between 88°C and 92°C (190°F to 198°F). The Specialty Coffee Association’s brewing guidance notes that operating at the lower end of the brewing range helps highly soluble coffees avoid pulling out bitter roast compounds.
Bloom with three times the coffee weight, so 45 grams of water for a 15 gram dose, and let it sit for 40 to 45 seconds. Then finish with two or three gentle, low-agitation center-to-edge pours, and target a total drawdown between 2:30 and 3:15 minutes.
A gooseneck kettle with temperature control plus a 0.1 gram coffee scale make those numbers repeatable from brew to brew.
How To Dial In, Step By Step
Taste is your dial, so brew, taste, and adjust one variable at a time. Grind is always the first variable to change, before you touch dose or temperature.
| If Your Cup Tastes… | Likely Cause | The Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Sour, thin, hollow, grassy | Under-extraction, water ran too fast | Grind a bit finer; try water up around 93°C |
| Bitter, astringent, dry, muted acidity | Over-extraction, excess fines choking the bed | Grind 1 to 2 clicks coarser; drop water to about 90°C |
| Drawdown stalls past 3:45 | Fines migrated to the filter bottom | Grind coarser, pour more gently, or try a faster-flowing paper like a Cafec Abaca filter |
Use the table above to match your symptom to the single change that usually fixes it. Bitter flavors in a soft natural coffee can indicate you went too fine, not that the coffee is bad.
Avoid heavy swirling when you stir, because fines sink into the filter paper and stall the drawdown. A gentle center-to-edge pour keeps the bed even without driving fines downward.
Does Your Brewer Change The Answer?
Yes, by a small amount. A flat-bottom dripper like the Kalita Wave usually behaves well at the middle of the range, while a fast-drawing cone like the Hario V60 may need one step finer to hit the same 2:30 to 3:15 total time.
A Hario V60 ceramic dripper is a fine choice for Brazilian beans, as long as you watch the drawdown clock rather than copying a setting from another brewer blindly.
Roast level matters too. A darker Brazilian roast is even more soluble, so lean toward the coarse end and the low end of the temperature range. A lighter roasted Brazilian can handle the finer end.
One small non-grind tip: soft natural Brazilian coffees taste best within a few weeks of roasting, so if your bag has been sitting around, freshness may be the real problem behind a flat cup. We cover that in detail in our Brazilian coffee freshness guide for pour-over.
How This Compares To Other Brewing Methods
Pour-over is the middle ground for Brazilian grinds. Espresso needs a much finer grind and full pressure, and our espresso grind setup for Brazilian beans covers that separately.
If you own an automatic drip machine instead, the same softness and fines logic applies, and the drip grind settings for Brazilian coffee page maps those machines out. Cold brew goes much coarser still, but that is a different extraction world.
The Bottom Line
Start at medium to medium-coarse, roughly 24 to 28 clicks on a Comandante or setting 16 to 20 on a Baratza Encore, with 15 grams of coffee to 240 grams of water at 88°C to 92°C. Pull one brew, taste it, and move the grind one small step at a time: finer if it is sour and thin, coarser if it is bitter and slow.
Brazil rewards this gentle dialing-in better than almost any origin, because the sweetness was already in the bag. Your job is just to keep the fines out of the way long enough for the water to find it.