What is pre-ground coffee better than freshly ground coffee? How best to drink pre-ground coffee or freshly ground coffee?

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When you come into contact with boutique coffee, you must hear some golden rules, one of which is "always use freshly ground coffee powder, not pre-ground coffee powder", but is it true?

Let's see how the pre-ground powder is different from our own freshly ground coffee powder.

Reasons to avoid pre-ground powder

Why on earth are you grinding coffee? The aim is to increase the surface area of ripe coffee beans to facilitate the extraction of better flavor and aroma from the coffee. If we throw the whole coffee bean into the water, it will only produce a liquid that is as light as water and lacks aroma.

Grinding means that coffee powder is exposed to water to a greater extent, which enables the substances in coffee to be quickly dissolved in water, thus achieving the purpose of extraction. If you understand the basis of extraction, you will be able to know the advantages and disadvantages of grinding coffee powder in advance.

When the coffee is ground into powder, it will greatly increase the surface area, making the coffee more exposed to the air.

Coffee exposed to oxygen will exhaust, which means that coffee will release gases from the roasting process, and exhaust is very important to avoid insufficient extraction and bubbles of coffee. And grinding will speed up exhaust. The longer you grind the coffee and expose the powder to the air, the more flavor and aroma will be lost. When the coffee powder discharges all the gases, the brewed coffee will be very insipid.

Similarly, coffee powder is more vulnerable to moisture, when coffee beans are damp, it will affect the oil and flavor of coffee.

The surface area is also the reason why fine ground coffee loses its flavor faster than rough grinding.

Is freshly ground powder always good?

It's one thing to minimize the decay of flavor, but is it always good to freshly grind each cup of coffee? It's usually good, but it doesn't apply to every situation.

When we grind, we turn coffee beans into aromatic particles, but if we use a blade grinder or a poor quality grinder, we will get inconsistent grinding results, resulting in many coffee powders of different sizes and shapes.

Inconsistent coffee powder can lead to inconsistent extraction. Speaking of which, let's take a look at the extraction. The substances in coffee beans dissolve into the water at different rates, first sour, then sweet, and finally bitter. When you brew, you must want a cup of coffee with a balanced flavor.

Brewing and grinding the same coffee powder, you can expect the coffee powder to be extracted in the same state, which allows you to master the flavor and aroma more effectively.

When brewing coffee powder with inconsistent grinding, the extraction speed of some powders will be faster, leading to the problem of over-extraction. It is almost impossible to grasp the brewing results, let alone to recreate a good cup of coffee with these randomly sized powders.