Fellow Opus french press grind setting: the verified range

Fellow Opus french press grind setting: the verified range

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Set a Fellow Opus between 6 and 11 for french press, per Honest Coffee Guide's compiled Fellow Opus chart. Start in the middle of the window and adjust on taste: finer if the cup tastes thin or sour after a normal steep, coarser if the plunger fights you and the cup is muddy with sediment at the bottom.

Fellow Opus french press settings, and the bands either side

What Setting on the Fellow Opus
French press window 6 to 11 [1]
The pour over band on the same chart 3 to 8.5 [1]
The cold brew band on the same chart 7.25 to 11 [1]
Full grind range of the grinder 230 to 1160 microns [1]

The neighbouring bands are there for context. If your french press sits at one end of its window and still tastes wrong, the answer is usually a different variable, not another step in the same direction, because past that edge you are grinding for a different brew method.

Why french press wants this part of the dial

A French press is full immersion behind a metal filter, so the grounds sit in the water for the whole brew and nothing fine gets caught on the way out. Coarse is not a style choice here, it is what keeps silt out of the cup and the plunger moving.

Dial it in from the chart in 3 steps

1. Set the middle of the french press window above and brew once, changing nothing else. 2. Taste against the two failure directions: finer if the cup tastes thin or sour after a normal steep, coarser if the plunger fights you and the cup is muddy with sediment at the bottom. The full logic is in the French press ratio and the French press grind size chart. For the rest of the recipe, see French press tips. 3. Move in small steps and write each attempt down; the free dial-in logbook exists for exactly this. If the cup is gritty at the coarsest setting on the chart, the problem is burr alignment or fines, not the number on the dial.

How the Fellow Opus adjustment reads

The Fellow Opus uses an outer ring numbered 1 at the fine end to 11 at the coarse end, plus an inner ring for finer steps. Find your zero before trusting any chart: with the hopper empty, close the burrs until they just touch, call that zero, and count from there. A zero point calibrated differently from the chart's shifts every range by the difference, which is behind most complaints that a chart is wrong. The full Fellow Opus grind settings chart has every other brew method on one page.

French press on other popular grinders

Grinder French press setting
Turin DF54 67 to 90 [2]
Turin DF64V 59 to 90 [3]
Turin SD40 13 to 19 [4]
Fellow Ode Gen 1 2.2 to 9.2 [5]
Cuisinart CBM-18 5 to 11 [6]

Get the grinder

The Fellow Opus is on Amazon: check the current Fellow Opus price. We link the search rather than quote a price that will be stale by Friday.

Related reading

FAQ

What grind setting is french press on the Fellow Opus? 6 to 11 on the compiled Fellow Opus chart. Start in the middle of that window, brew once with everything else held steady, then move in small steps on taste.

My french press tastes wrong on the Fellow Opus. Which way do I move? If the cup tastes thin or sour after a normal steep, go finer. If the plunger fights you and the cup is muddy with sediment at the bottom, go coarser. Change one thing at a time and write down what you did.

Where do these Fellow Opus numbers come from? Honest Coffee Guide's compiled Fellow Opus chart, read from the published table and cited in the sources list on this page. It is a compiled chart built from that site's research and reader feedback, not a manufacturer document, so treat every range as a window rather than a verdict.

Sources

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