Coffee ground too finely - how to deal with it? We bought a pack of coffee and had it ground on site, like many times before. The new sales girl must have misunderstood something and used a too-fine setting, finest (for espresso) instead of second finest (for my moka).

Now if I use it, I get many grounds in the top container and basically have to discard about a quarter of the brew each time as its just a grainy sludge at the bottom. Not the end of the world, but rather unpleasant.

Is there a kind of "hack" how I could still use the perfectly fine coffee?
In this case, my usual pre-coffee tiredness solved the problem:

I had planned to mix the espresso grind with my usual grind to minimize the total amount of grounds in the cup. The idea was 

1/2 too-fine grounds -&gt; 1/2 the amount of dregs in the coffee.


Being tired, I only remembered this when I had already filled the moka more than half-way with the too-fine grind, so I just topped it up with the other kind and coooked my coffee.  

But lo and behold: There were no coarse grounds in my pot - just some super-fine ones that weren't noticeable. I have since repeated the experiment a few times and can confirm that a top layer of "just right" grounds seems to be able to hold back most of the too-fine crumbs, especially those responsible for the "gritty" mouthfeel.



A top layer of 1/4th to 1/3rd of the correct grind proved sufficient as "filter" in my experiments. 

Also, there is no excess clogging of the moka, causing the valve to trigger or hot steam/water escaping round the gasket. The pot works just as usual. Of course one may not compact the coffee grounds in the brewing chamber, but that's standard procedure.