It is gritty when it should be smooth

The grind did not finish

Smoothness takes longer than people expect, and the batch passes through a gritty stage on the way. A run stopped early because it looked right is the most common cause, and it is the easiest to fix by timing the grind rather than judging it.

The equipment is worn

Grinding plates and burrs wear, and the product degrades gradually enough that nobody notices until a customer does. If grit has crept in across several batches rather than appearing in one, this is where to look.

The sugar never dissolved

There is almost no water in a nut butter, so granulated sugar has nothing to dissolve into and stays as crystals. It has to be ground in with the batch or added as something already fine. This catches makers moving a home recipe into production, because at small scale a long processor run hides it.

Salt has the same problem, at a smaller scale

Coarse salt in a nut butter is detectable as grit by anybody paying attention. Fine salt, added early enough to be ground with the batch, is the straightforward answer.

Decide whether smooth is the claim

Some buyers want texture, and a product described as stone ground or rustic is making a different promise. The failure is a jar that says smooth and is not, which is a labeling decision as much as a production one.

Time the grind rather than watching it

Once you know how long a given batch size takes on your equipment, run it to the clock and check the result rather than stopping when it looks done. Judgment at the end of a long run is the least reliable judgment of the day, and this is the failure that follows from it.

References