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Just how much ground coffee do I need for x amount of coffee?
a. Whatever seems right to you.
b. It may change slightly from coffee to coffee and according to freshness and varietal.
c. What the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) has to say:
A cup is defined as 6 ounces of water before brewing. This will produce 5.33 ounces of brewed coffee. Or 125 ml & 110 ml for Euro style coffee makers
The SCAA defines 10 grams or .36 oz per cup as the proper measure for brewed coffee if using the American standards. If using Euro standards the measure is 7 grams per 125 ml.
To further confuse things I will add a few more measures:
3.75 oz per 1/2 gallon
55 grams per liter
2.25 gallons per 1 lb.
If you want to know more check the SCAA's web page at www.scaa.org.
d. The easy answer for most home coffee brewing is 2 Tbs. per 6 oz of water. A standard coffee measure should be 2 Tbs (1/8 cup) . Be warned some coffee measures deviate from the 2 Tbs. standard. Some are even as small as 1 Tbs.
It needs to be pointed out that some coffee pot manufacturers deviate from the 6 oz per cup standard. You should check the total water capacity of your pot before assuming that the pot will be measured in 6 oz cups.
If you have a pot that is overflowing the basket even after checking the cup size the chances are that you are either grinding too fine and clogging the filter or your coffee pot manufacturer has decided to make their filter basket a little smaller than normal. If the issue is a small basket your best bet it to figure out how much coffee the basket will hold and add water accordingly. For example, if your filter basket only holds 8 scoops (16 tbsp) without overflowing fall back to 48 oz (8 x 6 oz cups) of water.
Ultimately the amount of coffee to use is a personal taste but I highly recommend at least starting with the standard and adjusting from there and don’t forget as you move toward more water and less grounds you will extract more off flavors. Most people that say they don’t like strong coffee mean they don’t like bitter coffee and weak coffee actually has more bitter compounds. You can always add hot water to weaken coffee. Weak coffee if just weak coffee and can not be fixed.
Comments
How much coffee to use for a 6oz Cup of coffe?
In the original entry of this blog it says: " the SCAA defines 10gram or .36oz as the proper mearsure for brewed coffee". Since 1 TBLS = 1 ounce, that would meean .36 tablespoon per 6oz cup of coffee. Which means 2 Tablespoons of coffee would make six 6oz cups of coffee. So is the coffee manufacturers just trying to fool us into thinking that we really need 2 TBLS to make one 6 oz cup of coffee so they sell more coffee grounds? or what am I missing here? I actually use more like two TBLS per 5 cups.
coffees vary in density,
coffees vary in density, partally with grind, so a teaspoon of different coffees can vary. I prefer, 7 Grams per 6 oz cup, when brewing a 6 "cup" pot (42 GM of grind). grind fine for paper filter, a bit coarser for metal. also, the finer the grind, the stronger the coffee, as it will retain the water longer.
volume versus density
You are absolutely correct that the amount of coffee in a given volume of grounds varies with the coarseness or fineness of the grind. However, the amount of coffee in a given mass (or weight) of grounds also varies, not with the grind, but with the moisture content of the coffee. Alas, neither volume nor mass is entirely reliable for accurately measuring most of the ingredients we use in making our foods and beverages.
How much ground coffee per "cup"
OK, given a cup of coffee is 6oz, and you get about 5oz plus/minus after brewing, and recognizing that coffee making is a personalized art (you learn to make what you like with the grinding and brewing equipment you own), but what about the factor introduced by the fineness or coarseness of the grind.?
Should you add more coffee per cup when using coarser grinds (because you get less coffee per measure) or is that all part of the art? I know I can increase the amount of coffee in a 2 TBSP measure by 20% if I tap the newly ground jar of coffee on the counter. The grounds settle a lot, depending on how finely they are ground.
Further, I pack the coffee in the filter cone gently but firmly to increase the dwell time of the brewing. Pack or pack not?
And finally, is there a rule of thumb for grinding various coffees or is that, too, part of the art?
Starbucks instructions on package
I went looking on the internet for information about ounces, cups, tablespoons, etc., and sort of found it, but I'm still confused (and annoyed), I guess because I haven't been in school for a long time and am now rusty when it comes to simple math calculations.
Basically I'm annoyed that the back of the Starbucks package says "2 tablespoons per 6 ounces." #1, why wouldn't it say "1 tablespoon per 3 ounces"? And even better, why not "1 tablespoon per ___ cups," since my coffeemachine, Mr. Coffee, is labeled to measure in cups?
Why can't we as a society/planet get this straightened out? It's really annoying. Year 2011, people. We don't have to be sentimental about old measuring systems. We should get it organized so we don't even have to mentally make such comparisons between different types of measurements.
starbucks directions.
Starbucks was actually being smart on this.
They say 2tbsp to 6oz of water because most coffee machines use 6oz as the general number for "cup". so when you want to brew 4 cups, thats 8tbsp.
You may ask, then why don't they say 2tbsp to 1cup? because in actual measurement, 1cup=8oz. So some people would be measuring out water, others would be using the lines on the coffee machine.. and they would be off.
So its not really Starbucks' fault, its the coffee-maker companies who decided that their "cup" would equal 6oz.
"cup"
It should be noted that in any context other than coffee, a cup is 8 ounces. Fortunately, tablespoons and cups are in the same measuring system, however when scooping coffee one rarely bothers to level off the top of the scoop, which throws everything off even more. The measuring methods used in home coffee preparation are totally confusing and really don't make any sense. There should be a way of having a nice ratio of coffee to water, but for some reason whoever was in charge of that messed it up pretty bad. Maybe they ran a restaurant and wanted to be the only ones around who could properly make coffee.
Anyway.. in the coffee universe, i.e. in the units indicated by the numbers and lines on the side of a conventional coffee pot, a "cup" is 6 ounces. Now, a tablespoon is 1/2 of an ounce. I would say that most people like their coffee anywhere from 1-2 tablespoons of ground coffee, per 1 "cup" of water. Let's standardize this by putting it into ounces (I'm a mathematician, so this is how I think...): that's 0.5-1 ounce coffee per 6 ounces of water. If we drop the units and turn it into a ratio of whole numbers, that's 1-2 parts coffee per 12 parts of water. Or better yet, it's 1 part coffee to 6-12 parts of water (which I denote 1:6, 1:7, 1:8, ..., 1:12). If you are a complete nerd as I am, you can get people used to this convention and ask them how they like their coffee: "are you a 1:10 kind of guy? or do you like it a little stronger, maybe a 1:7 pot even?"
So in conclusion, if you want, you can use the same measuring cup for the water and the grounds, and using this ratio it won't matter what units you're using. Personally I like mine at about 1:9. Hopefully this is helpful, I bothered figuring it out because that same question was driving me crazy forever.
mass of coffee vs volume of coffee
A tablespoon of water @ ~4º C weighs about 14 grams. A tablespoon of ground or whole bean roasted coffee would typically not have the same mass as an equal volume of water. I measured the weight of whole beans that I have and these weighed approx. 6 grams per tbls. Thus, given the different masses of coffee types (esp. ground vs. whole bean), it is more accurate to use either a W/W (coffee/water) ratio or a V/V (coffee/water) ratio to fix the approximate strength of the resultant brew (using the same brewing method).
Coffe Ratio
Thank you for finally making some logical sense of the coffee to water ratio dilemma. I am not a "numbers" person, but this formula made it possible to finally make a decent "cup" of coffee with my "5-oz-is-a-cup" coffee maker.
Weak coffee if just weak coffee and can not be fixed.
Weak coffee IS just weak coffee and can not be fixed.