- [Narrator] That is real coffee,
as delicious as the best cup of coffee,
you've ever had brewed.
- Today, we're gonna talk about ratios for coffee brewing.
How much coffee should I use to brew a cup of coffee
in terms of filter coffee?
Now I'm gonna talk about this in three separate stages.
I'm gonna talk about why I'm gonna recommend
a certain type of ratios
of using grams per liter,
and then I'm gonna talk about kinda finding
your ideal ratio.
And finally I'm gonna talk about why
I might recommend a different ratio
for different brewing methods.
So first thing, why would I recommend grams per liter?
There's a number of different ways people
do recipes and ratios.
The most common ones still is to recommend scoops per cup.
There's no international standard for scoops.
A scoop can contain about seven grams.
It could contain about 10 or 12 grams.
Now the problem I have with scoops or cups
or tablespoons or teaspoons,
or all of that sort of stuff
is that they're volumetric measurements.
Which means that they'll have massive fluctuations
in actual weight depending on a few different factors.
For example, if I were to use,
let's say a dark roast, medium ground coffee
and I have a perfect level scoop of that,
that might weigh around seven, seven and a half grams.
If I went for a light roast finer ground coffee,
that might weigh eight, eight and a half grams,
well over 10% more, and that's me being really careful
in loading the same volume each time.
It's very easy to have small variances
in that volume result in pretty big variances
in the gram weight that you're using.
In the day-to-day morning coffee brewing,
using scoops will mean that some days
your coffee is good and some days it's not.
Even though you seemingly did the same thing,
but volumetric measurements, they're just not very reliable.
Then there's the other commonly used ratios
of like one to 14, one to 15, one to 16.
These break my head, I can't deal with these.
They kind of work completely backwards to me.
Those kinds of ratios are pretty useful.
If you know how much ground coffee you have
and you wanna work out how much coffee you can make.
That is never a problem I have, in the mornings.
Usually, I have a desired amount of coffee
that I wanna brew and I wanna work out,
how much ground coffee I need,
you know what weight of coffee I need to start with.
So, using a one to 15 ratio.
I can't do the maths on that,
if I need 500 mL of coffee,
I'm not dividing 500 by 15 first thing in the morning.
However, if you give me a grams per liter,
well, if I'm brewing half a liter than I need.
If at 60 grams a liter, then I need half that,
which is 30 that's not,
I don't need my phone and a calculator for that.
I can just do a quick little bit of maths.
I like it also because typically a cup,
an average cup is about 250 mL of brewing
or about eight ounces and that scales really nicely.
Whether I'm making one or two or three or four or more,
two to the grams per liter ratio.
You know I'm using half a liter, a full liter,
three quarters of a liter.
The maths is never complicated.
And there's one other kind of ratio
that deserves a special place in hell.
The mixed unit ratio,
if you are recommending grams per ounce,
get out, get out, go away, you do not belong.
Just get, that's all.
What are you doing?
That's the worst thing in the world.
Don't, ah, I mean, you know, the Imperial,
I have no time for that to begin with,
but don't be mixing Imperial and metric that is no, stop it.
Rant aside.
We end up at grams per liter.
I think it's a really nice, neat way to work.
So if it's a 60 grams per liter doing the mass with that,
that's very, very easy.
It's very, very usable.
And this leads us into the second part of this video.
What is the right amount of coffee per liter of water?
And this is a really important point
that becomes a little bit complicated.
There is no correct ratio.
There is only preference.
The ratio of coffee to water you use
is really gonna determine how strong the end cup
of coffee is, how strong you like your coffee.
that's up to you, right?
That's, your decision.
I shouldn't get a say.
I'll give a good starting point, right?
Like I think 60 grams per liter
is a pretty good one-size-fits-all.
Most people are happy with the resulting strength
of a good brew, but you can choose 55, 50, 75
that's up to you.
But, there's one complicating factor
in the world of coffee brewing and that is extraction.
I'll give a very quick primer on extraction.
In ground coffee, about approximately,
about a third of it is soluble material.
It could be dissolved by water.
Two thirds of it pretty much is insoluble.
It's cellulose, it's kind of wood.
You could steep that coffee, brew their coffee forever.
You still have some grounds left over
that you would throw away afterwards.
You don't want everything that is soluble
and available in coffee.
You want, broadly speaking,
for the sake of easy maths in the video to come,
about to 20%.
Some would prefer a little bit more, 22, maybe 23,
maybe even more, but let's say for the sake of argument
about 20%.
If you do a good job of brewing your coffee,
that will have a nice resulting strength,
but if you didn't do a good job, brewing that coffee,
that 60 grams liter would produce a weaker cup.
Let's say, you under extracted it,
you ground it to too coarse, you brew too quickly,
however it happened, you end up with a weak cup.
So if you're trying to change your ratio,
if you're trying to work out your ideal ratio,
you only want to change the ratio,
once you're really happy with the taste.
If you've brewed a cup of coffee
and you think that was delicious,
I just wish it was a fraction stronger.
That's the time to change your ratio.
If you brew a cup of coffee and you think that's a bit weak,
it's a bit sour, it's not really delicious.
Don't change your ratio.
Change your extraction.
Grind a little finer, steep, a little longer,
agitate a little bit more.
Those things need to be fixed first
before you mess with your ratio.
Once you're happy with taste, sure experiment.
In my life, I kinda wandered around in terms
of what I prefer in terms of the end strength
of my cup of coffee.
It's a personal thing.
Whatever you like is okay.
There is no one answer to this question.
This brings us into the third part of this video,
which is why I might recommend using a different ratio
for different brewing methods.
Now you can broadly divide all coffee brewing methods
into two camps.
Percolation and infusion.
Now with percolation, water is passing through
a bed of coffee.
In infusion, all of the water, and all of the coffee
are hanging out together during the brew time.
A pour-over is percolation.
A French press, an AeroPress.
Those are infusion methods.
Now, I would recommend using a little bit more coffee
for an infusion method than I would for a pour-over
for a percolation method.
I'll explain why.
Let's imagine for the sake of argument,
we're gonna brew a liter of coffee
and we're gonna use 60 grams per liter.
That's a good starting point,
and in this theoretical brew,
we're gonna extract 20% of the coffee, right?
So it means that of those 60 grams,
about 12 grams were dissolved and brought
into the liquid coffee.
Now when you brew a percolation,
when you brew a pour-over,
not all of the water that you pour in, ends up in the brew.
Typically, about two grams per gram of coffee get absorbed
by the ground coffee.
That bed still contains a good amount of water
and that water never really got involved
in the brewing process.
So what you have in the resulting brew, is 12 grams
of coffee dissolved in round about 880 grams of water.
If you take a French press and you do the same thing,
you brew 60 grams per liter,
those 12 grams of solubles that we've extracted,
that 20% extraction, that's now dissolved
into a thousand grams of water.
All a thousand grams we're involved in the brewing process
and those solubles are distributed amongst
the whole thing, that makes that brew weaker,
even though it's the same extraction.
That's why if you want a similar extraction
and a similar strength,
I would recommend using more coffee, in my infusions.
70 grams, maybe 75 grams per liter of water.
If you dive into extraction theory
and you start playing the refractometers,
you'll notice that the software does ask you
to specify if it's an immersion or a percolation,
because it does affect your extraction calculations.
But more than that, it really just affects
the strength and the taste.
So that's why with any infusion brew,
any brew where all of the ground is in contact
with all of the brew water for a period of time,
even if in the case of an AeroPress,
you're gonna push that liquid through
the bed of coffee at the end.
It was still an infusion.
Any pour-over I would recommend about 60 grams a liter.
Any infusion brew, I'd recommend about 75 grams a liter.
I think those are both great starting points,
but they're not the answer.
Don't take it as gospel.
Find your own way.
Find your own preferences.
If they are too weak too strong, well change them.
Being consistent in how you brew,
and that means weighing the amount of coffee going in
and ideally weighing the amount of water too
means that you actually understand what's affecting
your morning coffee.
You don't have to make decisions,
you don't have to guesstimate the amount
of water you poured in or the amount of coffee
you're brewing, especially frankly,
before you've had coffee.
So, get a set of scales.
This is a great starting point.
I'd love to hear what you're brewing at home.
I'd love also to hear more about your journey.
Has this changed for you over time?
Have you gone weaker?
Have you gone stronger?
Are you kinda bouncing around all over the place.
I'd be really interested to hear what you're doing.
As always, thank you so much for watching.
I hope you have a great day.
Dammit.