How much coffee makes coffee?

Since developing a passion for coffee and discovering the joys of experimenting with single origins and blends, the one element that has confounded me is the amount of coffee to use when making my morning pick-me-up. I thought I knew the answer - the packet says use 7 grams per cup right? Well, right... and wrong.

Most coffee brand packaging and coffee related websites recommend using 7 grams per cup. But how big is this cup? Is it an European sized cup? American? Many coffee sites talk about cups in liquid ounces (6 or 8 being the most popular). But is that imperial or US ounces? You can understand the confusion that all this talk causes and still I don't think that everyone quite knows how it all works. Many people think of a cup as the standard measuring cup used in baking (250ml). Don't be fooled. A cup is not the cup you think it is. To add to this, South Africans like their coffee is mugs. This started another question, if 7 grams makes one cup, how much would I need for a mug of coffee?

The universal consensus among coffee snobs is that the ratio of coffee to water is 55 - 60 grams of coffee per litre of water. This is the rule of thumb and the starting point of experimentation. I have determined that it is not the size of your cup or mug that is important but what ratio of water to coffee that you use that is. So forget the cups and mugs, look at the amount of coffee you want to brew and start from there.

If your drip coffee maker (filter for South Africans) has a one litre capacity, then it's simple: add 55 grams of filter-ground coffee to your brew basket and off you go. If the capacity is 1,5L then it's 55 x 1.5 = 82.5 grams. If you're making half a litre it's 55 / 2 = 27.5 grams. You can use the same calculation for standard 1.8L and 2.2L coffee brewers.

I have found it useful to weigh my coffee on a digital kitchen scale. This is an inexpensive tool and soon you'll be used to weighing your coffee and not just spooning in an estimated amount wondering if you've added 4... or wait was that 5 measures of coffee?

All this weighing and measuring might appear a little pedantic but using these rules ensures that my cup of coffee tastes wonderful every time. In order to judge coffee taste and compare one with another, you need to keep your brewing ratios consistent. In this way your favourite blended coffee with taste the same every morning and will allow you to compare apples with apples (or beans with beans...).

I could get stuck into grind size and how that influences brewing, extraction time and a host of other technicalities but I will save that for another post.

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