So you’re wanting to find out more about coffee to water ratio, well that’s handy, as this post is a deep dive into coffee to water ratio :-). In this post you’re going to find out exactly what ratio means for coffee brewing, how it differs for each different brew method, and how you can improve the taste of your coffee by tweaking the coffee to water ratio.
There are lots of variables when it comes to coffee brewing, some of them result in a relatively small difference in the cup. Coffee to water ratio, however, makes a huge difference, so nailing the ratio gets you much closer to getting the best cup of coffee possible with the beans you’re using.
There are, of course, many ways to brew coffee. There’s espresso, pour-over, drip coffee, stove-top, Aeropress, cold brew – and more, all of which call for different coffee to water to ratios, but also there are several different schools of thought when it comes to what the ratio should be for each brew method, so it’s not as simple as “you’re brewing via french press, here’s the ratio to use”, there’s a bit more to it than that.
Fear not, Coffee Kev is here. OK it’s a bit weird that I refer to myself in the third person, I’ll grant you that ;-), but you won’t find this article weird, or difficult to understand – I’m simple, and as a result, I can’t help myself but put explain information like this in a way that is simple to understand.
What is Coffee to Water Ratio?
It depends on the brew method. What we refer to as “ratio” or “brew ratio” or “coffee to water ratio” is usually the input ratio when we’re discussing manual brew methods and drip filter brewing, so it’s how many parts water you’re adding to the brewer, in relation to the ground coffee.
It’s slightly different when it comes to espresso, however. With espresso, when we say “ratio”, we mean the output ratio, so it’s the weight of the espresso in relation to the weight of the ground coffee.
So for espresso, when we say a 1:2 ratio, this is two parts espresso from one part ground coffee, if we say 1:3 (lungo) this would be three parts espresso from one part ground coffee, or 1:1 (ristretto) would be one part espresso from one part ground coffee, so 18 grams of ground coffee to 18 grams of espresso.
For drip, pourover, French press, and other brew methods when we say 1:15, for example, this means we add fifteen parts water to one part ground coffee, or 1:12 would mean twelve parts water to one part ground coffee beans. So for example, if you make a coffee using 15g of ground coffee and 220 ml of water, that’s a 1:15 coffee to water ratio.
What does Coffee to Water Ratio do?
Ratio determines the strength, or intensity, of the coffee. So if you want a slightly weaker coffee you’d just use a smaller coffee to water ratio, or use a higher ratio if you want a stronger coffee, so you could refer to the ratio for manual brew methods “dilution”.
This isn’t all that the coffee to water ratio does, however, it also determines the taste. So we’re not only talking about the intensity, we’re also talking about how bitter or sour or sweet your coffee tastes, ratio is that powerful!
OK, how much impact ratio will have on this does depend on the brew method, for example, ratio makes such an impact on taste balance with espresso that you can literally use it to balance the shot instead of tweaking the grind size, it makes that big a difference for espresso. The same isn’t quite true of other brew methods but coffee to water ratio will still make a difference to extraction and therefore to how the coffee tastes.
How to Use Ratio to Improve Your Coffee
In a nutshell, the higher the dilution, meaning the more water vs coffee, the more extracted the resulting cup of coffee will be, and the opposite is also true. So if you imagine over-extraction at one side of the seesaw, and under-extraction on the other side, we want to tweak things until we get the balance just right, for our taste buds.
Generally speaking (it depends on the coffee you’re using), under-extraction shows itself with sour flavors, while over-extraction can taste overly bitter and also dry, hollow, or empty.
If you imagine squeezing a lemon directly onto your tongue at the under-extracted side of the seesaw and piling unsweetened 100% cocoa onto your tongue on the other side, we want to achieve the balance right in the middle of these extremes.