Why You Should Stop Measuring Coffee With A Spoon

There are two important questions to ask someone in the morning. The first being, "how do you like your eggs?" but perhaps the most important being, "how do you take your coffee?"

Coffee is one of those rare, beautiful delights in life. The smell is enough to drag you out of bed, the rich flavor is enough to make you smile, and the kick from the caffeine can set the tone for your entire morning. When it comes to making coffee at home measuring the correct coffee grounds to water ratio is important for getting the flavor right.

Measuring coffee beans with a spoon can be horribly inaccurate, notes Serious Eats, and this is because a coffee bean being a round three-dimensional object will never perfectly fit into a spoon en masse. Even using a spoon to measure coffee grounds can be erroneous. If you want to get the perfect measurement for your next pot of coffee, try this trick instead.

According to Reddiwip the best thing you can do when measuring your coffee is to weigh the ingredients on a food scale. They note that weighing your coffee beans before grinding them gives you the perfect measurement, so no beans go to waste, and you know you'll get the perfect ratio for your coffeemaker. Home Grounds also notes that in the coffee world precision is key, so measuring coffee by weight is far more accurate than measuring coffee by volume.

Home Grounds explains that most people make coffee at a ratio of 1:15, which means one part coffee grounds to 15 parts water. So if you're making a 300-gram cup of coffee, (which is approximately 300 milliliters or about 10.25 ounces) then you'll want to use 20 grams of coffee. You can then multiply these amounts by how many cups of coffee you want to make. For example, for six cups of coffee you would multiply 300 grams (or roughly 300 milliliters) of water by six, which is 1,800 grams (or roughly 1,800 milliliters); then multiply 20 grams of coffee by six, which is 120 grams of coffee. So on and so forth. Trying to get these exact measurements with a spoon is way more difficult, so next time you want to make that perfect cup or pot of coffee, whip out the scale!