How much coffee should I use?
In general, we recommend using brew ratios of water to coffee, by weight. (Don't leave! We have a recipe for those of us who don't have kitchen scales.)
Really strong cups are about 12:1, for a bit less strong cup, use an 18:1 ratio. Using a metric weight on your scale (usually grams) helps make the math easy.
Too much bed depth can give even good coffee a bitter taste
Don’t have a scale, or you think we’ve gone too far?
Many kitchens don’t have digital scales, mo problem.
You’ve bought great coffee, so all you need is a few common kitchen measuring tools and a calculator (or slide rule?) Once you get it you'll quickly be able to adjust based on your new fancy formula.
Measure the fluid ounces of your coffee and multiply by 0.35. The resulting number is the number of tablespoons of ground coffee. You can adjust by a few tablespoons in either direction to adjust the strength of your brew.
See our recipe below for a quick 4 cup drip coffee machine recipe. Double up for more, and adjust to taste.
Bed depth, what?
Every coffee maker's drip cone has a sweet spot. The best cups need a bed depth of 1” to max 2” in order to extract the coffee well, too shallow and it's watery, too deep and it's bitter.
No need to obliterate your coffee into dust
A quick note on grinding:
For most drip coffee makers, use a coarse grind (think Morton’s kosher salt). It may seem counterintuitive, but a finer grind can do a lot. In a drip coffee maker, because the "muddiness" can slow extraction, bitterness can very quickly become an issue.