If you consider yourself a coffee connoisseur, you might have heard of the ‘golden ratio’ for brewing coffee before. If you’re like most people in the world though (including me for a LONG time) you just throw a couple scoops of coffee in and press brew- and that’s okay! But in this blog, I want to go over what exactly this ‘golden ratio’ is and how it can improve your everyday coffee drinking experience.
Well I guess we should cover what it even means to be the ‘golden ratio’.
The golden ratio is essentially the coffee world’s suggestion for the perfect cup of coffee. The goal of the golden ratio is to have a perfect balance when it comes to water vs. coffee beans. With this being said, this ‘golden ratio’ is merely a suggestion for the perfect cup of coffee- everybody likes their coffee a little bit differently so you might have to play with the ratio a little bit to figure out exactly how you like it. BUT! This is a perfect starting point if you’re new to brewing your own coffee, or even if you’re trying to get better at making that perfect cup of coffee to give you a smile every single morning.
The suggested ratio for brewing coffee can be pretty simple actually, so I’ll show you that first, then I’ll break down all the math behind it.
In basic terms, each 8 oz cup of coffee (who only drinks 8 oz cups??), you should use approximately 3 leveled off tablespoons of coffee.
This is using the ratio (by weight) of 1:15
Like I said before, this is simply the suggestion for the “perfect cup of coffee”. I personally like it with a little bit less coffee and prefer my ratio to be around 1:18
To do this, I simply just add around 2 ounces of water to the combination I just mentioned, and I know that cup of coffee will put a smile on my face every time.
For all the nerds out there (me included!) who want to know the math behind this, I’ll lay it all out!
First we need to do a quick refresher on water volume/weight conversions. Well 1 mL of water weighs 1 gram, so that’s pretty easy!
If we take 8 oz of water and convert that to mL it is 236 mL of water, meaning by weight, there is 236 grams of water.
One tablespoon of coffee is approximately 5 grams. If we use the ratio 1:15 we can easily find the weight of grams needed in coffee by dividing the weight of the water by 15.
236/15= 15.73
Okay, well I just ground 3 tablespoons of coffee and it turned out to be 16 grams- pretty darn close!
So when we take our assumption of 1 tablespoon of coffee = 5 grams, we can say to fit the ‘golden ratio’ of 1:15, we need to scoop 3 tablespoons of coffee into our cup.
Like I said, I just scooped out 3 tablespoons of beans to grind while writing this (yes, I drink a lot of coffee ;) ) and it came out to be 16 grams.
Like I mentioned, my ratio preference right now is closer to 1:18, so I took the 16 grams of beans and put that in 10 oz of water giving me MY perfect ratio.
10 oz of water is 295 grams and 295/18=16 grams of coffee!
While I personally enjoy digging into the math with things, it’s really not extremely necessary unless you’re really trying to craft that perfect cup of coffee.
The easiest way to have these numbers handy is to have a quick little chart ready to go by your coffee machine you can quickly glance at just to be sure you have the numbers right.
In conclusion, the golden ratio is merely a suggestion for the perfect cup of coffee and it suggests that you use 3 tablespoons of coffee to every 8 oz of water.
Play around and see what ratio you like best! If you find something you like, let me know! I’d love to hear what you like and will try it out myself!