Tag: blade grinder

Must Have Items To Up Your Coffee Game

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Two things you must have if you want to up your coffee game:

Weight vs. Volume

Some of you who have done cooking or looked up a famous chef or baker’s recipe knows that many of them don’t use volumetric measurements. Pretty much any baker or cook outside of the U.S. can instantly recognize an American recipe because it uses volume measurements like teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, pints or quarts.

If you want to make your life easier with coffee, use the metric system. Grams of coffee to milliliters of water (this is where the kitchen scale comes in). A milliliter of water weighs exactly 1 gram so it makes this incredibly easy. Most roasters recommend a ratio from between 1:15 to 1:17 for drip and pour over coffee.

Here is a quick cheat sheet for grams of coffee to milliliters of water following the widely recommended ratio of 30 grams per 500 ml or water or 60 grams per 1 liter of water. Another way is to divide milliliters of water by 16.7 for grams of coffee needed, or say I’m at the end of a bag of coffee and only have 37 grams left, multiply by 16.7 and I know to use 618 ml of water for my brew.

Here it is in cups and fluid ounces, with rounding for convenience. Useful if your coffee brewer only lists cups. *This is based off US cups of 8 fluid ounces. Cups can mean 4, 5, 6, or 8 ounces of water depending on your brewer, try to figure out how many fluid ounces you are using vs. cups to avoid the wrong ratio.

If your coffee recipe involves number of scoops per cups of water, consider switching to a weight based recipe. Coffee beans come in all different sizes and water content and using a volume measure like a scoop is not at all precise.

Check out our post about kitchen scales.

Burr Grinder

The single most important thing to adjust the taste of your coffee is the size of the grind. It is recommended that you don’t alter anything else about your coffee recipe other than the grind size to adjust the taste. So if your coffee is too bitter, the solution isn’t to add more water to dilute it, the answer is to adjust your grind coarser. If your coffee is weak or sour you need to adjust the grind finer. The only way you can get a consistent and even grind, is to use a burr grinder.

A blade grinder works like a food processor or blender and just chops your coffee beans into inconsistent chunks of coffee. Invest in a burr grinder, this will cost anywhere from $80-140 for a decent electric grinder.

For each type of coffee you get, ideally you should adjust your grind finer and finer until you taste that bitterness you don’t like, the adjust it coarser just a little to know you are getting the ideal extraction level.

Check out our grinder recommendations here and our review of two of the most popular entry level grinders here.