Achieve A Truly Perfect Cup Of Coffee With Your Kitchen Scale

The "golden ratio" for measuring out your coffee grounds is pretty well known: Add about 2 tablespoons of grounds for every cup of water (a cup is 6 ounces when we talk about coffee). But do you measure it out precisely every morning, or do you eventually start eyeballing it and tossing in a couple of spoonfuls of grounds? After all, precise measurements require focus, and you haven't even drank your morning coffee yet, so how can you focus? But you could make that easier by putting a kitchen scale to use if you've got one.

A kitchen scale helps because not all coffee beans are created equal. Darker coffee roasts are less dense than lighter roasts because dark roasted coffee beans have been roasted for longer. This means that more moisture has evaporated, so they'll weigh less despite being the same size as lighter roasted coffee beans (which are roasted for less time and have more moisture). It's not a huge difference, but it means that a perfect tablespoon of one weighs differently than a tablespoon of the other.

That's why measuring by volume instead of weight is an imperfect process, and you should think in terms of grams, not tablespoons. Going by tablespoons won't ruin a basic cup of coffee at all. But if you're going for precision, a kitchen scale can perfectly give you that ratio of one gram of coffee grounds for every 18 grams of water. Or 15 to 17 grams of water for every gram of coffee grounds; preferences vary, but once you know what you want, a scale will help you get it consistently.

If you grind your beans, you can simply pour out whole coffee beans into a bowl, put it onto the scale and "tare" out the bowl (scales usually have a feature to ignore a certain amount of weight, in this case, the bowl) and then measure until you have the amount you need — then you grind. If you buy grounds, it's also easy to scoop grounds into the bowl and measure your coffee on the scale. If you're making pour-over coffee, you can put everything directly on the scale. 

So, much like Anubis weighs souls of the dead on scales to judge their sins, you've mastered placing coffee on your kitchen scale to brew the perfect cup of joe. What about some different coffee hacks for weighing your grounds and water just right? When it comes to water, you might find a gooseneck kettle helpful because it's an easy way to measure how much water you're adding and how hot it gets heated to (just like any kettle) with a long spout to pour over the grounds.

If you find that using a kitchen scale works well for you, you might find that a coffee scale could be worth the money. What's the difference between a kitchen scale and a coffee scale? Not much, but a coffee scale can offer more precise measurements in grams and faster response times if you're working with, say, pour-over. It can also be useful if you're working with something really finicky like espresso. But for basic drip coffee, an all-purpose kitchen scale may suit your needs just fine.