A brewing ratio is often times referred to in a coffee brewing recipe, but what actually is a brewing ratio? In a nutshell, it is the amount of coffee to water you should be using in that specific recipe. The cool thing about brewing ratios is that you can use it in a few different ways. Here is how a brewing ratio works and three scenarios where you can use a brewing ratio to make a better cup of coffee.
How a brewing ratio works.
A brewing ratio often looks like this:
The first number is the amount of coffee you will be using (in grams) and the second number is how much water you will be using (in milliliters). So in the example of 1:15, for every 1g of coffee, you will be using 15ml of water. Keep in mind that grams and milliliters are often times used interchangeably here because they are pretty much the same for coffee brewing purposes. Moving forwards in this post, I will use ml whenever I refer to the water amount.
What changing the brewing ratio does.
So why would you want to change the brewing ratio at all? The thing with coffee is that you need to not only hit a balanced extraction but also use the appropriate amount of coffee to water to brew that good cup of coffee. The way that the brewing ratio impacts extraction is that you can decrease the brewing ratio to decrease the extraction and increase the brewing ratio to increase the extraction. This is because by using more water in your brew, more extraction occurs.
Another side effect of specific brewing ratios is that it often works for specific brewing devices. With a cold brew or darker roasts, you often times want to use a lower brewing ratio to get a better body and to prevent over-extraction from the brittle beans. For pour-overs and light roasts, you want to use a higher brewing ratio to compensate for the natural brewing time of the device and also the denser light roast beans.
There are some other practical uses for the brewing ratio so here are three of those scenarios where you can use the brewing ratio in your day to day coffee brewing process.
Scenario 1:
So you have been brewing a cup of coffee with 20g of coffee at a 1:16 brewing ratio making you use 320ml of water. However your bag of beans is nearly out and you only have 14 grams of coffee left. How much water do you use? Well what you can do is multiply 14g by 16 (from the 1:16 brewing ratio) and get that you need to use 224ml of water to brew a cup with just 14g of coffee.
Scenario 2:
So you want to scale up your brewing recipe and brew for 2 people instead of 1. Your normal cup uses 320ml of water with 20g of coffee but you want to increase that to lets say use 800ml to brew a batch of coffee. If you are using a 1:16 brewing ratio, divide 800 by 16 and you will get 50. That means that to brew a 800ml batch of coffee at a 1:16 brewing ratio, you need to use 50g of coffee.
Scenario 3:
If your cup of coffee is over-extracted or under-extracted, you can use the brewing ratio to fix that. Let’s say in this scenario your cup is over extracted. That means that you have taken too much from your coffee beans and you are getting bitter notes. In this scenario, you need to lower the brewing ratio to extract less from the coffee beans. So if you were brewing a cup of coffee with 20g of coffee and 320ml of water making it a 1:16 brewing ratio. You can lower the brewing ratio and do your new calculations. Lets lower it to 1:14 and keep the coffee amount the same. To find out how much water you need to use with the new amount, multiply 20 by 14 to get 280ml of water. So the new brewing parameters will be to use 20g of coffee with 280ml of water (making it a 1:14 brewing ratio) that will then lower extraction and hopefully make it into a better cup of coffee.
And that is how you can use brewing ratios to brew a better cup of coffee. Some things to consider is that brewing ratios are just a guideline not a rule. So whenever a recipe asks for a specific brewing recipe, treat it as a starting point and not an absolute that you need to follow. Brewing ratios is a really powerful tool that you can use in your coffee brewing arsenal to tweak the extraction of the cup of coffee so make sure to be aware of its impacts on your final cup of coffee. Lower brewing ratio = less extraction. Higher brewing ratio = more extraction.
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