Getting coffee right at home is mostly one number: how much coffee for how much water. Everything else — grind, temperature, gear — is fine-tuning on top of it. Below you can work in grams or in tablespoons, whichever you actually measure with, and every brew method here matches a grind we sell.
Pick how you brew, say how much you want, and this does the weighing maths for you.
We grind to order for this, free. Shop coffee · Read the grind guide
The “cup” on your coffee pot is not a cup
On nearly every American drip machine, the marks on the carafe are 5 fluid ounces apiece — not 8. A 12-cup pot holds about 60 ounces — five 12-ounce mugs, not twelve of anything. That single mix-up is the most common reason a pot comes out muddy: measure for twelve 8-ounce cups and you have put in 60% more coffee than the pot was asking for. That is why the calculator offers “cups marked on my pot” as its own separate unit, and says out loud which one it is using.
The coffee pot rule worth memorizing
For a standard drip machine, everything above comes down to one thing you can keep in your head: one level tablespoon of ground coffee per mark on the carafe for a lighter cup, one and a half for balanced, two for strong. A 12-cup pot on balanced is 18 tablespoons. Switch the readout to tablespoons and you will see the calculator land on exactly those numbers, because that rule is where its drip ratios come from.
Pour over, French press, and the rest are a different story — those get weighed, and the calculator gives you grams because a scale is what people brewing that way already own. Pour over sits right around 1 gram of coffee to every 16 grams of water, give or take a point either direction depending on how you like it.
Three answers that are not what they look like
Espresso is measured dose in, liquid out — 18 grams of coffee producing about 36 grams in the cup. That second number is not the water you pour; it is what comes out the bottom, which is why the calculator labels it yield.
AeroPress is measured per finished mug. You brew a small, strong concentrate in the chamber and top it up afterwards, so the water gets split into what goes through the press and what goes in the mug after. A press simply does not hold a mug’s worth of water.
Cold brew lands somewhere between a concentrate you cut with water and a drink you pour straight over ice, depending on which strength you pick — the calculator tells you which one you just asked for. Our cold brew guide has the full method, including how long to steep it.
Ratios only matter if the coffee is fresh
None of this rescues stale beans. Coffee starts giving up its aromatics within days of roasting, and pre-ground coffee sitting on a shelf has lost most of what you are measuring for. We roast every order after you place it and grind it for your brew method — or leave it whole — so the numbers above are actually worth dialing in.