Start espresso at 18 grams of coffee in and 36 grams of espresso out, in about 28 seconds. Start drip at one gram of coffee for every twelve grams of water. Start pour over at one gram for every sixteen, and give it around four minutes. Those three numbers are where we begin at Inheritance, and the part worth learning is which way to move them.
All coffees are different, and in the end your own palate is the judge. A starting number is what gives your palate something to judge. Without one you are changing two or three things at once and guessing at which of them helped.
The arithmetic is simpler than the notation makes it look. A coffee to water ratio of 1:16 means one part coffee to sixteen parts water, measured by weight, so 25 grams of coffee wants 400 grams of water. A 12-ounce cup of drip works out to roughly 21 to 23 grams of coffee, which is about twenty cups from a pound. Espresso uses the same arithmetic with much smaller numbers: 1:2 is 18 grams in and 36 grams out.
What is the ratio for pour over?
One gram of coffee to sixteen grams of water, with a total brew time of about four minutes. For a single mug that is 20 grams of coffee to 320 grams of water. For two, 30 to 480.
Four minutes is doing real work in that sentence. Pour over is the one method where you control the flow of water yourself, so the same 1:16 can land anywhere from thin to harsh depending on how long the water is actually in contact with the bed. If your brew is finishing in two and a half minutes, the water is running through rather than soaking through, and no change to the ratio will fix that. Grind finer or pour slower, and get the clock to four before you touch anything else.
We use this ratio on the coffees we pick for filter brewing. The lots in our Best for Drip collection are chosen because they read clearly at longer contact with water, which is exactly the condition a pour over creates.
Why do we start drip stronger than pour over?
Because an automatic drip machine does not extract as efficiently as a careful hand does, and the honest way to make up the difference is with more coffee rather than with a finer grind.
A drip machine sprays water over a bed for a fixed period at whatever temperature its heating element produces. It does not bloom, it does not pour in stages, and on most home machines it does not hold temperature through the cycle. The result is a brew that pulls less out of the same grounds than a well-run pour over does at the same ratio. At 1:16 a lot of drip machines give you something correct and a bit hollow. At 1:12 the same machine gives you a cup with body in it.
This is the part of the answer that gets collapsed most often. Drip and pour over both run water through a paper filter, so they get written down as one method with one number, and they are not. Ours are four points apart, and that gap is the largest single difference between a filter cup you like and one you tolerate.
It is worth being precise about what moving from 1:16 to 1:12 actually does, because it is not the same as grinding finer. More coffee against the same water raises the strength of the finished drink, meaning the proportion of dissolved coffee in your cup. It does not raise extraction, meaning the proportion of each ground particle that dissolved. A drip machine that is under-extracting will still be under-extracting at 1:12; it will simply be under-extracting more coffee, which usually tastes better because the weakness was the thing you noticed first. If the cup is stronger and still sour, extraction is the problem and the grind is where you go next.
Two practical notes. If your drip machine came with a scoop and a fill line, 1:12 will feel like a lot of coffee, because the markings on most consumer machines assume a much weaker brew. And a machine that cannot hold its temperature will taste sour at any ratio, which is worth knowing before you spend money on coffee trying to fix it.
What is the ratio for espresso?
1:2, which in practice means 18 grams of ground coffee in the basket and 36 grams of liquid espresso in the cup, pulled in about 28 seconds.
Three numbers, and all three matter together. Weigh what goes in and weigh what comes out, because volume lies to you in a way weight does not: crema makes a shot look finished before it is, and two shots of identical volume can differ by a third in actual mass. The clock is the third reading. If 18 grams gives you 36 grams out in 20 seconds, the coffee is too coarse. If it takes 45, it is too fine.
That ratio is the starting point for a standard double. Plenty of good bars run shorter for a denser shot or longer for a lighter one, and a coffee that tastes thin at 1:2 often opens up at 1:2.5. What we would not do is start somewhere else and work back, because 1:2 in 28 seconds is the setting from which every other change is legible.
The coffees in our Best for Espresso collection are picked to hold up under that. Espresso concentrates sweetness, body and acidity all at once, so a coffee that is delicate and lovely as a pour over can arrive sharp in a basket.
What should you change first when the coffee tastes wrong?
On filter, change the dose. On espresso, change the grind. Those are opposite instructions and they are both right, because the two methods have different variables holding still.
On a pour over or a drip machine the contact time is roughly fixed by the brewer, so the reliable way to make the cup stronger is to put more coffee against the same water. We have written about this before in whether a finer grind makes coffee stronger, and the short version is that grinding finer raises extraction a little and then starts working against you, while adding coffee works every time. A cup that is bitter and thin at once is usually a grind pushed too fine at a dose that was too small to begin with. Add coffee first, taste it, and only then move the grind.
On espresso the dose is fixed by the basket. An 18-gram basket takes 18 grams, and you cannot meaningfully add coffee without changing hardware. So grind is the first lever: finer if the shot gushes and tastes sour, coarser if it drips and tastes bitter. Hold the dose, hold the target yield, and move the grind until the clock lands where you want it.
Sour and bitter are the two words worth getting right, because they point in opposite directions. Sour means the water did not get enough out of the grounds, so you want more contact, a finer grind, or hotter water. Bitter means it got too much, so you want less. A light roast that tastes sour is almost always under-extracted rather than badly roasted, which is a point we make at more length in our piece on light roast coffee.
Does the size of the batch change the ratio?
It does, and once you know that, two numbers that look contradictory often stop being contradictory.
Mark Prince at CoffeeGeek has written the clearest version of this argument I have read, in One to Fourteen, published in March 2024. His case is that a small brew loses proportionally more of its water to the grounds and to evaporation than a large one does, so a ratio that produces a full-bodied result in a 40-cup commercial urn produces a thin one in a 300ml pour over. He lands on 1:14 as a general starting point and pushes pour over to about 1:12.5 on small batches, and he notes that the specialty association's published golden cup range was written with large batch brewers in mind. That framing is his, it is well argued, and I would send anyone interested in the reasoning to him rather than restate it here.
Where we differ is the direction of the split. He makes pour over the stronger of the two filter methods; we make drip the stronger one. That is not a disagreement about chemistry, it is a disagreement about what the two brewers are typically doing in a real kitchen. His pour over numbers assume a careful brew under 300ml. Our drip number assumes a household machine making a full carafe that nobody is standing over. Both are honest readings of a different situation, and I would rather name the difference than average it into something neither of us would recommend.
The practical upshot is the same either way: if you are brewing small, expect to need proportionally more coffee than a printed number suggests.
Cold brew sits outside all of this and runs far stronger again, because a long steep in cold water is a different extraction problem and the result is usually diluted before anybody drinks it. It deserves its own numbers rather than a footnote to these.
Do you have to weigh it?
For the ratio to mean anything, yes, and a scoop is the reason. A level two-tablespoon scoop holds about 10 grams of ground coffee. The same scoop heaped holds closer to 14. That is a 40 percent swing in strength produced by two people who each believe they used one scoop, and it is most of what separates a good cup from a bad one in places where several people make the coffee.
We are firm about this with the cafes, hotels and restaurants we supply, for the reason that a scoop is a volume and a volume is not a mass. Ground coffee settles, and a coarse grind and a fine grind of the same weight do not fill the same space. We have written up how we handle that on a bar in our guide to standardizing cafe recipes, and the same logic applies on a kitchen counter with fewer people involved.
A kitchen scale that reads to the gram costs less than two bags of good coffee and removes the largest variable you have. If you genuinely will not weigh, then measure the water and keep the coffee scoop consistently level, because one controlled variable beats none.
Where do our own numbers stop?
Here is the concession. We do not publish a brew recipe on any coffee's page on this site. Every lot we sell carries an origin, a cultivar, a processing method and a cup score, and not one of them carries a starting ratio where you can find it before you buy. That is a real gap on our part and it is on the list.
What we do instead is take one of the two variables off you. We grind to your brewer, free, on the day we roast, so the grind is already matched to the method and the only thing left for you to set is the dose. That is genuinely useful and it is also a trade: a bag ground for a V60 is ground for a V60, and if you change brewers mid-bag you are back to buying whole bean and doing it yourself. It is the right default for most people and the wrong one for anybody still deciding how they brew.
The number is where you start. What you are actually learning is which way to move it, and that is the part no bag can print for you.
Questions we get about brew ratios
Is drip coffee the same ratio as pour over?
No, and we start them four points apart. Pour over begins at 1:16 with about a four-minute brew; drip begins at 1:12. An automatic machine extracts less efficiently than a careful hand pour, so it needs more coffee against the same water to produce a cup with body in it.
How many grams of coffee for a 12-ounce cup?
Roughly 21 to 23 grams of ground coffee for a 12-ounce cup at normal strength. A pound of coffee is 454 grams, so a pound gives you about twenty cups at that size. An 8-ounce cup takes 14 to 15 grams and gets you nearer thirty.
What ratio should I use for espresso?
Start at 1:2 and read all three numbers together: 18 grams of coffee in the basket, 36 grams of espresso in the cup, about 28 seconds. Weigh the output rather than eyeballing the volume, because crema makes a shot look finished before it is.
Do I need a scale to brew coffee?
To use a ratio at all, yes. A level two-tablespoon scoop holds about 10 grams and the same scoop heaped holds closer to 14, which is a 40 percent difference in strength between two people who both think they used one scoop. If you will not weigh, at least measure the water and keep the scoop level.
Are these numbers the correct ones?
They are where we start, and they are not precise. All coffees are different and your own preference is the thing being aimed at, so treat the figures above as a place to begin and then adjust deliberately rather than at random. Learning how to make an informed adjustment is worth more than any number we could give you.
If you want a coffee to test this on: ASCENT by Inheritance is our house blend and it is built to be legible at both ends of this article, holding up as a 1:2 espresso and as a 1:12 drip without changing character. It is roasted to order in Pensacola, and we will grind it to your brewer at no charge if you tell us what you are using.
