Why You Should Be Using a Weighing Scale When Making Coffee

Whatever coffee you make, getting the correct ratio of coffee:water or coffee:milk is make or break for making the best tasting coffee. Whilst you may think you can 'eyeball' this ratio, it's too important to handle with just guesswork. It's the difference between spending an extra 30 seconds making a great coffee, or making a bad coffee and having to do it all over again. Plus, you want a recipe you can make time and time again, knowing that it will always taste good. This is why we strongly suggest getting an accurate digital weighing scale, with at least one decimal place precision.

Which Scale Do We Love? The Hario Drip Scale 

We swear by the Hario Drip scales, but really any scale with 1 DP accuracy works. Not only do we believe in weighing our beans out before we grind for pourovers, aeropress and single-dosed espressos.. but we also weigh our water too to really make sure our ratios are precise. The density of water is 1g per 1 ml, meaning we can be sure we are adding exactly 250ml of water to our pourover by weighing this out.

Why Measuring Cups/Spoons Aren't Good Enough

You might think a measuring spoon/cup is still a measurement and therefore a good way to dose your coffee, but we're hear to challenge that...

Whilst you might know that your measuring cup gives you the perfect dose for one bag of coffee, we all know that coffee beans are mixed in size from their growing conditions and varietal. So using a measuring cup will still give a discrepancy in the true mass of coffee you're adding. Not good for producing the same level of great coffee every time, and especially not good for when the coffee is a new blend or just has seasonal differences.

So What's The Perfect Way to Dose Coffee and Make an Awesome Pour over

Well, for example, when we make a pour over we first start by weighing our whole beans with the Hario Drip scales. We grind this up ensuring we shake out the grinder first... then we get to work:

 We then prewet/preheat our V60 funnel and paper and then sit this on top of our weighing scale. Yes - that's right we'll be monitoring the weight of this system whilst we add our coffee and water.

1. We'll then tare the scales to 0.0 and add our coffee, ensuring our ground coffee weighs the same as our intended dose (it allows us to know if any beans got stuck in the grinder).
2. Next, when we know we have the right amount of ground coffee (we aim for 15.0g), we tare the scales again. Then, with our mass at 0.0g, we start a stopwatch (very handy as the Hario Drip scales come with a stopwatch) and begin pouring our 50g of water to bloom the coffee.
3. After our stopwatch reaches 45 seconds, we add more water until our scales show our total amount of water added is 140g. Then, when water has nearly drained, we add the final aliquot of water until a total of 250g of water has been added.
4. Checking on our stopwatch, we should see that its now between 2:00 and 3:00 minutes - which is a good target for a full bodied yet delicate pourover.

How's that for accuracy! It might seem excessive at first - but we love to know its reliable, reproducible and very good at extracting all of those delicate aromatic flavours of filter coffee. 

Need some beans to replicate our recipe? Try our My Single Friend Single Origin Series.