I am currently using 40g coffee to 500g water which is 12.5g coffee to 1g water but I have seen things like this https://www.olympiacoffee.com/blogs/blog/how-to-brew-like-olympia-coffee#:~:text=For those of you who,use 16.7 grams of water. which suggest using a little more. Does it even matter to adjust the ratio precisely if I don’t have a precision grinder and am using a Krups blade grinder? I am trying to get things as precise as possible.
Like most basic entry-level coffee nerds, I do whatever James Hoffman tells me to, so I use ~15g of coffee to 250g of water (which is equivalent to the 1 to 16.7 ratio suggested in your link).
I think it’s still worth playing around with ratios regardless of grinder, it definitely could still make a substantial difference in your cup. However, switching to a decent burr grinder would be a massive difference both in quality of results, but (perhaps more importantly) reproducibility. Blade grinders make it harder to achieve the same grind size every time, and even within a single dose the ground consistency won’t be great.
A caveat I’d like to add: blades are known to produce a lot of fines, which causes higher extraction. So maybe the lower-than-typical ratio you’ve ended up on “compensates” a bit for the high extraction. At the end of the day though, remember: who cares what some website/James Hoffman/random Fediverse users have to say? Do you like the coffee you make?
Nah the coffee I make could definitely be better. I think a better grinder will definitely help.
Nah the coffee I make could definitely be better. I think a better grinder will definitely help.