Brewing Basics

Before any single method, there are the fundamentals that every good cup shares: how much coffee per cup, how fine to grind, how hot the water should be, and how long coffee should stay in contact with it. This collection covers those variables one at a time, with reference charts you can keep by the grinder. Our basics guides stick to well-established specialty-coffee reference ranges and show the arithmetic rather than hiding it — grams per cup, grams per liter, and how to scale a ratio up or down. When a rule of thumb has real wiggle room, we say so, because taste is the final authority.