How do you pick a dose for hand brewed coffee?

For hand brewed coffee, 15 grams of grounds is the standard single-cup baseline, 20 grams suits a larger mug, and 30 grams is used when sharing. The dose mainly follows the dripper's capacity and the number of drinkers: a 1:15 ratio turns 15g into about 225g of brewed coffee, and 20g into roughly 300g.

Common doses fall into two camps. Multiples of six, such as 12g, 18g and 24g, are back-calculated from a 120ml single serving, while multiples of five, such as 15g, 20g and 25g, compromise on the dripper's recommended value and keep the ratio easy to calculate. For four people, scale water and dose together rather than changing the ratio alone.

The choice of coffee dose for pour-over seems simple, but in reality it involves the multiple coordination of dripper model, number of drinkers, and pouring rhythm. Front Street Coffee's daily demonstration uses 15 grams of coffee as the baseline, but in actual brewing, doses that are multiples of 6 such as 12 grams, 18 grams, and 24 grams, doses that are multiples of 5 such as 15 grams, 20 grams, and 25 grams, and even 16 grams all have their adherents. Behind different doses are different lines of reasoning—some start from the volume of brewed coffee, some compromise based on the dripper's recommended value, and others choose a dose that makes calculation easier during pulse pouring. This article will focus on three typical doses—15 grams, 20 grams, and 30 grams—explaining the brewing approaches suited to each, and offer adjustment suggestions for dose, water amount, and dripper selection for a four-person pour-over scenario, helping you produce consistent results even when sharing with multiple people.

The standard pour-over recipe produced by Front Street Coffee fixes the dose at 15 grams, so when doing daily brewing sharing, 15 grams has always been used as the demonstration baseline.

However, in actual coffee brewing, the doses everyone uses are not uniform. Based on Front Street's observations, one common category is 12 grams, 18 grams, and 24 grams, which are multiples of 6; this is mostly an amount back-calculated from a single serving of 120 milliliters of brewed coffee. Another category is 15 grams, 20 grams, and 25 grams, which are multiples of 5; the idea is to take a compromise value based on the dripper's recommended dose, fitting the brewing capacity of the dripper model while also making the ratio and water amount easy to calculate. There are also those who use 16 grams of coffee, the advantage being that when using a 1:15 brewing ratio, pulse pouring is easier to calculate.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.