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Pour-over coffee ratio: where to start and how to adjust it

Start at 1:16, then change it in steps you can actually taste. What the ratio does to a pour-over, with a dose table and the numbers behind it.

Most pour-over recipes land between 1:15 and 1:17: one gram of coffee for every 15 to 17 grams of water. Start at 1:16. For one cup, that's 15 g of coffee and 240 g of water.

The ratio isn't a rule, though. It's the setting that most directly controls how strong your coffee tastes, and people disagree about strength more than almost anything else in coffee.

Water for common doses

Coffee1:151:161:17
12 g180 g192 g204 g
15 g225 g240 g255 g
18 g270 g288 g306 g
20 g300 g320 g340 g
30 g450 g480 g510 g

Weigh both. Roast and bean change how much a scoop weighs, and a gram or two is a whole column on this table.

What the ratio changes

The ratio sets strength: how much dissolved coffee ends up in the cup. At a typical extraction, 1:14 comes out around 1.65% dissolved coffee, 1:16 around 1.42% and 1:19 around 1.17%. That's arithmetic from the standard brewing equation rather than a measurement, but it shows how big the effect is.

It also nudges extraction, the share of the grounds that dissolved, because more water dissolves more. In one of Lance Hedrick's tests, 15 g of coffee at a fixed grind went from 1.73% to 1.09% strength between 1:12 and 1:20, while extraction rose from 16.9% to 19.7%. A longer ratio is weaker and slightly more extracted at the same time.

Grind, water temperature and brew time mostly move extraction. That's what makes the ratio the cleanest dial for strength: change it, and you know what you changed.

Your cup is lighter than your water

Wet grounds hold on to about 2.1 g of water per gram of coffee. Pour 240 g over 15 g and expect about 208 g in the cup. The loss is a fixed amount per gram of coffee, so it takes a bigger share of the water at shorter ratios.

Pour-over recipes quote the water you pour. Espresso is the exception: its ratio is coffee to the drink in the cup, which is why espresso ratios look like 1:2.

How big a change to make

Small changes don't taste like anything. In a UC Davis study, tasters needed about a 0.24% change in strength before they noticed it. Worked through the brewing equation, that's roughly a 15% change in ratio, so 1:15.5 and 1:16.5 make about the same cup.

Move a whole step at a time, and change only the ratio while you test it:

  • Thin, watery or flat: go shorter, from 1:16 to 1:15.
  • Heavy, harsh or too intense: go longer, from 1:16 to 1:17.

Keep the dose the same and change the water. A bigger dose makes a deeper bed in the dripper, which slows the brew and changes extraction too.

If the problem is sourness or bitterness rather than strength, read why coffee tastes sour or bitter. Ratio helps there too, but it isn't the only lever.

There's no correct ratio

In a UC Davis consumer study, 118 coffee drinkers rated 27 drip brews at different strengths and extractions. They split into two groups. A little over half liked weaker, sweeter cups best. The rest had two favourites: bright, fruity cups and roasty ones. Averaging everyone pointed at the classic "golden cup" range, which the researchers called the wrong conclusion, because it sits between what the two groups actually liked.

Experienced brewers disagree too. Hedrick's V60 recipe uses 1:15. James Hoffmann's one-cup V60 uses 15 g to 250 g, about 1:16.7.

So treat 1:16 as a place to start, not a target.

Find yours

Brew the same coffee a few times at different ratios and write down how each cup tasted. Spread it over a few days rather than one sitting, because a single rating is noisy.

Perco saves the ratio and your rating with every brew, so you can look back at which ratio you liked instead of trying to remember.

Sources