I get confused about measurements when making coffee. How much coffee goes with how much water? A minimalist might say “easy, it’s 1-to-1.” My brain doesn’t work like that.

A typical coffee product might say something like “1 tablespoon per 6 ounce cup”. That’s 1-to-1 if all you have are 6oz cups.

In Joleen’s terms that should mean a “scoop” might hold roughly 1 tablespoon, and she must be talking about a 6 ounce cup. No…

We have 6 and 8 ounce cups, and we always like our coffee strong. To get a strong 6oz coffee that scoop must have much more than 1tbsp – and much much more for our 8oz cups.

OK, how much does her scoop hold? I measured it today and it’s about 2.5 tablespoons. So the product recommendation is essentially ( 1/6= ) 0.16tbs/oz and our preference is ( 2.5/8= ) 0.31tbs/oz … nearly twice as strong. If I just went by the packaging I’d be off by a factor of 2. That’s huge.

Where did that weird scoop come from? It’s a branded Mr Coffee scoop!
Yeah, that blew my mind – and it’s not just me who is confused about this.

And measurements be damned – when Joleen says “scoop” she’s talking a heaping scoop, not a level scoop – which means we use about three times what the packaging says.

OK, so I need to put one scoop in per cup. How do we measure a “cup”?
That’s also non-trivial to my “everything is a research project” pea-brain.

We don’t always know the cup size before we make the coffee – we might pull out cups before or after the brew. Joleen says “look inside the coffee maker and fill it to 4”.

Um, wait. There’s no indication of how many ounces “1” is in there. I don’t know how many ounces the Mr Coffee people think are in a cup. I’ll guess 6. So that means that means we get 4, 6oz cups, for a total of 24 ounces of water. Now, if we are using 8oz cups, that means we get 3 full cups, or 1 and a half 8oz cups for each of us.

Being more awake than I am at that time of morning, she knows that 4 means 3, 6 means 8, and 1 means 2.5.

Should I even mention that there’s no 1 or 2 mark in the coffee pot?

So if you’re reading that coffee packaging or some recipe, and it says “one tablespoon”, be very careful about reaching into the drawer for a “tablespoon” to measure your ingredients. That “1 tablespoon per 6 ounce cup” will be very weak if you use the spoon next to the fork rather than the measuring spoon. To be specific – one dinner table “tablespoon” is exactly one-half of a measuring “tablespoon”. That means, if you use one of those to measure your coffee, it will even weaker than above – more like 0.08 tbsp of coffee per ounce of water – and we like it four-times as strong as that.

Ya know what? I’m tempted to leave it right there, with this little bit of insight into my little brain. But I need to take it just one step further …

Do they use “tablespoons” in the UK?

Apparently I’m not the first one to Google that. Of course they do, but how much does it hold? And why is it still called a “tablespoon” when they don’t use the U.S. measurement system? According to the Wikipedia page on “Tablespoon”:

The unit of measurement varies by region: a United States tablespoon is approximately 14.8 ml (0.50 US fl oz), a United Kingdom and Canadian tablespoon is exactly 15 ml (0.51 US fl oz), and an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml (0.68 US fl oz).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablespoon

So looking at that coffee packaging again, “1 tablespoon per 6 ounce cup” will get you a different cup of coffee depending on where you are. Aggghhhhh

I just wanted to make coffee.

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• This page uses images from South Park Archives and Wikipedia. They are licensed under the CC Attribution-Share Alike License.
• Coffee scoop image from here.
• Coffee cup image FreeStockPhotos.biz