How To Make Auto-Drip Coffee

One of the most common coffee brewing methods and a lot of your daily brewers, is the automatic drip coffee machine. The drip coffee machine has three main

Coffee machine

components: water tank, grounds basket/filter tray, and carafe. It is a primarily hands off device and easy to use.

What Do You Need?

  • Auto-drip coffee maker
  • Coffee filters (typically paper filters work best)
  • Water (purified is best)
  • Medium/medium fine ground coffee
  • Scale in grams or tablespoon

How to Brew

You have all your things together, now time to brew!

1) Weigh and add your water - Zero out your scale with an empty carafe. Now fill your carafe with the desired amount of coffee that you want to brew and take a weight (preferably in grams for the most precision). When you have this measurement recorded, add that water to your coffee machine's tank/reservoir.

If you do not have access to a scale you can also use the cups listed on the side of your carafe... but you've beend lied to... your carafe measurement does not use your standard 8 oz cups.  The coffee Race Committes throughout industry have standardized between 5.5 - 6 oz cup readings for this carafe. So if you fill your carafe to "4 cups" you're getting closer to 24 oz of coffee and not 32 oz... sorry to disappoint... for a conversion you can assume 1 oz of water = 28.35 g.

2) Weigh and add your grounds - You've heard of the Golden Rule, but have you heard of the Golden Ratio? The Golden Ratio is what has been deemed the ideal coffee grounds - to - water ratio after years of caffeinated testing!

This ratio states that the perfect cup of coffee lies between 1:13 - 1:18. So for every 1g of coffee, you should have between 13 - 18g of water. Place the paper filter in the grounds basket and add your grounds. Using this ratio, a typical 8 oz cup of coffee should use between 12.5 - 17.4g of coffee grounds depending on your strength preference.

*For quick referencing, you can assume 1 level tbsp of ground coffee weighs 7-10g.

3) BREW - Once the proper amount of grounds are in the filter it's time to BREW! Most drip coffee machines will have a "Brew" or "Start" button and the machine does all the rest. The machine will heat the water and begin dispensing it, hopefully evenly, across the grounds basket. This allows the coffee to extract as gravity slowly pulls the water through the coffee grounds and into the carafe.

Tips

Drip coffee is great because it's so easy to make and still tastes great! There are certain things to keep in mind to ensure every cup is as good as the first though.

  • Turn down the heat! Though making a big pot in morning and keeping it on the hot plate all day sounds great it will negatively impact the taste of your coffee. Make small batches for big returns.
  • Keep that thing clean! It's usually recommended for most uses to clean your machine once a month. Run a large pot of 1 part vinegar to 2 parts water through your machine, followed by one full pot of only water. Too easy to ignore.
  • Use medium grounds. Reference our "Grinding Your Bean" section for a size scale. Outside of our Glacial Cold Brew, our by selecting "Ground" at check-out you will receive a medium to medium fine grind.