Brew Ratio Chart: Espresso and Filter Dose to Yield

Brew ratio is the weight of liquid coffee out divided by the weight of dry coffee in. It is written as dose to yield, so 1:2 means the drink weighs twice the dry dose. For espresso the reference recipe is 18 g in, 36 g out, 25 to 30 seconds. For pourover and other filter methods the reference is 1:16, roughly eight times more water for the same coffee, because filter brewing has minutes of contact time and no pressure doing the work. Everything below is that idea expanded into numbers you can read off directly.

How do you calculate a brew ratio?

Divide the weight of what ends up in the cup by the weight of the dry ground coffee you started with. A 18 g dose that produces 36 g of espresso is 36 ÷ 18 = 2, written 1:2. A 20 g filter dose brewed with 320 g of water is 320 ÷ 20 = 16, written 1:16. The ratio carries no units, which is why it transfers between a 14 g basket and a 22 g basket without any recalculation.

Two details trip people up. The first is that espresso yield is the weight of the liquid in the cup, not the volume, and not the water your machine pushed through the group. Some of that water stays in the puck, which is why a soaked puck weighs more after the shot than the dose you put in. The second is that filter ratios are conventionally quoted against water added rather than beverage produced, because the paper and the coffee bed retain roughly two grams of water per gram of dry coffee. So an espresso ratio describes output and a filter ratio describes input. They are both useful, they are simply measured at different ends of the process.

If you would rather not do the arithmetic in your head at six in the morning, the brew ratio calculator converts any dose and ratio into a target yield, and the espresso dose and yield calculator works backward from the shot you actually pulled to tell you which ratio you hit. Both work in grams, because grams are the only unit espresso is honest in.

What is the espresso dose to yield lookup for every common ratio?

This is the table to screenshot. Doses run from 14 g, the low end of a small double basket, to 22 g, a triple. Yields are in grams of liquid espresso in the cup, weighed on a scale sitting in or under the drip tray.

Read across from your dose and stop the shot when the scale reaches the number in the column for the style you want. If your machine has volumetric buttons rather than a stop button, weigh the result once and program the button to that volume, then re-check it when you change beans, because the same volume setting delivers a different weight as crema volume changes.

What does each espresso style taste like at its ratio?

A ratio is a lever with a predictable direction. Shorter concentrates and thickens, longer dilutes and clarifies. The taste column below describes what you should expect when the grind is already roughly correct, not what a badly dialled shot tastes like at that ratio.

Ristretto is worth understanding properly, because it is the most misused word on a cafe menu. A true ristretto is the same grind and the same dose as your normale, stopped early. It is not a normale pulled with a finer grind, and it is not a smaller dose. Stopping early means the first and most soluble compounds dominate, which is why a ristretto reads sweet and heavy but can feel like it has no finish. A dark roast usually flatters this ratio because it is already highly soluble, and a light roast usually does not, because you stop the shot before the sugars have dissolved.

The turbo shot at the bottom of the table is the modern outlier: a much coarser grind, a high yield and a very short time, sometimes under 20 seconds for a 1:3. It works because the coarse bed lets a large volume of water through without over-extracting the surface of the grounds. It also punishes an uneven puck harder than any other recipe, so it belongs on a setup with a genuine espresso grinder rather than on a machine with a pressurised basket.

What ratio should each basket size run?

Your basket sets the dose window before ratio enters the conversation. Under-filling a basket leaves headroom that the water carves a channel through, and over-filling it presses the puck against the shower screen and blocks the flow. The dose window below is what fits properly, and the yields follow from the ratio.

A precision basket makes the whole table behave more predictably, because its holes are laser cut to a consistent diameter and open area rather than stamped. An IMS precision basket is the cheapest change that reduces shot-to-shot variance on a machine that already grinds well. If your basket size is not obvious, measure the portafilter with calipers rather than trusting a listing, since 54 mm and 58 mm baskets look identical in a photograph and neither will seat in the other.

What is the filter brewing ratio chart?

Filter ratios are quoted as coffee to water by weight. The table gives water weight in grams, which equals millilitres closely enough for brewing at room temperature. The final column is roughly how many 240 ml mugs the 1:16 brew fills, allowing for the water the grounds and paper hold back.

A Hario V60 02 is usually brewed at 1:16 with a 20 to 22 g dose and a total brew time between two and a half and three and a half minutes. A Chemex uses the same ratio with a coarser grind, because its bonded filter is thick and slows the flow on its own. A French press is normally brewed slightly stronger, around 1:15, because the metal mesh lets oils and fine particles through and the extra body carries the concentration well. In every case the water weight is measured, not poured by eye from a kettle, because a 30 g error on a 320 g brew is a full step of strength.

How does ratio interact with grind, strength and extraction?

Strength is how much dissolved coffee is in the drink, expressed as total dissolved solids. Extraction yield is what percentage of the dry coffee ended up dissolved, with a conventional target window of 18 to 22%. Ratio and grind move these two numbers in different directions, which is the whole reason dialling in feels confusing until you separate them.

The practical order of operations is: fix the dose to your basket, fix the ratio to the style you want, then move grind alone until the taste is right. Sour and thin means the coffee is under-extracted, so grind finer or raise the brew temperature. Bitter, drying and ashy means it is over-extracted, so grind coarser or lower the temperature. Change one thing per shot. Two changes at once means you learn nothing from the result, and the extraction troubleshooting chart exists precisely because people change three things and then cannot get back to where they started.

Why do dark and light roasts want different ratios?

Roasting drives off moisture, develops sugars and makes the bean structure more porous and more brittle. A darker roast has been through more of that, so it is more soluble and gives up its material faster. That is why a dark roast espresso often peaks somewhere between 1:1.5 and 1:2: push it to 1:3 and you dissolve the harsh, drying compounds that live at the end of extraction.

A light roast is denser and less soluble, so the same 1:2 that flatters a dark roast frequently lands sour and hollow. The common fixes are all in the same direction: a longer ratio at 1:2.5 or 1:3, a higher brew temperature near the top of the 90 to 96 C range, a finer grind, or all three. This is also why light roast espresso is much more demanding of the grinder, because a fine grind on a dense bean magnifies any inconsistency in particle size.

Freshness moves the same lever. Coffee between roughly 7 and 21 days off roast is still releasing carbon dioxide, and that gas disrupts the water flow through the puck. Very fresh coffee often needs a slightly coarser grind and behaves as though the ratio ran short. Record the roast date next to the ratio, because the same bag at day 8 and at day 25 behaves like two different coffees.

What do you need to actually use these ratios?

Two things: a scale with 0.1 g resolution and a timer. The Maestri House S2 Espresso Coffee Scale with Timer covers both for the price of two bags of beans, and the BOOKOO flow rate scale adds live grams per second, which shows a shot channelling while it is still running rather than afterwards. Any kitchen scale that reads in whole grams is not enough, because a one gram error on an 18 g dose is a 5.5% change in the ratio before you have touched anything else.

The other requirement is a grinder that can hold a setting. The Baratza Encore ESP Coffee Grinder is the usual entry point because it has genuine espresso-range micro-adjustment and published parts diagrams, and the MiiCoffee DF64 II adds stepless adjustment with near-zero retention, which matters if you switch between beans and want the ratio you recorded last week to still mean something. Grind quality sets the ceiling on what any ratio can deliver, so if the budget is fixed, protect the grinder line before the machine line.

How do you record ratios so you can repeat them?

Write down five numbers per shot: dose in grams, yield in grams, time in seconds, grind setting, and a one word verdict. That is enough to reconstruct any shot months later, and it turns dialling in from a memory exercise into a lookup. Most people who describe espresso as inconsistent are actually running an unrecorded process, where each morning starts from whatever the grinder was left on.

When you open a new bag, start at the ratio that worked for the closest previous coffee, not at a default. A medium roast blend that worked at 1:2 and 27 seconds is a far better starting point for the next medium roast blend than the factory setting. The dial-in guide gives a step-by-step sequence for the first three shots from a new bag, and the grind size chart gives the micron ranges each brew method sits in, so you know roughly where to start before you taste anything.