What is a cup?

What is a cup?

Instructions for cooking, baking, making drinks, especially for drip coffee makers, tell you to use X grams/ounces of coffee for a “cup”. Unless you prepare food and drink regularly, you may not know that the cup referred to rarely measures the standard 240 ml. or 8 US fluid ounces. There are also a metric cup and an Imperial (UK) cup, but since Canada and the US use the 240 ml/8 oz. cup, we will stick with that.

So why do we need a definition of a cup? The above is one reason, but the real reason is that water tanks on drip coffee makers are divided into “cups” which rarely are 240 ml. People often buy coffee makers based on how many cups it says it will make. If you regularly make coffee for a group, whose members may have more than one coffee at a time, will you buy a 12-cup drip coffee maker or an 8-cupper. Both may hold exactly the same amount of water, but you don’t know that.

My drip coffee maker (which I bought because it heats water to between 195F and 205F) is marked for 8 cups and holds 1,400 ml. of water while 8 standard cups are 1,920 ml. I therefore have adjusted the amount of coffee I use from 13.3 gms per standard cup, to 9.7 gms for each of my “cups”.-

You will have to determine the size of your drip coffee maker’s “cups” by measuring how many millilitres it holds to a particular level, e.g., 8 cups as I did, compare that to the standard for 8 cups and adjust the amount of coffee you need accordingly.

I have made the following table for my drip coffee maker so I have the right amount of coffee for any size of brew. I’m using the 18:1 water:coffee proportion, but you can adjust that to your taste.

 If you want to download my Excel file, click on this link: https://spaces.hightail.com/space/iq2X2wsEtO

Enter the volume of your drip maker’s cup in the highlighted cell (175 ml for me), hit enter, and the table will automatically calculate the amount of coffee for each cup level.