The idea of a ratio when brewing coffee is straight forward. As a general rule, you will want a 16:1 ratio, or 16 oz of water to 1 oz of ground coffee. There is even a term to describe this and it's called the "golden ratio". Recently, I purchased a new Technivorm Moccamaster home coffee brewer and I was excited to give it a try. If you are unfamiliar with the Moccamaster, it's a hand made premium coffee maker thats claim to fame is keeping your brew water at a very consistent temp and the filter slows the saturation time down so you get the ideal brew time. They are pretty sweet brewers. I wanted to make a pot of coffee with this new brewer, so I got my trusty scale out, measured out 1 oz of coffee, and then brewed 16 oz of filtered water. The first cup was disappointing. I then looked in the manual for the Moccamaster to see what they recommended for a brew ratio and their advise was basically a 16:1 ratio. Time to experiment. As I've mentioned in other posts, it all comes down to taste. I decided to brew my next pot with more coffee and the same amount of water - still not right. After some additional experimentation, I settled in at a 13:1 ratio and the cup was absolutely outstanding. The lesson I keep learning over and over is that coffee flavors can sometimes be allusive and it's best to dial in a recipe until you get it right where you want it. For example, I have had what seems like the perfect recipe for espresso on a particular blend I use. However, after adjusting the grind, weight and yield it still wasn't quite right. Finally, I decided to adjust the extraction time down and when I got to a 21 second brew time it was perfect. If you use the same coffee every time then you might only need to tweak your recipe slightly. However, if you mix it up often then each time you have to start with the golden ratio and then fine tune to your taste. Fortunately, that is the fun part. -Van