It’s easy to avoid using a thermometer to get correct water temperatures for coffee or different kinds of tea - you can mix the right proportions of boiling and cool water instead. It’s easier to see that using Celsius than Fahrenheit - boiling water is 100C, room-temp is about 20C, so
3 parts boiling and 1 part room temp = (3/4100) + (1/420) = 75+5 = 80C = 176F = Green Tea.
9 parts boiling and 1 part room temp = 90 + 2 = 92C = 197.6F = close enough to French Press.
I used an electric kettle with temperature settings for a couple of years until it died. It was wonderful. The cheaper kettles mostly just do boiling and maybe “avoid boiling dry”, until I either find a good cheap kettle or give up, I’m mostly using the microwave or pots on the stove to boil water, and doing proportions.
(Edit reason: Getting paragraphs right, and BB won’t let me do that without a reason because it’s not enough of a change.)
I just used a kitchen scale to measure out 465 ml worth of beans, ground them up, put them in a nut-milk bag (or whatever that thing is called), and then put that bag in a 2 liter pitcher. So, slightly more water and 110ml less grounds than the recipe called for…
The problem is this: the bag of grounds is so large that it barely fits into the pitcher. As such, it seems like a tremendous amount of coffee and frankly not enough water for that amount of beans to properly soak in…
Am I’m just being scared by squeezing the nut-bag’s worth of grounds into a container barley larger than it? Again, I used less than the full volume of grounds and more water!
Are the measurements right? Thoughts? Thanks in advance for the help…
Hmm, The recipe calls for 570 ml of coffee grounds (15 aeropress scoops, which would be 38 ml each, or approximately 2 and half Tablespoons. A strange measurement, but okay.)
1 Tablespoon of anything is 14.7 ml, and according to this chart, one tablespoon of ground coffee weighs 5.3 g.
So 570 ml is 39 tablespoons of coffee, which weighs about 205 grams. (Thus, 1 ml of coffee grounds weighs about 0.36 g). Yes, 1 ml of water weighs a gram, but water is denser than a lot of things, including coffee grounds.
If you actually put in 465 mg of ground beans instead of 465 ml of grounds, you would end up using 1.29 liters of coffee grounds, which might well overflow your container.
Disclaimer, I have not actually tried this,and I don’t have a scale at the moment. Call it an informed speculation.
I’m so cracked out of my mind on caffeine right now!!! I’d regret my late night confusion between weight and volume but the results have been heart-attack inducingly excellent!!!
