AeroPress Coffee Ratio

There are two legitimate answers to "what's the AeroPress ratio," and which one applies depends on which recipe tradition you're following. For a standard, drink-it-as-brewed cup, 1:15 is the balanced starting point, with 1:12 for a stronger pour and 1:17 for a lighter one, all built around AeroPress's typical 16g dose. For a concentrate recipe, brewed at closer to 1:6 or 1:8 and then topped up with hot water afterward, the numbers on this page's chart don't apply at all — the concentrate math is separate, below.

The standard-strength numbers

At a 16g dose, 1:15 works out to about 240ml of water — one full chamber for most AeroPress models, which max out around 250ml before the plunger seal has nowhere left to go. That ceiling is part of why AeroPress doesn't scale up to batch sizes the way a French press or drip machine does: one AeroPress makes one serving, full stop, and a second cup means a second brew.

Inverted method, same ratio

Standard and inverted AeroPress (plunger assembled upside down, brewed before flipping onto the cup) use the exact same coffee-to-water math — inverting changes the timing of when the filter first touches water and gives you a longer, more controllable steep before pressing, but it doesn't change how many grams of coffee a given volume of water calls for. If you've read that inverted AeroPress needs a different ratio, that's conflating a technique change with a ratio change; they're independent.

The concentrate recipe is a different question

Some AeroPress recipes deliberately brew strong — as concentrated as 1:6 to 1:8 with the full 16g dose landing in well under 150ml — then dilute the result with hot water or milk after pressing to reach drinking strength, the same logic cold brew concentrate uses. A 16g dose at 1:7 produces about 112ml of concentrate, which then gets topped up with another 120-150ml of hot water to reach a normal cup's volume and strength. This is worth knowing specifically because a concentrate recipe and a standard recipe can use the identical 16g of coffee and still taste completely different, purely from when and how much water gets added.

Scaling the dose down or up

AeroPress recipes commonly run smaller doses than other filter methods — 11g to 18g is typical range, against a pour-over's 20g-plus — because the single-chamber size caps how much water fits regardless of dose. If you prefer a bigger single cup, raising the dose while holding the ratio constant gets you more coffee in the same 240ml ceiling, up to the point the grounds bed itself gets too tall for even extraction; past roughly 20g in a standard chamber, water starts channeling around the edges of the puck rather than through it evenly.

Which preset to reach for

Move toward 1:12 for a fuller, more filter-coffee-like cup, especially with a medium or dark roast. Move toward 1:17 with a light, delicate single origin where you want clarity over body. The ratio calculator handles both the standard and concentrate math, and if the cup tastes off rather than simply too strong or weak at any of these settings, that's a dial-in question, not a ratio one.

For plunge pressure, bloom time, and the paper-versus-metal filter choice that changes body more than almost anything else on this brewer, see the full AeroPress guide.