My Coffee Pot Lied
We used to wonder why when we poured out a 12 cup coffee maker carafe that we never got 12 cups of coffee. We get the same question from our Hula Daddy farm visitors. We now know the answer.
On every automatic coffee maker the manufacturer puts measuring marks for the number of cups. If you buy a french press, Clever, siphon, Cafe Solo etc. the box says how many cups it makes. If you think they mean 8 ounce cups, you are a victim of a marketing scam.
All coffee maker manufacturers refuse to use an 8 ounce standard for coffee. Their justification is that a long time ago china coffee sets used to come with 5 and 6 ounce coffee cups. The real reason is that using a fake cup measurement makes their coffee makers look bigger.So if you buy a 12 cup automatic drip coffee maker and expect to get 96 fluid ounces of coffee, you are going to be disappointed when you only get, at most, 72 ounces of brewed coffee, which is 9 cups.
Even worse, some coffee maker manufactures use 4 or 4.5 or 5 or 5.5 ounce “cups.” Customers get fooled by these phony cup definitions and add enough grounds for eight ounce cups. They wind up with extra strong coffee and don’t know why.
You can’t rely on the numbers on the brewer box or on your brewer carafe. The first time your use your brewer fill the carafe with water to the top mark and pour the water into a measuring cup to get the real number of 8 ounce cups. If there are cup numbers on your carafe, divide by the number next to the top mark, then you will know how many “cups” each mark represents. Now you can brew the right amount of coffee for that many cups.
