For 500 g of brewing water at a 1:16 coffee-to-water ratio, use 31.25 g of dry coffee. Divide water by 16; for the other direction, multiply coffee by 16. The ratio is your recipe choice. It is not a promise about strength, extraction or finished drink volume.

Scale a recipe

Choose which quantity you know. When solving for water, the known quantity is always dry coffee in grams. When solving for coffee, enter water in grams or use a clearly labeled volume option. The batch multiplier scales both coffee and water together.

Read 1:16 in the right order

In this worksheet, 1:16 means one part dry coffee to sixteen parts input water by mass. For example:

Dry coffee Input water Coffee:water
15 g 240 g 1:16
30 g 480 g 1:16
31.25 g 500 g 1:16
60 g 960 g 1:16

dry coffee = input water / water parts

input water = dry coffee × water parts

Breville’s coffee-to-water primer treats ratio as one brewing variable alongside method and grind. Change the ratio field to the recipe you intend to use; the tool does not select a best ratio for a bean or brewer.

A cup label is not a measurement

The custom-cup option asks for the volume of your cup in milliliters. Two 250 mL cups give 500 mL of input water in the worksheet. A coffee machine’s cup marking or a mug’s advertised size can refer to a different quantity, so do not substitute those labels without checking what they mean.

One US fluid ounce is 29.5735295625 mL. It measures volume, while an ounce of coffee by weight measures mass. The conversion follows the US liquid-volume relationships in NIST Handbook 44 . This tool does not accept a dry-coffee weight in fluid ounces.

For volume-based water entries, it approximates 1 mL of water as 1 g. That is a kitchen-planning approximation, not an exact density conversion at every temperature. Weigh the water if you want to reproduce a mass-based recipe closely.

Input water and finished yield are separate

Grounds retain some water, and different brewing methods and equipment leave different amounts behind. A 500 g water input therefore does not establish a 500 g drink yield. This worksheet makes no automatic retention or extraction correction.

The Specialty Coffee Association’s discussion of brewing and beverage ratios distinguishes input-water ratios used for drip or immersion from the beverage-mass ratio commonly used for espresso. Use the espresso shot notebook when the number you measured is liquid espresso in the cup.

For hot-over-ice coffee, split recipe water between the kettle and ice with the iced-coffee worksheet . For guests, the carafe planner starts from usable finished coffee volume, a separate planning question.

Method and sources

Arithmetic and unit handling reviewed October 15, 2026. We did not brew, taste or measure a coffee. The examples are reproducible recipe calculations; you supply your own ratio, quantities and cup measurement. Entries are neither stored nor uploaded.