Why don’t I get twelve cups of coffee from my 12 cup brewer?
It’s a vacation, and a bigger family stays with you. You will boil a full pot in your brand new 12 cup Cuisinart. A relative jockey for his morning jazz, but only the top five in a row fill up. The pot is empty. Urgent! You knew you would have a house – that’s why you bought a great brewer. What happened wrong?
A “cup” of coffee does not mean 8 ounces
Coffee cup sizes are not standardized. The number of ounces that make up a “cup” depends on the manufacturer. The same company may even have different models.
In the French press of Bodum, for example, the size of a “cup” is 4 ounces. But if you use an 8-cup French Bodum press, the “cup” is 4.25 ounces. But wait! Bodum also produces vacuum brewers, and the “cup” in one of them is about 5.7 ounces. Still confused?
Experts don’t even agree when trying to name most commonly used cup measurement. Votes are split between 4 oz., 5 oz. And 6 oz.
One thing is clear: a “cup” of coffee does not fill a typical 12 oz. a cup of coffee is found in most American homes.
Ounces per cup in popular coffee maker brands
- Bunn: 5 ounces
- Bodum (French press): 4 to 4.25 ounces
- Bodum (vacuum): 5.7 ounces
- Capers: 5 ounces
- Kona: 5.5 to 5.7 ounces
- Cuisinart: 5 ounces
- Croup: 5 oz
- Proctor Silex: 4.5 ounces
- Technivorm: 4.2 ounces
- Zojirushi: 5.1 ounces
To make matters worse, the coffee-making instructions often state how much ground coffee needs to be added to each 6 ounces of water. You’ll see this metric at the back of the Maxwell House can, and it’s also published by coffee authorities such as the U.S. National Coffee Association. Another proof of the lack of standardization.
Metric conversion
So what about the people of Zojirushi? Did they sit down and decide that a cup of coffee should be 5.1 ounces (more precisely, 5.0721)?
Coffee brewers designed and sold outside the U.S. often begin to measure metric measurements. The capacity of the brewery will be in liters and the corresponding number of glasses will be a nice round number in milliliters.
When these brewers are sold in the U.S., the cup capacity remains the same, but the milliliters are converted to ounces – and are often partial. Which look weird.
Zojirushi is a Japanese household goods company. Their 10-cup Fresh Brew thermal coffee machine has a capacity of 1.5 liters. This is for a 150 ml cup. However, when we convert Fresh Brew to ounces, the total volume of 1.5 liters will be 50,721 ounces – or 5,721 ounces per cup. Still weird – but understandable.
Supersize It
Another thing to keep in mind when understanding that your 12-cup brewery serves less than six people is the American propensity for large sizes. We love our SUVs and the Big Gulps. Coffee is no exception, as evidenced by the size of the Trenta recently introduced by Starbucks. Trenta has a huge 31 oz., 11 oz. More than Starbuck’s huge Venti size.
“Bigger” is a trend in our society and it distorts our expectations. We instinctively want a “cup” of coffee to fill our favorite ceramic cup or insulated travel cup. And those everyday things are BIG.
Our household coffee makers did not meet these expectations. The volume of the cups is more in line with historically smaller dish sizes and in line with the global perspective. (You won’t find a Trenta size nothing in a traditional European café.)
Divide to conquer
The fact that the number of cups you can fill from one cup of brewed coffee is very different from the number listed in the ad is actually a common source of consumer dissatisfaction with your coffee machine purchase.
However, to meet the expectations regarding the size of the cup of the coffee maker, only a little fragmentation is needed.
When buying a coffee maker, I recommend completely ignoring the advertised number of cups.
Rather, pay attention to the maximum number of ounces that a water tank can hold. Then measure the capacity in ounces of the cup of coffee or cup you normally use. Divide the tank capacity by the cup capacity. This indicates how many times you can fill your favorite cup – or expect a real serving.
Remember:
- The number of “cups” advertised by the brewer indicates the portion size, not the unit of measure
- The dish sizes for the coffee makers are much smaller than we expected
When you need to feed the crowd or fill your travel cups for a long ride, keep these things in mind and everyone will get their satiety.
