Being familiar with Espresso Machine Cup Size

Why don’t I get twelve cups of coffee from my 12-cup brewer?

It’s the holidays and the extended family is staying at your place. You brew a full pot in your brand new 12-cup Cuisinart. Relatives jockey for their morning joe, but only the first five in line get their fill. The pot is empty. Urgh! You knew you’d have a houseful — that’s why you bought the large brewer. What went wrong?

A “Cup” of Coffee Does not Mean 8 Ounces

Coffee maker cup sizes are not standardized. The number of ounces that make up a “cup” varies by manufacturer. The same company can even have models that differ amongst themselves.

For example, in a Bodum 3-cup French press, a “cup” measures 4 oz. But if you are using the 8-cup Bodum French press, a “cup” comes in at 4.25 oz. But wait! Bodum also makes vacuum brewers and a “cup” in one of those is around 5.7 oz. Confused yet?

Professionals even disagree when attempting to name essentially the most typically employed cup measurement. Votes are split among 4 oz., 5 oz., and 6 oz.

One particular factor is for positive: a “cup” of coffee will not fill up the typical 12 oz. coffee mug identified in most American properties.

Ounces per Cup in Popular Coffee Maker Brands

Bunn: 5 oz

Bodum (French Press): 4 oz to 4.25 oz

Bodum (Vacuum): 5.7 oz

Capresso: 5 oz

Cona: 5.5 oz to 5.7 oz

Cuisinart: 5 oz

Krups: 5 oz

Proctor Silex: 4.5 oz

Technivorm: 4.2 oz

Zojirushi: 5.1 oz

To complicate items even further, coffee brewing directions regularly let you know just how much ground coffee to add for each 6 ounces of water. You will see this metric on the back of a can of Maxwell Residence too as published by coffee authorities for example the National Coffee Association of U.S.A., Inc. Further proof in the lack of standardization.

Metric Conversion

So what’s up with the folks at Zojirushi? Did they sit down and decide that a cup of coffee should be 5.1 oz (5.0721, to be exact)?

Coffee brewers designed and marketed outside of the US frequently start out with metric measurements. The brewer capacity will be in liters, and the corresponding number of cups will be a nice round figure in milliliters.

When these brewers are sold inside the U.S., the cup capacity remains the exact same, however the milliliters are converted to ounces – and regularly wind up as fractional ounces. Which appear weird.

Zojirushi is a Japanese housewares company. Their 10-cup Fresh Brew thermal coffee maker has a capacity of 1.5 liters. That comes to 150 ml per cup. But when we convert the Fresh Brew to ounces, the 1.5 liters becomes a total capacity of 50.721 ounces – or 5.721 ounces per cup. Still weird — but understandable.

Supersize It

An additional factor to think about when realizing that your 12-cup brewer serves much less than six individuals, will be the tendency of Americans to supersize. We adore our SUVs and our Large Gulps. Coffee is no exception, as evidenced by the lately introduced “Trenta” size at Starbucks. The Trenta holds a whopping 31 oz, a full 11 oz much more than Starbuck’s already-huge “Venti” size.

“Bigger” is really a trend in our society, and it skews our expectations. Instinctively, we want a “cup” of coffee to fill up our preferred ceramic mug or our insulated travel mug. And those everyday items are Large.

Our household coffee makers have not adjusted to these expectations. Cup volume is more in line with historically smaller serving sizes and in line with a global perspective. (You won’t find a Trenta-sized anything in a traditional European coffee house.)

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