How Much Coffee Do I Need?
How much coffee to buy is a pretty tricky question and one that we get asked all the time.
The short answer is, it all depends. It depends on how you make your coffee, it depends on how much coffee you drink and it depends on how many people are drinking coffee. Between myself and my wife, we drink a lot of coffee in our house. I drink about 4-5 cups per day and my wife drinks about 3 or 4. Over the course of a week, that’s somewhere between 50 – 65 cups of coffee, and that’s not counting friends and family calling by, all of whom love the coffee in our house. Given that we tend to double up on making coffee, and that we mostly use a Bialetti Moka Express stovetop coffee maker, which takes about 25 grams of coffee for 2 very strong coffees (it’s a 6 cup coffee maker but we split it into two cups), it’s no surprise that we go through a kilo of coffee beans every 12 days or so.
This is probably more than average. Most houseswill use less coffee than this and a kilo of beans will last at least 2 weeks. It really depends on how much coffee you use per cup . A great thing about coffee as good as Dreambeans is that you can take your coffee as strong as you like because there’s absolutely no bitterness. You can really load up on the strength and the flavour will remain rich and true to the last drop. If you haven’t tried Dreambeans before, try making your coffee a good bit stronger than usual to really experience the high notes of the aroma and the flavour. There’s absolutely no bitterness, I promise you.
If you use an espresso machine you’ll probably use coffee at a rate similar to us. A cafetiere, unless you really load it up, will use less. A percolator or a pour-over maker will use a good bit less.
For me, it’s a trade off between the convenience of a 1 kg bag and making sure that the coffee remains fresh after the bag is opened. We tend to pour half the bag into the hopper of the grinder and put the other half in an airtight jar in the kitchen which keeps it fresh while we’re using the first half. This way, a kilo bag will stay fresh the whole way through.
The big brand coffee companies will tell you that coffee beans will stay fresh for up to two to three months after the bag is opened. This is nonsense. Two to three weeks is about the limit for beans staying fresh in a opened bag. After three weeks, you’ll start to notice the high notes and the subtlety in the flavour are disappearing. After about 4 weeks, even your Dreambeans coffee will start to taste like ordinary coffee. Other people mightn’t notice, but you will! If you aren’t using a 1kg bag within 4 weeks, maybe you would be better buying 2 x 500g bags or 4 x 250g?