What is the most common espresso brewing ratio?

Question

I’m working on getting the brewing process of the espresso correct. What, it is customary in the current surveys, would be the most usual espresso brewing ratio?

Answer 1

According to a poll that collected answers from almost 40 thousand people, the most popular espresso brewing ratio is two to one. In other words, the weight of the liquid espresso is two times more than the weight of the ground coffee.

Comments

I'm one who pulls a longer shot--usually a ~3:1 ratio of coffee output to grounds.   You asked why?   Largely it's because it gives me more coffee to enjoy!   I use a Flair, so reloading it to make a full double shot is a bit time-consuming...and 2x the caffeine is too much for me anyway--it'll give me palpitations!   So I make a hearty lungo that I can sip on for a while.  And I make a lot of Americanos and Cortados, so similarly it either stretches the volume of the drink more, OR I can play ratios and have a stronger 'coffee flavor' in my Americanos and Cortados by upping the espresso ratio in those drinks without sacrificing overall drink volume too much.  

Lungo is just an amazing way to enjoy coffee each morning. And the fact that it has a little less of a "bite" is nice too.  I compare it to whisky. Neat is a good way to enjoy whisky, but I prefer to add a dash of chilled water to mellow it out! It brings out the flavors. And I think a lungo has more depth of flavor and "time on my tongue" than the wham-bam flavor shock of a standard straight shot!

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Lance is pushing longer shots pretty hard on his channel and I think his reasoning makes perfect sense. Yes, equipment is better now. But there is still subpar equipment out there, and coarser grounds extract way more evenly. Similarly, when you have equipment that is quite good, favorable extraction dynamics still play in your advantage even if you're losing body. I never drink anything at 1:2. Most shots in fact are more in the direction of 1:4 or 1:5 (and I lengthen that with fresh water afterwards still) and this just tastes so amazing that I never have the desire to go down

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I participated, but I've gotten all of my info from YouTube, which pushes 18/36 in 24-30secs pretty hard

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Oohhh any plans to release an anonymised data set?

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Bit of feedback on the survey: I‘m a home barista and the way I pull the shot is pretty different depending on if I pull an espresso for a milk drink or to drink on its own. Short ratio (2:1) and more ground coffee for milk drinks and longer ratios (2.5-3:1) for espresso to drink on its own. While we could specify the range of acceptable brew times which for me where between 15 secs (when I make turbos) to 35 secs (when making a 3:1 light roast espresso). I don’t know how to tease this out of the data, but I‘d assume than many home baristas do something similar in that they change their brewing approach to the drink they are making.

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Maybe turbo shots were skewing the brew ratio data?

It's certainly a recent finding that helped making dial-ins more forgiving...

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My reasoning for pulling longer shots:

Equipment: Breville Bambino Plus, Breville Smart Grinder Pro

My wife and I both use our espresso machine and my wife will absolutely not pull out a scale to measure the yield, especially in the morning before work. My compromise for taste and convenience has been to dial in based on the yield of the double shot button on my breville which yields about 47 grams, a 1:2.5 ratio at 17g.

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A lot of the talk is about how the mean is changing, but from the data it looks like the biggest change is often the spread. This is important because, eg, the 35-44 cohort aren't making an average coffee, everyone in that group is making their own coffee. In all cases across all groups, the 2:1 ratio is clearly dominant. What changes is the size of the minority that makes it much shorter or longer. In other words: the mean isn't the only thing that matters, the mode show that there's really very little change between all the variables looked at.