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Comment by pdog | Hacker News Reader

> And they see more and more American consumers willing to spend $8 or $12 for a cup of joe, which would offset their high costs of production.

A single pound of coffee makes about 50 cups. Who seriously pays this much?

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Also had a wtf reaction to that number. "Cup of joe" implies black coffee, or at most cream or milk added. The most expensive cup of black coffee I've had is one from a vacuum style system in Japan ($10~). Pour over cups in shops are usually on the expensive side due to labor, and are $4-5.

Espresso based milk drinks at a boutique shop are 3.50-5.00.

Obviously you can order ridiculous Starbucks drinks that add up, but all things considered, a $12 cup of joe is a pretty rare purchase for an American.

I think you're overthinking the meaning here. I'm sure that "cup of joe" is used simply to vary the vocabulary used in the article, rather than the specify a cup of black coffee.

Well, we all know how terrible using a thesaurus is.

> A single pound of coffee makes about 50 cups of coffee.

What method are you using to make 50 cups from a pound?!

I get 20-25 from pourover; slightly less from aeropress.

A standard cup of coffee is six ounces.

Most people use too high a coffee-to-water ratio when making coffee.

I think the problem is the notion of "cups." When I make 8 cups in my automatic, I drink about 4 cups - our mug size is about 2 "cups."

Baaah!

How can it be called wrong if they like it? I like my espresso as thick as I can get it out the machine. Tamp the hell out of it, over pressure the boiler (12 bar) and go for it. I'm sure I'll damage the machine doing this but after 10 years it still seems ok. The Rancillio Silvia is well suited to this brewing method.

Espresso, sure. Good drip or pourover coffee is generally brewed by weight with approximately 16 units of water to 1 unit of coffee.

There are 60-75 tablespoons in a pound of coffee. Which should make 30+ cups of coffee. 2 tablespoons per cup. If you're needing substantially more than that in your Aeropress you're probably being somewhat wasteful. Possibly your grind is coarser than it needs to be.

Coffee is dosed by weight, not volume. A 1:15 to 1:20 ratio of coffee to water is ideal - assuming 300ml cups, that's at most 30 cups per pound.

Ideal is entirely dependend on brewmethod, bean, preference, and age of the roast. I very rarely go above 1:15, and often closer to 1:10 for pourover. For espresso it's a different beast, but usually something like 18-20g pr cup.

I don't understand. You're saying that when I measure two tablespoons and brew a lovely cup of coffee every morning that what... I'm in an artificial reality? I'm hallucinating?

Your numbers sound about right to me. I use 25g per mug. There's around 450g/lb so 18 mugs per lb. That's pour over with a Chemix.

I get just under 40 cups/pound from cold brew. I use around 8-9oz of coffee beans (plus a bit of salt) with a little under a gallon of water.

I was in Starbucks the other day and someone ordered an iced latte with 11 shots. At about $1/shot plus cost of the latte it was about $14.

Eleven shots??

One for each homie that died of a heart attack for attempting this.

Reminds me of the Futurama episode where Fry purchases 100 cups of coffee and momentarily has super human hummingbird-esq abilities.

One of Keurig's cofounders had caffeine poisoning after drinking like 30-40 cups a day back in like 1995.

He then, in 1997, got pushed out by the company, with no equity, and sold the patents to the company for $50,000.

Pretty rough

I drink coffee regularly, but I don't think I could even get to 15 cups a day without serious issues.

Dave Grohl, of the Foo Fighters, ended up going to the hospital because of drinking too much coffee/caffeine.

http://www.nme.com/news/music/them-crooked-vultures-14-12945...

https://youtu.be/fhdCslFcKFU?t=111

My stomach would give out before the rest of me.

I think most people would be just fine with 11 shots. The lethal dose of caffeine is like 100 cups.

What luck that this was the 12th person to attempt 11 shots at once.

~700mg of caffeine. Sounds pretty normal.

I'm kidding. In one drink, that's a 'seeing God' amount.

Except that's not a "cup of joe".

No joke, they shouldn't even be allowed to sell that much caffeine to one person. I'm surprised Starbucks' lawyers haven't prevented that.

I was astonished, honestly. The barista said it wasn't that unusual.

Who knows, maybe they just sip it all day in which case it's still a lot of caffeine but probably tolerable. A lot of people will drink 4-6 8oz coffees over a workday, which works out about the same.

That's 400oz of water to 16oz of coffee, or a 1:25 ratio of coffee to water. Keurig might pull that off.

Specialty pour-over coffee is usually between a 1:15 and 1:10 ratio.

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