2. Use a Scale, Not a Scoop

Now that “nerd” has gone from a slur to a compliment, it frees you to be more compulsive about how you make coffee. To start, coffee should be measured in grams, using a digital scale. It doesn’t have to be expensive. You can buy a perfectly functional digital scale for less than $15.

This suggestion shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody who has bought a baking cookbook recently. For years, pastry chefs have weighed their ingredients in grams, and now it’s standard for all corners of a restaurant kitchen. If you’ve baked using a digital scale, you know it is very easy to use and delivers better results with less mess or waste.

And it’s not just the coffee you should weigh. Ideally, you would also weigh your water, or at least measure volume in liters, rather than cups or ounces. Here’s why: When you brew coffee, you’re working with a ratio, a certain amount of coffee to water that you can scale up or down depending on how much you want to make. Most Americans do this with scoops and cups, meaning the cup measurements marked on the coffee machine. But a cup on a coffee machine is usually five ounces (not eight), and a scoop is arbitrary (there is no standard measurement). It’s a messy system.

If you are going to the trouble of creating that ratio every morning, you may as well do it right. A good benchmark is 55 grams of coffee to 1,000 grams (or one liter) of water, which is the Golden Cup Ratio of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Don’t let the metric system scare you; it actually makes doing any math much easier.

As for the scale itself, an inexpensive one is all you need; be sure it has a capacity of at least two kilograms. But if you want to nudge open the door of coffee obsession, consider the Hario V60 scale ($60), which is accurate up to 0.01 of a gram, has a built-in timer and comes in Death Star matte black.

By the way, the best place to store beans is in a cool, dark, airtight place, and not in your grinder, which presumably sits out on the counter. Keeping the beans in the bag in a cabinet is fine. Take them out as needed, weigh them and then grind.