Notes: A Little Soulver Coffee Calculator

site/notes/2025/01/Little Soulver Coffee Calculator.md

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+---
+title: A Little Soulver Coffee Calculator
+subtitle: >
+    One of the many ways I use [a great app](https://soulver.app) in day-to-day life!
+
+date: 2025-01-17T20:21:00-0700
+
+image:
+    cdn: soulver.png
+
+tags:
+    - tools
+    - Apple
+    - macOS
+    - iOS
+
+---
+
+One of my favorite little Mac and iOS tools is [Soulver][soulver]. Billed as part notepad and part calculator, you could think of it as a *vastly* simpler spreadsheet that uses text instead of cells. I use it all the time for little calculations, whether for work or, more commonly, for things like running pace calculations or little things around the house.[^notes] For example, my coffee calculator.
+
+[soulver]: https://soulver.app
+
+![](https://cdn.chriskrycho.com/images/soulver.png "Soulver open on an iPhone, showing base coffee and base water ratios, then a second set of calculations which use those ratios to figure out how much a different coffee weight requires in water input and what it will yield.")
+
+I make pour-over coffee pretty much every morning (the rare exception being when I go off to a coffee shop and get some espresso), and I have baseline recipes dialed in long since. However, sometimes I have some random weight of beans left over when hitting the end of a bag. Unless it happens to be a pretty clean ratio to one of the weights I use as the starting point for any given coffee, I need to do some math to figure out how much water I ought to use and roughly how many ounces of drinkable coffee “yield” I ought to expect as a result. It's not perfect, of course, but it's a great starting point.
+
+This little calculator is something you could do many other ways, but Soulver makes it *really* easy. You can [download this particular sheet directly][calculator] if you like, but of course you can also see here how easy it was to make! So if you’re on macOS or iOS, you should absolutely snag [Soulver][soulver]: it is inexpensive and invaluable.
+
+[calculator]: https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/resources/Coffee.slvr
+
+[^notes]: The Math Notes feature in the latest versions of the Notes app on Apple platforms can do a subset of what Soulver can do, but it is *much* less robust, especially in terms of its ability to interpret equations, name variables, and so on. If you have liked Math Notes, you will *love* Soulver.