I've always liked a nice cup of coffee and I've mostly been a french press, aeropress, or drip machine person for most of my life. I would drink the stuff at work out of the big filter coffee machines which were loaded with a dark roast made drinkable with some milk or what passed for milk (powdered stuff) in the more automatic machines.
I had a dirt cheap drip machine at home one of those sub 20 bucks glass carafe bubble pump machines with the plastic filter basket and a french press knocking about. Sometime in the pandemic I invested in a nicer bean to cup drip machine. Not an outrageously expensive device I think it was a couple of hundred bucks but it offered the option to grind beans fresh and then make a nice pot of coffee for me to then enjoy throughout my day during lockdown working from my sofa. I went with a machine with a thermal carafe rather than a hotplate as everyone that's tasted coffee out of those hotplate glass jug drip machines knows if it just sits there all day on the hot plate it gets burnt fast.
Going from preground beans to fresh ground (but still store bought) beans was a huge step up in terms of flavor and freshness and just experiencing how much of a difference just having a cheap ceramic burr grinder making filter coffee made me wonder about maybe trying out a few more options.
I started watching coffee youtubers like James hoffman Lance Hedrick and Morgan Eckroth my youtube shorts started to fill with coffee making videos.
So sometime later I invested in a dedicated grinder a Fellow Ode Gen 2 which is a flat burr grinder aimed at making filter coffee.
Quick terminology primer Burrs are the part of a grinder that do the grinding they come in various types and grades. You have your super cheap blade grinders, these use a metal blade to just smash what ever you put in it to pieces. They are not very consistent about the size of those pieces, these make fine spice grinders but they're not really suitable for coffee grinding. They can do it but you are basically getting everything from very small pieces of coffee to very large pieces of coffee which isn't what you want. Ideally depending on the type of coffee you are making you want a reasonably consistent grind size so all the bits roughly in the same range and you want to be able to set that range with some level of precision.
Grind size is one of the parameters you can tweak to change how the coffee brews and so you want a good degree of control of what range of sizes your grinder is kicking out.
A better but also still cheapish type of grinder is the conical burr grinder. The burrs are typically two parts one a sort of ring shaped peice with cutting surfaces that is usually static and then a conical piece that sits inside that ring with the a number of cutting teeth that spins. By adjusting the separation between these two bits you can grind fairly consistently and they are cheaper to make than other burr types thye produce what the experts call a full body with a round flavor profile ... which means ... something. They are capable of grinding quite fine for making things like espresso or moka pot or turkish coffee.
A more expensive option is the flat burr grinders these use flat discs with cutting teeth around the outside edges and come in two pieces and have a sort of hole in the middle of these rings where the coffee beans are fed in the beans then get ground up between the two discs one stationary the other spinning the ground coffee being flung out the side from in between the disks. You can adjust the grind size by adjustng the gap between the two burrs. They coffee they produce is typically supposed to have greater clarity and better acidity ... again just words.
There are also blind burrs which I'm not sure I understand.
Coffee grinders also will contain a big fuck off ac motor a few bits of electronics but not really a lot and mostly that's it maybe some variable speed control and niceties like a ionizer to stop the coffee grounds sticking to everything due to static maybe a prebreaking auger and other things.
Coffee grinders also come in stepped where it will have locking adjustments on the grind size so you can grind at its setting 10 or setting 11 but you can't do 11.5 and then stepless where it will allow you to smoothly adjust it anywhere in its range. There are also a few that do some variation like having large steps on one end of the range and smaller steps on another (so it can do filter coffee at one end of its range and then espresso at the other with finer adjustment for espresso end of things) or two different adjustment ranges one course and one fine so you can set it to 10 or 11 and then turn some other control or wheel to nudge it up and down by some smaller factor.
Some grinders specialize in one particular range like the ode only doing filter level, others do just espresso, and some use different burr sets for each and there are also dedicated custom burr sets you can buy for specific types of grinding (some of which cost hundreds of dollars just for the burrs let alone the machine they then run in) you can get manual grinders in all the ranges too which also can cost a lot of money for something espresso capable but those require a lot of elbow grease to get your 18g of coffee.
The finer adjustments really only come into play with espresso pour over is more coarse levels of grind.
Coffee grind size is important to how good the coffee tastes and indeed for certain types of coffee making you need to grind very fine and that gets expensive.
But at this point I was just doing filter and pour over coffee which is on the cheaper end of things. Most of the equipment is relatively cheap a pour over V60 is just a plastic funnel so it's typically 15-20 bucks an aeropress is 30-40 you can get equipment to make coffee that way without breaking the bank.
So I played around with that trying different grind sizes some different coffees different coffee roast levels I found the light roasts pretty enjoyable the fruit flavors the brighter tastes were good and something most coffee places don't sell sticking to dark or medium roast most of the time. I started drinking coffee black to appreciate just the flavor of the coffee. I got some of the more expensive specialty roasts from local roasters. I got a nice goose neck temperature control kettle so I could do the swirling pours and more precisely control the temperature when brewing.
I got myself an accurate scale accurate to a 10th of a gram so I could more precisely measure coffee in and out with a built in timer to work out my ratios.
I played with some of the more expensive but still relatively cheap combined immersion and percolation brewers like the Hario Switch and the Next level pulsar. Immersion is when you dump all the coffee grounds in a tub and pour on the hot water then wait before filtering out the grounds to get the coffee think a french press, percolation is when you pass the hot water through a bed of coffee grounds usually just by gravity this is your v60's your pour overs drip or filter coffee making. Some of the recent brewers combine these two modes with a valve to allow you to do both immersion and percolation in any combination. yet more parameters you can fuck with.
Around this time I came across the kickstarter for the Xbloom an automatic bean to cup coffee maker with a bunch of interesting features it controls the stream of hot water using an electrostatic charge alowing it to do the patterns swirl the water and so on. It offered the option to do pour over with prescise control of the water amount the ratios the timing the temperature. It had a load cell on the water filter so it could weigh the coffee and water as it passed through and it could move the filter about to do agitation. It had a few flaws but offered a nice user experience to be able to dial in your coffee with a given settings you programmed yourself or via an nfc card from the roaster themselves. They offered their own coffee pod type things direct from specialty roasters which came with compostable filter cup with the right dose of unground beans for a single cup it would then grind fresh apply the roasters recipe. I then had a generic filter you could use for your own beans. It makes a very nice cup of coffee without manual intervention
A few years later they came out with a second generation machine the Xbloom Studio that refined the user interface (the old one used these led light bars for everything which wasn't that clear what was going on without going and getting the app) and adding another scale to the output stage so it could now weigh water in to coffee out and work out ratios plot the graphs all fun stuff.
A fine machine but one dedicated to making pour over and nothing else.
So I had a nice grinder a good kettle a lot of plastic funnels and paper filters of various shapes and sizes and a fairly expensive automatic pour over coffee machine.
Earlier this year I decided to dip my toe into espresso making ... I burned it ... the trouble with espresso is it requires very finely ground coffee and none of the equipment above was specifically designed to grind fine enough to do it. It also requires high pressure to force the hot water through the puck of coffee to make the super concentrated tiny cup of goodness.
You can get espresso machines relatively cheaply but there is a catch you can't get grinders that grind fine enough to make real espresso for cheap and store bought is typically not ground fine enough even the allegedly espresso stuff. The trick espresso makers deploy to get round this is pressurized baskets. The basket is the little metal bucket with the holes in it you stuff with coffee and then the machine forces water through typically via a portafilter mechanism the little ring on a handle thing you'll see in espresso machines often with the two spouts for coffee to come out of or the newer trendy thing naked portafilters that lack those funels and that just show the bottom of the basket so you can see the coffee oozing out for your instagram reels.
Pressurized baskets can take normal ground coffee and then they use a flow restricter to generate the pressure and create the fake crema (crema is the foam on top of an espresso it's usually disolved carbondioxide from the coffee forced into a emulsion with the coffee bean oils by the pressure). This type of espresso shot is not quite the "real" thing it's a way of getting something close without the requirement of very finely ground coffee.
I'm sure that's fine but I wanted to get the real deal the real espresso with actual crema not foam made by a nozzle. But the kit to do this is expensive and what if I spent a bunch of money and didn't even like espresso I could make. So i decided to go for a cheaper introductory option.
My xbloom did have the option to grind what it called espresso fine so I used that and then I bought a budget lever espresso machine the Flair Neo Flex. A lever espresso machine rather than using a boiler and then steam pressure to force the water through coffee uses basically a piston hooked up to a big lever and you provide the mechanical force to create 9 bar of pressure to squirt nearly boiling liquid through coffee grounds.
These machines are cheaper since they are mostly mechanical and in someways more flexible anything sub thousand dollar because so long as you have a pressure gauge and a timer you can vary the pressure over time something only very very expensive machines can do. The neo flex does have a pressure gauge although for some reason it doesn't have numbers on it only a range marked "espresso zone" and then above that "STOP!!!!" so there is data but not that precise.
The Neo Flex machine also is mostly plastic to get the price way down under a hundred dollars This frame is strong enough but it does make an alarming creaking noise as you apply full force which you never get used to. It has two basket options a pressurized basket for normal store bought coffee and a high flow basket for espresso ground coffee.
I selected the highflow basket ground myself some coffee in the super fine range on the xbloom pressed it down in the little basket added just off the boil water and then manually pressed water through trying to maintain an even pressure while the alarming creaking went on.
Initially the results were not great.
There are a lot of parameters to work with at the espresso level the same sort of ratio factors you have with pour over so how much water vs how much coffee and how long one is in contact with the other. I was doing a 1 to 2 ratio so 14g of coffee to 28g of coffee out. Then there is also time how long does it take to push the water through. When I first tried this I ground the coffee too coarse and the water just went right through too quickly and the resulting coffee was very sour and weak being under extracted. Then I ground it too fine and the water couldn't get through it easily taking much longer and ending up fairly overextracted and bitter.
One of the problems I found with using the xbloom for the grinder was it could do fine enough but it was a stepped grinder and it's range between steps was too large to easily dial in a good espresso shot. I would get too sour coffee at one setting and go one single step finer only to get bitter coffee on that one and of course I had no option to go half or quarter a step. I somewhat compensated but swapping to a darker roast coffee from a medium (darker roasts are more forgiving on extraction than medium or Light roasted coffee) and adjusting my ratio to 1 to 2.5 so 14g coffee 35g coffee out in the same minute time frame. I got some pretty drinkable results that were nicely balanced but it was still tricky to dial in the more challenging lighter roasted coffees I liked the brew chamber on the neo flex is small so I was about the top end of what I could achieve.
So I invested in a better grinder. A 400 dollar grinder and that is on the cheaper end of espresso capable grinders.
This one was the Turin DF64 Gen 2, these grinders have actually a bunch of names depending on which company is selling them they're a generic oem brand out of china all made in the same factory which other people put their name onto. Turin is the US distributor but they come under a bunch of names but they're all the same hardware. This is a 64mm flat burr step less grinder capable of going espresso fine all the way up to french press course and everywhere in between (64mm is a fairly common burr size so I would have the option to potentially swap these burrs out if I wanted). It was also low retention and had a ionizer on the exit chute to prevent coffee dust going everywhere which is nice. Retention is when there is coffee left in the grinder from the last grind, this usually then gets pushed out when you next grind so you always end up with a little old probably stale coffee in your new coffee which is not ideal low retention grinders have less retained than others (nothing is truly zero retention but these get pretty close in the 0.1g range or lower) it uses a fairly straight chute through the machine so there is nowhere coffee can get stuck and then a set of plastic bellows you can pump on the input to force out any coffee left in the burrs.
So armed with infinite adjustability and now flat burr profiles I started making more shots of coffee with the neo flex. My shot quality and ability to finely adjust went up and I was getting consistent quality shots out of the thing. I was pretty happy with where things were but I did fancy a slightly better les creaky machine now I'd confirmed I would actually enjoy drinking a nice espresso shot. I considered getting an actual proper steam boiler powered espresso machine maybe something like a breville bambio or a gadgia classic but I was having fun with the lever machine theres something nice about being in control of the pressure akin to doing a manual pour over tweaking the parameters and enjoying the process of making coffee. I have the automatic machine to make me coffee when I just wanted a cup to drink but this was a fun thing I could do when I had the time and wanted to play.
So for my birthday I invested in the bigger badder brother of the Neo Flex the Flair 58 +2 lever espresso machine.
I had considered things like the Cafelat robot another manual lever espresso machine (and cheaper) but they were sold out everywhere and I'd had good results with the flair.
This is a much more premium machine than the neo. no plastic anywhere it's solid metal with nice walnut accents. It uses an industry standard 58mm basket and portafilter so you can use any 58mm baskets or accessories with the machine. It came with a nice metal tamper and a shot mirror so you can see the bottom of the naked portafilter as you are applying pressure to see where the coffee is flowing look for things like uneven flow or channeling where water is flowing through at a single point rather than evenly distributing through the puck. While it is a manual machine it does contain a built in heating element that preheats the brew chamber/piston so the water doesn't cool down when it hits that metal which is useful for lighter roasts that need that nearly boiling water temp to properly extract. For the extra money it also has a pressure gauge with actual numbers on it, you can even fit a pressure transducer instead for coupling with an app to do pressure profiling although thats extra cash. It's not cheap that machine with all its bells and whistles was 600 bucks which is a lot for a manual machine.
It took me a few goes to get back to good results, the larger basket taking typically 18g of coffee and the larger size of the basket 58mm vs the 40ish of the neo meant I needed to adjust my grind a bit but I was soon making pretty good shots on it. I've been enjoying some of the specialty roasted decaf on it where I can make a shot when I get home from work or in the evening with dinner and have it caffeine free so I get my beauty sleep.
So now my flat is 90% coffee things
Its an expensive hobby but then think of all the money I'm saving by not going to Starbucks or Peets every time I need my caffeine fix. I'll probably break even sometime in 2040. Although I keep buying nice double walled glass coffee cups that inevitably break within a few weeks when I put something on top of them in the sink and or drop them and then I forget and get more or different but equally fragile drinkware.