My morning ritual commences with coffee. I wake up, smash the snooze button a few times, and then haul myself to the kitchen, where I am greeted by my Meraki espresso machine, currently sleeping on the job. No, literally: the LED display at the top of the system illuminates in a sleepy emoji face as it waits in standby mode. I’ve programmed the machine to turn on at the same time as my morning alarm, so that everything is good to go by the time I want to start brewing. A quick tap of the screen and it flashes: “Ready when you are, boss.” Well, let’s begin.
At the push of a button, the bean-to-cup machine starts by grinding 18.1g of fresh beans I’ve sourced from Horsham Coffee Roaster, delivered twice a month on a mail-order subscription for maximum freshness. The 0.1g is due to a little retention in the grinder that stops me from coming up short of my perfect 1:2 brew ratio. I give the grounds a shake and tip the coffee into the bottomless portafilter, grab my distributor to flatten the coffee bed, and then use my tamping tool twice to evenly pack the grounds for the best quality shot. I lock the portafilter in place and then set the machine to brew 36g at a temperature of 92°C (cooler if I’m using dark-roasted beans) and watch as the dual-boiler whirs into life, preinfusing the grounds for ten seconds before extraction begins. The LED display shows the shot’s duration and how long it takes to get to my desired brew weight – I’m aiming for anywhere from 30 to 35 seconds for an optimal extraction.
While this is happening, I prepare 4oz of milk in my pitcher, purge my steam wand, and then heat my milk to around 55°C (shown via the display, again), which makes for a piping hot flat white with workable milk texture for a bit of latte art. The ‘art’ in question is pretty abstract compared to professional baristas, but it’s a work in progress. With everything finished and complete, the only thing left to do is sit in my favourite chair and enjoy the fruits of my labour. It’s inevitably gone in less time than it takes to prepare.
Now, if you’re a completely normal person, or someone content with a cup of Yorkshire Tea in the morning, you might be wondering what in the Patrick Bateman you’ve just read. But rest assured that caffeine obsessives across the UK are tumbling down the very same rabbit hole that I have fallen into and are geeking out in increasingly large numbers on the mind- bending world of coffee. The meditative process, the tinkering and the gadgetry are more addictive than the caffeine buzz itself.
The Meraki Espresso Machine is fitted with a state-of- the-art conical burr grinder
But how did we get here? Whether a regular cup of joe leaves you cold or warms your soul, the inexorable rise of coffee culture is impossible to ignore, culminating in the flood of pour-overs, cortados, and long blacks that have swept around the world. The fact that you can get a flat white at McDonald’s these days tells you all you need to know. However, our habits were forced to pivot in 2020 with the arrival of the global pandemic and, almost overnight, home brewing went from a small community of enthusiasts to, dare I say it, a cool trend all of your favourite food influencers were jumping on board.
Easy-fix solutions like Nespresso machines were swiftly replaced by fully fledged café-quality set-ups that sometimes integrate thousands of pounds worth of equipment. Single-origin coffee beans, grinders with specially machined burrs for different brewing methods, manual lever espresso machines, and of course high-tech ‘smart’ brewers capable of eliminating much of the guesswork from making a good cup have proliferated at an unprecedented rate. What has happened over the subsequent five years has been nothing short of an explosion of growth in the world of coffee, to the point that it’s almost impossible to keep up.
Seeking to get a grip on things, I reached out to the experts, starting with passionate home brewing advocate and YouTuber, Lance Hedrick. A two-time winner of the CoffeeFest Latte Art World Championship Open and silver medallist at the US Brewers Cup Championship, Hedrick is one of the brightest minds in the burgeoning world of coffee media, as well as a wholesale representative at Onyx Coffee Lab. He has amassed a loyal following of 356k+ on his YouTube page, who tune in weekly to his videos that span the secrets behind a great pour-over to ‘prosumer’ (professional consumer) reviews of the latest and greatest coffee equipment on the market.
“The pandemic really was a perfect storm for coffee. Over the past few decades, people had been getting into coffee thanks to the rise of speciality cafés in the 1990s – and later the influence of shows like Friends, which normalised the idea of hanging out in coffee shops. Then suddenly, in 2020, that whole culture was stripped away. People still needed their daily cup – something better than instant or Nespresso – and they started buying everything they could to make it at home. That sparked a huge surge in coffee-related media, as people tried to scratch that very specific itch,” Hedrick tells me over a video call.
Recent advancements have bridged the gap between café and home
Like many in the coffee world, the YouTuber had no intention of getting into the industry permanently. He was never much of a coffee drinker in his youth and used to “chug and grimace” espresso as a means to an end during moments of low energy. However, having discovered the wonders of speciality coffee while working at a non-profit coffee shop during his graduate school years, Hedrick made it his mission to give others the tools they need to brew great coffee at home – a skill that he insists anyone can learn.
Recent advancements in home brewing equipment, whether single-dose grinders or kitchen-appropriate espresso machines, have bridged the gap between the café and the home and enabled amateur brewers to surpass the quality of their average coffee shop without investing thousands.
“In the early 2000s and 2010s, many home brewers assumed they couldn’t match café-quality coffee at home. They enjoyed good coffee out, but stuck with Keurigs or Nespresso machines because they believed only commercial gear could produce those professional results. To an extent, they were right – back then, enthusiasts scoured forums for used commercial grinders, knowing the grinder was key, no matter how bulky.
Now, with the boom in home brewing, that’s changed. Sure, some cafés might brew better than you, but they rarely dial in each cup perfectly. They brew for consistency, speed, and broad appeal, rather than your specific taste. You might love their beans, but prefer how they taste when you brew them your way. With today’s machines and grinders, great coffee at home is no longer a compromise – it’s often the upgrade. You can match – even surpass – café quality with sub-£500 set-ups.”
That last word, ‘set-up’, is one of the hottest topics in coffee. It’s shorthand for the various pieces of coffee equipment and paraphernalia you use during your average brew session – the tools of the trade, if you will. Mention to a coffee enthusiast that you enjoy brewing the odd cup, and you can rest assured that “What’s your set-up?” will be the next words from their lips. It shows how quickly the home brewing industry is growing that such a question exists.
A consistent, even extraction brewed from a La Marzocco Linea espresso machine
Not long ago, Hedrick tells me, options were few and far between when it came to selecting which model best suited your tastes, but now the market is only getting broader: “Manufacturers are jumping on home brewing like no other at the moment. You have new companies that have been built strictly for the home, which was never really a thing in the past. You had Niche in England, which was the first to offer a single-dosing experience on a well-built grinder, but for everyone else, it was about commercial settings because that’s where the money was. But now, even really well-established, longstanding brands are finally investing in the home market because the demand is so high. Brands like Mahlkönig are introducing grinders for the home; Synesso has finally released a home espresso machine; and even La Marzocco has grown its home brewing division to capture a larger share of the market. For a long time its entry machines were the £6,600 GS3 and £4,500 Linea Mini, but now they also have the £3,000 Linea Micra and have introduced a home grinder, Pico. You have many commercially successful companies focusing on the home sector because it’s proliferating at such an unbelievable speed.”
La Marzocco Linea espresso machine
The great Florentine manufacturer La Marzocco is one of the most prevalent brands you’ll find in your local coffee shops: chances are, if you’ve had a half-decent espresso in London any time recently, it was probably brewed on one of its workhorse machines. Despite almost 100 years of coffee expertise, it was only in the spring of 2015 that La Marzocco first pivoted into the home brewing space with the Linea Mini, a smaller version of one of its most popular commercial designs. The follow-up Linea Micra, with its ultra- compact profile and uncompromising performance, was launched in 2022 as a direct response to growing demand in the home brewing space.
I sat down with Dave Bise, director of La Marzocco’s Home division, to discuss the company’s recent shift in focus.
The partnership between La Marzocco and Starbucks was a seminal moment in coffee
As he explains, while the brand may have centred around commercial machines until lately, its gritty history is dotted with moments where it needed to adapt to survive: “We were founded in 1927 by the Bambi brothers, Giuseppe and Bruno – true artisans working with metal in Florence. They eventually pivoted to making their own commercial espresso machines. Back then, they’d ride around on a motorcycle with a sidecar, stopping at shops and asking, ‘Would you like to buy an espresso machine?’ At the time, espresso – and La Marzocco – weren’t popular. Most people were like, ‘What are you talking about? Get out of here.’ There’s always been this lineage of hustling and adapting to culture. That continued when we started selling machines to Starbucks, and it’s part of why we embraced home brewing. We’re not afraid to pivot away from what we’ve done before to try something new. I think La Marzocco is, above all, an innovator – and we’re always crafting for the barista, wherever they might be.”
Coffee educator and World Latte Art champion Lance Hedrick
Bise mentions what may be one of the true seminal moments in coffee culture: the partnership between La Marzocco and Starbucks. In the late 1980s and 1990s, as Starbucks rapidly expanded under Howard Schultz’s vision of introducing Italian-style espresso bars to the United States, the company chose the La Marzocco Linea Classic espresso machine for its superior craftsmanship, temperature stability, and reliability. One of La Marzocco’s most significant contributions is the invention of the dual-boiler system, which allows for simultaneous brewing and steaming – revolutionising espresso machine efficiency and the speed at which a barista can operate – and, as a result, these hand-built Italian machines became the backbone of the Starbucks espresso program during its formative growth years.
By using La Marzocco equipment, Starbucks ensured a consistent and high-quality espresso experience across its stores, helping to elevate consumer expectations of what coffee could be and introducing a more refined coffee culture to the American mainstream. The widespread use of La Marzocco equipment during this period significantly boosted the brand’s visibility in the US, but as Starbucks transitioned to using super-automatic machines for scalability and phased out its relationship with La Marzocco, these machines found a new lease of life in the growing speciality coffee shop space.
“Spending time with Starbucks, that’s where La Marzocco had another growth spurt where we were not just making hundreds of machines a year, but rather thousands at that point. And it was a huge expansion to business commodity coffee,” Bise says. “When they pivoted to making their own automated machines, all these Linea Classics and old La Marzoccos were put up for sale and picked up by what we call speciality coffee now. So original shops like Intelligentsia, Blue Bottle Coffee, Stumptown are taking these machines being like, ‘Wait, this machine’s super consistent and it makes great coffee. I’ll buy one for a few thousand euros or dollars and start making my shop with it.’ And that’s what led to the reinvention of La Marzocco, with this idea of being a consistency tool, this beautiful thing on your bar, that would be the heartbeat of your café. So the departure of Starbucks proved to be the on-ramp for our next chapter.”
KinGrinder produces industry-leading manual coffee bean grinders
In one sense, you could make a pretty compelling case that the flourishing home brewing industry simply wouldn’t exist without Starbucks and La Marzocco. By popularising this high-end piece of Italian craftsmanship, the world got its first taste of what great coffee could and perhaps should be. But it’s important to note that there are plenty of considerations before taking the plunge and buying an expensive ‘endgame’ espresso machine. In fact, brewing phenomenal coffee can be a lot cheaper than you may think.
For Justin Piercy, the Canadian YouTuber behind the page ‘Daddy Got Coffee’, this is the great beauty of the evolution of home brewing. While he has reviewed almost every great machine and grinder released over the last few years, the marginal gains from a super high-end experience to a more affordable machine are smaller than you might think: “These days, there is just a wide spectrum of equipment available to the consumer so you can really find your lane when it comes to how you want your coffee experience to taste, look, feel, be on a daily basis,” he says.
“The more money you spend, you might get nicer finishes, a smoother workflow, or a flashier brand – but honestly, not much else. Advanced palates might notice small differences, but you don’t need to spend thousands for a great cup. Take my set-up: I have a La Marzocco Linea Mini – a beautiful machine that makes fantastic coffee. But I also have a Cafelat Barista Robot – a £380 manual espresso maker that can make espresso just as good, sometimes better. People often assume the most expensive machine must be the best. It’s not necessarily true. Every machine has its strengths – what matters the most is what works best for you.”
So, how do you up your coffee game without breaking the bank? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, starts and ends with what beans you use. It’s a lesser-known fact that coffee is considered to be the most complex natural product in the world. This is due to the sheer number and variety of chemical compounds it contains – over 1,000 scientifically identified so far – many of which are formed or transformed during roasting. These compounds include volatile aromatic molecules that give coffee its distinctive flavour and aroma. During roasting, the Maillard reaction (the chemical reaction between amino acids which reduces sugars to create melanoidins) creates hundreds of new compounds, resulting in a dynamic chemical composition that is still not fully understood by humans today.
KinGrinder produces industry-leading manual coffee bean grinders
Hedrick says: “A lot of people think it’s absurd when you’re like, ‘Oh, I taste blackberry in this coffee’. They think it’s bullshit, right? And yet the same people would probably enjoy wine tasting and pick out different flavour profiles. After all, coffee and wine both come from a fruit, the only difference is that coffee is a lot more chemically complex.” This complexity is only heightened by factors such as the origin of the bean, altitude, soil composition, climate, harvest method, and processing techniques, all of which influence the final profile of the brew. In other words, buying high-quality coffee is absolutely essential to the experience – it opens you up to a whole new world of flavour.
“There’s an ocean’s worth of equipment out there that’s very fancy, very expensive, but the best upgrade you can make is actually just better coffee. Shifting from buying pre-ground coffee at the grocery store to experimenting with whole beans, single origins from a local speciality roaster, which is such a huge jump in your coffee experience compared to anything else that you can do,” Piercy says. “Familiarise yourself with the coffee landscape itself in your area, try and find somebody who is roasting quality whole bean single-origin coffees with the roast date on the bag. Typically, the more transparency a roaster provides, the higher the quality of the coffee it roasts. And even if somebody has a Nespresso machine, get a refillable pod and grind that coffee super fine, put it in the pod and your coffee is going to get way better overnight. That’s really where I push people to start.”
It’s important that the coffee beans are freshly roasted (preferably used within two to three weeks) and ideally freshly ground on the day of use, so as to counteract the effects of oxidation. For Hedrick, battling against the effects of oxygen is one of the key factors in optimising your coffee experience and the main reason why he recommends single-dose grinders for the home barista: “Traditionally, grinders were hopper-fed. You’d preload beans into a bowl on top, then grind as needed. That’s ideal in theory, since you want freshly ground coffee to maximise flavour. But hopper-fed grinders have downsides at home. Grounds get stuck in the burrs and chute, and beans sit exposed to oxygen, which quickly degrades flavour. Unless you use the hopper in a day or two, your coffee won’t taste great by day three. Single dosing – a concept that started on home brewing forums – solves this. You weigh out just what you need, grind it, and keep the rest sealed. It’s a simple way to get fresher, better-tasting coffee.”
Standing on the edge of the rabbit hole, coffee can seem like a daunting business
Both Hedrick and Piercy name-check the Baratza Encore ESP grinder as a compelling value option for those looking to raise their coffee game. While the idea of taking up more counter space with yet another piece of kit might not be appealing to some, the benefits are certainly difficult to ignore. However, Hedrick also recommends a well-built hand grinder such as the Timemore C3 or the KINGrinder K6. He says, “Hand grinding is a nice meditative process. Some people just genuinely enjoy it. It’s a little workout that will give you some energy for your coffee or a little bit of awareness. Maybe not energy – but it’s a legit way of getting the most out of your beans. You can hit those diminishing returns of multi-thousand-pound electric grinders with a hand grinder.
“Because the manufacturers don’t have to pay for all these crazy tolerance checks on all these different stainless steel CNC parts and worrying about intense alignment on multi-axle systems that require incredible precision as well as robust motors, these companies can use a much smaller R&D budget in order to just make the drive shaft as aligned as possible and then put a handle on it, and you’re essentially good to go. You can get a much cheaper, incredible hand grinder, rather than an incredible electric grinder which is
going to set you back £1,000+.”
Standing on the edge of the rabbit hole, coffee can seem like a daunting business: a world that quickly descends into geekery and snobbishness, a battle of who has the newest, most expensive kit, and more than a little work. And in certain corners of the internet – not least some of the gorgeously aesthetic Instagram pages that are a dime a dozen these days – you might be right. But at its core the rapid proliferation of home brewing has allowed everyone to take the simple ritualistic action of making a coffee and turning into not only something far more flavourful than we once thought possible, but also an opportunity to put our phones down, be present, and maybe even change the world for the better.
The electric drip coffee maker from Aarke ensures the ideal coffee temperature of 92- 96°C
I’ll let Piercy talk you out: “Brewing is like playtime for my wife and me. We love the experience – it’s a great way to slow down and connect with people. A big part of it is trying to be more conscious consumers. Most of us buy coffee regularly, but it’s easy to forget the hands it passes through – from the person picking the cherries to the one roasting them. Once you understand that, the whole experience becomes richer. You start to realise, ‘This coffee tastes this way because of where it was grown and how it was processed.’ Buying high quality coffee helps support those people. That’s far more fulfilling than treating it like another commodity. We want to be thoughtful in how we buy the things we enjoy and that’s a big part of our why.”
There’s something quietly special brewing in the coffee industry these days. Perhaps it’s time we all dug a little deeper.
