News
Two Austrian engineers, both 28, are taking the Datum coffee machine to Berlin in early September. Christoph Konheisner and Nikolaus Potapow built an espresso machine and grinder pair that reads a code on your bag of beans and applies the roaster's recipe on its own. It's one of the most...
Élodie Fontaine
Guides
The little round dial on the front panel is the most-watched and least-understood part of a home espresso machine. You stare at it for twenty-five seconds, the needle settles into the green band, and you conclude the shot was good. That is not what the dial is telling you. It carries real, useful...
Julien Mercier
News
The arabica coffee price touched 363.40 US cents a pound on 18 August 2026, the front-month contract's highest since the third week of January, according to Comunicaffe. Three days later that same contract had already slipped to 358.75 cents. That was mid-August 2026 on the coffee desk: jumpy,...
Julien Mercier
Guides
You picked up a carton of oat milk, dropped the steam wand in, and got lukewarm liquid with three big bubbles floating on top. The following week, a different carton from the same family gave you dense, glossy microfoam. Nothing changed in your technique. It wasn't you — it was what was in the...
Élodie Fontaine
Guides
On a portafilter machine, two parts work on every single shot, age without ever announcing it, and appear on no maintenance sticker anywhere on the housing: the group gasket and the shower screen. They look like permanent hardware. They are consumables.
Camille Laurent
Guides
Specialty coffee has quietly settled on a hierarchy: single origin is the discerning choice, a blend is a commercial compromise. Applied to espresso, that hierarchy does not hold up. A blend solves three concrete problems a single origin cannot — consistency, body, and tolerance for grind error —...
Julien Mercier
Guides
Pre-infusion is sold as a premium feature, and the honest answer is that it is conditional. Wetting the puck at low pressure before full pressure arrives changes a great deal on a light roast ground fine at a high dose, and almost nothing on a forgiving medium roast pulled at 18 g. No product...
Camille Laurent
Guides
Somebody told you to tamp at 30 pounds. Or 15 kilos, depending on which corner of the internet you landed in. So you press. Hard. And every time a shot runs sour you press a bit harder next time, because honestly, you have no idea what 30 pounds feels like in your hand. Nobody does. That is the...
Julien Mercier
Guides
A grinder does not fail on the day its burrs wear out. It degrades slowly, over months, and the most common symptom looks so much like a dialling-in mistake that most people blame their beans, their tamping or their machine long before they suspect the two pieces of steel doing all the work.
Élodie Fontaine
Guides
Pull the shower screen out of your group head and hold it up to the light. If it looks glossy and slick, that is not household grime. It is polymerised coffee oil, and the water rinse you do after every shot has never once touched it. La Marzocco puts that greasy film at the top of its list of...
Élodie Fontaine
Guides
Two machines listed with the same pressure, the same portafilter and the same wattage can pull two very different shots. The variable that separates them almost never appears on the spec sheet: it's how the machine heats its water, and more specifically its ability to hold that water at the same...
Julien Mercier
Guides
Coffee roasted yesterday will usually pull a worse espresso than coffee roasted ten days ago. That isn't a matter of taste. The bean is still giving off gas, and the gas gets into your cup ahead of the coffee.
Camille Laurent
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