What equipment do I use to make excellent coffee at home?

First things first: coffee is subjective. If whatever set up you has hits the spot for you, please enjoy it wholeheartedly and ignore everything that follows. 

What this article covers is what I personally use to make coffee that tastes excellent to me, specifically using a V60-style pour-over. 

1. Good water. 

Coffee is around 98% water, so if your water tastes bad, your coffee will too. You want water that’s clean and fresh, not heavily chlorinated and not particularly hard or partifularly soft

Tesco Ashbeck is a great bottled option thanks to its relatively balanced mineral content and sensible price. That said, I’m lucky as where I live in Mumbles, the tap water is decent, so tap water works just fine.

2. A grinder. 

If you buy pre-ground coffee, you’re losing flavour before you even start brewing. Once coffee is ground, aroma compounds dissipate quickly, often within minutes.

Grinding fresh preserves aroma, improves sweetness and clarity and gives you far more control over extraction.

You don’t need to remortgage your house, but having a grinder at all is transformative. Most people who buy one never go back.

3. A ceramic V60

A Hario V60 is simple, affordable, and brutally honest. It won’t hide bad coffee and rewards good coffee and decent technique. I prefer ceramic because plastics currently has me rattled.

4. A gooseneck kettle

This fancy kettle means you can pour over slowly and evenly, leading to more even extraction, which usually means more sweetness and clarity in the cup. A standard kettle tends to dump water too aggressively and randomly, making it harder to get results.

5. Decent scales

Eyeballing coffee doses is a fast track to inconsistency, and mild existential despair. A sensitive digital scale lets you dose coffee accurately (e.g. 15g means 15g) and means you can be precise and follow recipes that work.

6. Filter papers

V60 papers are widely available and cheap. Just make sure you use the correct size and rinse them with hot water before brewing (this removes paper taste and preheats the brewer)

You don’t need loads of kit but each of these items directly affects flavour. 

Maddie x