I consider myself like a mid tier coffee snob, at least, by coffee snob standards. Well beyond your average coffee drinker but I’m not too wild about most things, although, I suspect with enough money I would get crazier.
I have a Breville Infuser, which is an espresso maker with automatic pressure and dosing controls as well as a steam wand I suspect is just mostly okay. It was supposed to be a Mother’s Day present to my mother-in-law but she ferociously refused it, not like in that way where you are just trying to be polite but like she demanded I take it and return it because she wouldn’t use it. I was curious and tried it out a few times before packing it up and returning it and then immediately realized after my first successful shot that I wasn’t going to return it.
I grind myself with a Breville Smart Grinder Pro which I effectively stole from Amazon (ordered one and told customer service it didn’t show up and probably got stolen so they gave me a refund hehe). No complaints or even anything particular to say about it, it’s great. I like that you can do a precise grind length and then pause it in the middle to lightly tamp down my shots so that coffee doesn’t spill everywhere, then restart it from where you paused it.
Despite having an espresso machine and a steam wand I mostly just put cream and hot water into my coffee. I like it that way. Lots of cream but strong coffee make a fantastic combination. I will make lattes or breves (breves are the best) every once in a while but not all that often, it’s kind of a pain to clean the steam wand after.
I would really like to get into roasting my own coffee, one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had was at the home of someone who roasted their own and I can’t stop thinking about it. They used I think one of these and it looked really simple, main problem according to them is that it produces a lot of smoke which they had an elaborate set up for which I wouldn’t be able to replicate. But you have freshly roasted coffee in less than 10 minutes.
