Beginners Guide to Building a Coffee Bar at Home

In recent years coffee making has become a hobby pursuit for a lot of people. Especially after the COVID pandemic, the number of home baristas and brewmasters has grown rapidly and the trend is going strong. 

In this guide, we are exploring the possible entry points into the coffee hobby, set-ups for your own home cafe, and talking with professionals to get insights on how to improve your coffee-making routine.

Ways to Obsess About Your coffee

First, we need to identify what you are interested in doing with coffee at home. Coffee is such a great product to get obsessed about exactly because it offers quite a list of activities tied to it. Do mind that all of those activities can also be ritualized and incorporated into your day-to-day routine.

Categorically, you can be a home barista, brewmaster, or home coffee roaster. Or all three!
All require different amounts of both financial and personal investments. It doesn’t matter which path you choose, you will find friendly, supportive growing groups of like-minded people, whether professionals or coffee geeks. Online forums and media resources today offer a lot of free-of-charge useful information such as hacks and ideas on how to improve the equipment or technique.

Home Barista Set Up

Making espresso at home is relatively easy but make no mistake: the cheaper fully automatic machines that don’t require to do practically anything are not extracting a true espresso. Those home coffee-making solutions produce espresso-like beverages.
Major differences are in texture, flavor intensity, and complexity. Espresso-like beverages compared to a true espresso will always be more watery, less flavorful, and not as aromatic.

To actually produce an espresso like in a coffee shop one would require the following:

• at least a semi-professional espresso machine
• a grinder
• scales
• temper 
• distribution tool

 A good addition would be filtered water, but it is possible to use water that you generally prefer to drink, as long as it is not too hard.

The case with all these pieces of equipment is that they can range in quality and therefore price. 

The best espresso machine for home use today has the same features as the commercial bigger version and can easily cost over 3000 euros. Such machines have inbuilt tools that allow for higher consistency when making multiple shots in a row, as well as facilitating more freedom to experiment with recipes. 

It is a similar picture with grinders. The best grinders today boast features that allow control of an rpm (round per minute) rate, touchscreen menus, and the capacity to save grinding profiles. These features are the reasons why coffee shop grinders cost way more than simpler home solutions.

Whether you need these features to start your coffee-discovering journey or not is up for debate. 

Our stance is that most if not all of the extra features are simply not needed for day-to-day use and act more as a party trick or something that gives a user bragging rights. 

So, here is the list of items we recommend for starting your journey as a home barista:

• For the machine, we recommend a Lelit Anna, a simple in use, compact, and affordable espresso-making apparatus with temperature control. It will not allow for pre-infusion of flow control, however. It is one of the best solutions for aspiring home baristas with no ambition of making more than 5 double-shot espressos in a row. The quality of the steam wand is also great for starting to learn frothing techniques and latte art.
• To accompany the espresso machine we recommend using Varia VS3 Grinder. VS3 is an all-purpose grinder meaning it performs well grinding both for espresso and filter. The smart design makes it one of the most compact, quiet, and user-friendly grinders for home use on the market today. It comes with a kit containing extra parts and a tiny water spray. Spraying coffee beans with just a bit of water allows for less static and less mess while grinding.
• Temper is usually provided with the espresso machine, however, we do recommend you find a fitting distribution tool such as AutoComb by BaristaHustle. It might look like an overkill but it does help with producing better shots. 
• But there will not be any consistency in your espresso making without a set of scales. They come in various shapes, sizes, and prices. We recommend finding the scales by Timemore. These are precise, fast, and come in a size that fits most espresso machines.
• Smaller tools like a knock-box to dispose of used coffee grounds, towels, or brushes to clean up the portafilter and cups are also needed.

When all this has been set up you are ready to start making your own espressos and cappuccinos. From this point onwards you can experiment with recipes, coffee beans of various origins, processing, and roast profiles.

To master the craft of making flavorful and aromatic espresso faster and save time on not making mistakes it is recommended to visit our barista course.

Home Brewmaster Set Up

Espresso is not the only way to make coffee at home. Brewing coffee at home using either immersion or percolative methods is a long-standing tradition in many regions of the world, from Brazil to Slovenia. 

We have an extended guide both on how to prepare filter coffee and V60 specifically and we invite you to discover the alternative way of making coffee. 

Home Roast-Master Set Up

Roasting is one of the most complex and interesting parts of a coffee hobby. Choosing green beans and then developing a profile requires not only knowing how to source and roast coffee but also experience in tasting and evaluating coffee quality.

To approach roasting coffee at home we recommend attending a roasting class that can be online. That will allow you to learn the basics of storing, profiling, and troubleshooting as well as health and safety best practices.

Today industry can provide several home roasters that can double as a sample roaster for a commercial roastery. Our pick is Koffeelogic, an air-roasting machine that allows for roasting from 70 to 200 grams of coffee. 

The coffee roasting hobby would also require you to find a supplier of green coffee. That can be challenging since green coffee traders rarely provide the coffee by kilo. It is possible to establish a relationship with a local provider to get green coffee samples.

Outro

Coffee can be a regular and dull fix or a product that acts as a lens through which we can learn about the world around us.

Discover cultures, recipes, traditions, and flavors with a cup of specialty coffee roasted and brewed by yourself!