I am a complete noob at coffee making. Which device should I get? I keep reading about stuff like French Press, Aeropress, etc but idk which is good and easy to use for a beginner. If it helps, until now I have only drunk instant coffee (with either milk or sugar or both). Thanks in advance!
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies guys!
I’d start really simple. A good burr grinder and either French press or pour over. Personally YMMV on French press vs pour over, but I tend to enjoy the taste and feel of a pour over coffee. If you have a set budget spend as much as possible on the best quality grinder. You’ll notice the biggest difference in taste, texture and brew from a grinder (IMO).
Also, buy a scale. You’ll want to start doing everything by weight now. I’m sure people can give you way more in-depth responses than mine, but this is my easy slide in to the world of coffee brewing. One day you’ll end up like the rest of us buying $6-700 single dose grinders and trying to math their way into the best cup of coffee every morning. It’s a lifestyle choice for sure.
Editing to add this bit:
I forgot to stress something I feel is the most important. It shouldn’t be a struggle or you shouldn’t really feel like you’re having to do a ton of work for your coffee. Yes boiling water, weighing the beans, grinding, then timing your pour and weighing the whole thing is work, but don’t stress over too much of it. It’s about enjoying the coffee and how it tastes. I feel like so much of this “hobby” or addiction gets wrapped up with sounding like a ton of work. It shouldn’t be that way, and adding one big piece each time slowly over time adds up to almost nothing.
I’d personally recommend an Aeropress over a pour over for a beginner. Pour over is actually pretty tricky to get great tasting coffee out of imo, aeropress is much harder to screw up.
Thanks. Does manual/electric grinder make much difference in the coffee?
@iamak @mean_bean279
Just the price. You can get a *really good* manual grinder fully able to grind espresso for the same as a meh electric one.
But or course, grinding manually gets old really fast if you normally grind for more than 1-2 cups at a time
Okay I’ll keep that in mind thanks :)
I started my coffee journey because I went on internship abroad and didn’t have access to the house coffee machine anymore. I decided instant was too disgusting so I bought a 10€ French Press. Now I’m complaining to my wife that my scale is not good enough, I need to be more precise than a gram to make good espresso. What a rabbit hole.
My dad had me pickup a bag of coffee he liked a lot on a roadtrip of mine. He excitedly brought it over one day and my mom had to tell him as he was explaining brining it while they were driving to my house that my giant fancy $600 grinder is in fact only single dose and doesn’t really “do” whole bags of coffee… he was sad to say the least.
Mr scale at 1/10th of a gram wasn’t even accurate enough to me… you’ll get to a point where a 1/100th of a gram is the difference between great and perfect coffee. 😂
Honestly, I always tell people I’m such a robot about making my coffee in the morning that it only seems complicated. If you did the whole routine every day too you’d end up making a great cup in about 5 minutes with cleanup. Although I’m blessed enough to have one of those instant boiling filtered water things in my kitchen. Cannot recommend that enough, even just for cleaning things. Anyways, I’m right there with you. I started with a cheap IKEA French press and a $40 Mr.Coffee burr grinder and it just rabbit holed from there.
So relatable! And now I’m finding myself often considering that one grinder is not enough because my Mignon does good espresso but isn’t awesome at filter and it’s a huge pain to switch granularity in it.
I remember not so long ago when I watched Hoffman videos and thought he had too many grinders…
Aliexpress Yuropress and Timemore C3. Then clever v60 and a kettle with a long nose. Then Gaggia New Classic. His was my path. I can give more details on these, if you want, including links.