Even the fanciest pourover funnel costs only 50 dollars, but you can certainly get by with a cheap plastic one for a few bucks. If you want to go full hipster, you will also need a temperature controlled electric kettle, and a scale to exactly portion out your coffee.
Then of course there is the grinder. If you are patient enough to hand grind, you can get a Hario ceramic manual grinder for $50 that produces a high quality grind. Otherwise, a quality electric grinder will be more expensive.
All and all, a hipster pourover setup will cost you less than $500 if you go all in. I don't use a scale, a temperature control, or a fancy grinder - I just use a cheap grinder and eyeball my beans, while pouring boiled water over them, so my whole setup cost me about $50 dollars. That coffee still blows the pants off Keurig any day of the week, and I can compost my filters so I am not filling a hole in our planet with a tiny plastic cup every time I want a coffee.
That's the key. When I buy mid-range beans (usually what I do—the good stuff's expensive) my pourovers are really just manual drip coffee. Fine, but just... coffee. When I use really good beans, though? It's a whole different drink. All kinds of nuance and delicate flavors.
The tiers I've found are basically: truly bad coffee; a very large range of coffees that pretty much all just taste like "alright coffee" and for me this goes as low as Kirkland-brand ground coffee and as high as... well, the "nicest" whole-bean coffee Costco sells, differentiated mostly by bitterness levels or burntness; and then the good stuff that doesn't even really belong in the same category of product as the rest, purchased in small quantities, very freshly roasted.
It could well be that Italy's espresso beans are much higher quality at the same price than those in the US. That's the case for some other things in other countries—rich ones, even, not just places with much lower GDP/capita (I still don't get why we can't seem to bake a good loaf of bread at a reasonable price, which also has the effect that our sandwiches tend to either suck or be really expensive—see also, cheese).
> and a scale to exactly portion out your coffee.
You're gonna want a scale if you do much cooking, anyway. Especially baking.
The problem is not so much roasting but getting the beans. Many roasters just wont get to the best stuff from Africa because of limited supply so it makes sense that richer countries snatch the material because they can charge more.
I can imagine US also can afford the best beans so i bet the high high quality is pretty top notch but ive never had US coffe in my life.
It's the same thing with beer and Germany. The average beer in a random town brewery somewhere in Germany is tastier than a Budweiser, but as a beer lover, I would much rather end up at a beer bar with a 100 different beers on tap in a place like London or New York.
The interesting twist with Germany is that the same beer purity laws that originally allowed them to become a beer leader in the world are now holding them back in the craft beer revolution.
But yeah that also means that there is someone obsesive in every bigger city trying to get the best stuff world has to offer.
In so many ways the tradition in italy holds it back in coffe world and holds Germany in beer world. But even the German/Czech beer purity laws are not the real problem its the tradition. It's hard to inovate when beer is super popular but everybody thinks beer equals lager. It's conservatism.
They can break those rules all they want and just not call what they're making "beer", right?
Besides traditions the craft beer "revolution" is due to hops. US climate and innovation brought new hop varieties that are crutial. To make craft beer you pretty much have to import US hops.
You can find good roasted coffee of many types in most of these places.
But if you need an espresso or any other Italian styled coffe. Nothing can beat Italy.
I admit one exception: Portugal. In a long trip to Lisbon I’ve done I had some of the best coffee there !
Edit: still using my 18yr old Bialetti for most of my coffee here and buying coffee when going back occasionally (ever brought back a trolley full of coffe through airport security checks?). Only reliable way so far to have decent coffee.
London is i think the original place from where high end coffe culture spread out to europe and where idea of small independent roasters came from.
I often buy coffee from London when i can get it. Square Mile, Has Bean, Union Coffee, Caravan coffee all mostly highest quality stuff.
Funnily enough i've lived in portugal for a while and coffee was so bad i had hard time finding good beans. Luckily some cafes were importing stuff but no roasters.
Look around a bit you can for sure find awesome cafes in London. If not there than probably nowhere. I posted few of my fav London roasteries to comment under this one.
Setup:
Hario v60 ~ $20
Pour Over Filter ~ $10
Grinder - $30 (already had)
Kitchen Scale - $10 (already had)
This guide is a good start: https://www.stumptowncoffee.com/brew-guides/v60
I dare say that if you are capable of following instructions, and have $15 to invest into a freshly roasted bag of beans from a coffee shop, then your coffee is exactly the same quality as to what you would get from a high end coffee shop. The only difference is that the coffee shop will charge you up to 5 dollars for a fancy pourover, while your 15 dollar bag of beans will last you several weeks.
I think Aeropress easily rivals or beats a cup of coffee I've had a "great" coffee shops, if you use good beans. But even grocery store coffee is better in the Aeropress than a cheap auto-drip machine.
It's such an ordinary, day to day gesture, making a moka when you have a little bit of free time, that I have yet to find an Italian "coffee geek".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_flip_coffee_pot
I thought they use moka pots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot
Easy to clean, easy to use, doesn't burn the coffee, like a percolator inevitably will.
Renato Bialetti, which I was lucky enough to greet, got his ashes put in an oversized moka pot, which was blessed during his funeral[0]. He was known for driving some of his factory workers out for lunch on Fridays, on his expensive car.
[0] https://www.corriere.it/cronache/16_febbraio_16/funerali-bia...
basket or collecting chamber? I hope they didn't brew it afterwards...
NOOOOO!!!
For example, the Rancilio Silvia [1] is known to be one of the best and most tweakable/hackable home machines for manually brewed espresso. It can make great Italian espresso out of the box, but there's also a healthy community around it that hacks the internals to brew at better temperatures and so on. It's also very affordable.
Personally, I have a Jura Ena, because I like just pressing one button to get my coffee, and it's fantastic.
[1] https://www.seattlecoffeegear.com/rancilio-silvia-espresso-m...
https://medium.com/@sonicaghi/why-is-espresso-in-america-so-...
I grew up with a generic espresso machine (pre-Nespresso, so one where you had to grind and compact the beans yourself) and I could make a decent cup from the age of 14. This was with North-American water and beans of average price and quality.
And now you have a plethora of capsule-based espresso machines with identical convenience to a Keurig, from Nespresso to Caffitaly.
There are three cafes local to me that are better than pretty much anything you'd get in italy.
Italian espresso is just... extremely plain. Decent, but boring.
This. This was your problem. I have a $2k Rocket Milano (not the fanciest, but not bad), and I clean it thoroughly every couple weeks. It makes a world of difference each time I do, and the first pulls after putting in the effort are wonderful.
Of course, I also spent nearly a year before I found decent beans near me.
Cheers and good luck!
I grew up in an Italian household with both parents Italian immigrants and have a large extended Italian family.
It would have been an embarrassment to be unable to make a quality espresso.
I never drank any coffee/espresso beverages growing up and it was seen as a rejection of my family's culture, yet despite not consuming it I still was taught how to make espresso and would do it regularly for my parents.
Cuisine is a big part of Italian culture. We didn't go to restaurants because they made food better than we did at home because they were professionals, we'd go to give my mother a break and every time it was like the restaurant was on trial with my mother pointing out every damn thing that was done worse than had she made it.
Edit:
Just wanted to add that having been raised in that environment where authentic home-cooked delicious food was made every day, I can't go to Italian restaurants anymore, not in the US. It's completely ruined it. There were no professional cooks or barristas under that roof, just OG Italians.
One of my favorite things about going to Italy is the quality of the coffee. I really like extreme dark roast (your typical American diner coffee doesn't even count as coffee in my book). In Italy you can go into pretty much any coffee shop and come away with a top-quality espresso. (Don't even get me started on Starbucks.) It's a taste I inherited from my parents, who have European roots.
Now, my parents are seriously old-school. They still live in the house I grew up in, a house they bought new in 1975 and pretty much never updated. It still has the original flower-pattern wall paper. Walking into their house today feels like stepping into a time machine that transports you to an episode of the Brady Bunch. And in their kitchen is a 40-year-old Mr. Coffee which my father loves to futz with. On a good day he can coax it into producing an acceptable cup of joe, but that's about it. So for their 50th anniversary I decided I was going to buy them a proper espresso machine.
Now, I know next to nothing about espresso except that I love to drink it, so I started doing some homework and very soon got lost in a morass of coffee geekdom. The range of options available in the espresso machine market is truly mind-boggling, as are the prices. I didn't mind dropping some serious coin (this was their 50th anniversary after all) but I wanted to make sure I was actually getting something for my money. So I decided to do some experiments.
At the time I worked in a co-working office that had a high-end espresso machine (retail price $5000) and several Italians so I asked one of them to show me how to make a proper espresso. I wanted to use the espresso that came out of the office machine as a baseline and compare it to what I could make on a less expensive machine to see if the machine actually made a difference. "The first thing you have to do," he told me, "is to get the right beans. You have to go to this little specialty shop that's a half-hour drive away and get this particular brand of beans..." which, of course, cost $50 a pound or something absurd like that. But I love my parents, so I dutifully complied.
Proper beanage having been procured, we spent several hours brewing espresso with just about every possible variation on the theme you could imagine. Different grinds (we had a high-end burr grinder in the office too), different packings, different machine settings. Not once did we manage to produce a cup that any of us considered even remotely drinkable. It was all acidic and awful, probably because the machine had never been cleaned since it was installed god-only-knows how many years before.
I ended up getting them a Keurig. I got one for myself too. It makes a decent cup of coffee, but nothing compared to what you find in Italy. It is still a mystery to me how the Italians manage to produce such consistently good coffee, but only in Italy. When they come to the U.S. they seem to lose the touch. Maybe there's something in the water.