Making Espresso at Home Is Kind of a Nightmare—But If You Insist, Here’s How to Do It Well (2024)

For a long time, my main focus in life was running Wirecutter, which I founded in 2011 with some friends. Three years ago, when The New York Times took over the company, I needed a new hobby. Despite not being a regular coffee drinker at the time, I decided to start brewing espresso.

I’d been warned it was a bad idea. Matt Buchanan, executive editor at Eater, who wrote an early coffee-making gear guide for Wirecutter, and who has written about coffee for The New Yorker, says, “No one should make espresso at home, leave it to the shops; it’s a multi-thousand-dollar rabbit hole you might never find your way out of.”

I didn’t listen. Initially, I started researching home espresso for a Wirecutter guide. Then I got a little obsessed—I was hooked. It’s been a few years, and I’ve gathered some decent equipment, some training, and a little experience. At this point, I feel comfortable making espresso, and I prefer my own drinks to those made in most cafés.

And I now agree with Buchanan—I do not think most people should get into making espresso at home without knowing what they are in for. From the complexity and cost of the machines to the way beans are brewed and dialed in when grinding, it’s the most expensive and difficult method of coffee making.

If you want to make truly great home espresso, you’ll need a quality machine and plenty of practice. Here are the lessons I learned the hard way through many mistakes and the guidance of pros.

Home espresso is crazy expensive

Making espresso at home is expensive compared with other types of coffee. Even Wirecutter’s recommended espresso machine for beginners, the Breville Bambino Plus, when paired with a good grinder comes close to $700. And if you want a machine you can really grow with, you’ll need to spend more.

In my experience, and according to pros at Clive Coffee (who specialize in gear for home espresso), a setup that can keep up with café-quality drinks is easily going to cost about $1,000 for the machine alone, and a few hundred extra for the grinder. These machines have full-size portafilters (the part that holds the basket that holds the coffee), pumps that won’t choke on large amounts of fine coffee necessary for strong espresso, and heating elements that are consistent, tweakable, and powerful enough to fine-tune extraction and make great coffee repeatedly.

Home espresso is difficult (so get trained)

The most important thing to realize before getting into home espresso is that it is a pain in the ass to make. Pulling decent shots is a lot harder than making a pour-over or drip coffee. James Hoffmann, one of my favorite coffee-gear reviewers and coffee experts, said, “We’ve set unrealistic expectations about the effort:reward ratio in coffee, and that’s the point of friction with espresso at home.”

If this does not dissuade you, that’s great. To start accumulating the considerable amount of knowledge needed to make good home espresso—and to get a better idea of how complex the process is—ideally you’d learn in person. Most cities have at least one local roaster or café that teaches classes on how to make espresso, so you can experience it for yourself and be prepared to use your machine. Of course, that’s nearly impossible right now, with social distancing rules in place.

In the short term, someone who’s curious can learn online—such as on YouTube or Barista Hustle—but you’ll get only the theory behind making good coffee. There’s no replacement for hands-on experience, because you will have to taste and adjust your drinks under the wing of a pro to understand what changing variables like grind size, beans, temperature, extraction time, and pressure can do to your coffee.

To not educate yourself and to own an espresso machine seems crazy to me, but it is very common. I have a friend who has one of the highest-end machines at home and does not really know how to use it. He doesn’t know how to dial in the coarseness of his coffee, tweak temperature, or vary pressure during the shot, to adjust the flavors in his drinks. He just drinks whatever brown liquid comes out of the machine and covers it up with pretty milk designs. He’s missing out on nuanced flavors and the ability to make drinks taste the way he wants, whether that is darker, lighter, stronger, more acidic, or whatever. And he’s basically using his $8,000 machine within the limits and capability of $1,000 machines, which is a total waste of a great machine.

I’ve found this unfortunate habit in more than one person, but anyone can fall victim to the idea that the only thing you need to make great espresso is an expensive machine. Even pros.

The number of professional coffee makers, shop owners, YouTubers, and writers I’ve come across who do not get training is, unfortunately, the majority. You’ll notice these people, too, once you take a class. And you’ll be able to make better drinks than most of them, if you care to.

Theory is important in espresso making because coffee is different bag to bag, and even the same coffee changes day to day as it ages. If you don’t understand the underlying way coffee is extracted, you cannot respond to those changes. You have to tweak the recipe almost every—if not every—day. Great cafés do this.

And you will be able to, too, if you find a teacher (digitally or in person).

A manual machine might teach you more—and last you forever

So, if you’re determined to get into home espresso and are committed to making great coffee, how do you start on a relative budget, without the huge compromises most lower-end espresso machines have? I recommend investing in a manual lever machine, like the Cafelat Robot. It’s more difficult to use than an automatic machine, but it’s a better choice for learning the fundamentals of espresso making. And it costs only around $300 (here’s a good review and video demonstration of how the Robot works, by James Hoffmann).

You’ve probably never heard of the Robot because it’s not made by a giant corporation that has a huge advertising budget, but instead by a well-known enthusiast, Paul Pratt, who restores old espresso machines for a hobby. The geeks at Home-Barista.com (the best place to converse with home espresso lunatics) really respect what it can do for beginners, and those with experience feel it can pull shots as great as any more expensive machine.

However, it’s not for everyone. There are a lot of things that make it inconvenient to use (and why something like this wouldn’t be a good pick for most people).

The machine does not have a pump or a boiler, and it depends on your arms to pull levers and your kettle to heat the water. This added fuss means that making drinks can take a dozen or so minutes (including time to boil some water on your stove and measure its temp), compared with a minute using an automatic machine. That’s not ideal for busy mornings or weekend brunch for a half-dozen friends.

And it doesn’t have a milk frother built in. So you’ll need a milk frother, like this $100 Bellman Stovetop Steamer, which, to use it, is just another thing you’ll have to boil water for.

You’ll also need a small scale to weigh your shots as they emerge, but no matter what machine you get, you’ll probably have a scale you use for weighing beans anyhow.

Sorry, I know I’m not making a good case here, but bear with me. There are upsides.

By controlling your own hot water, there’s no limit to the power of the heating element, like in other beginner machines, so you can turn down the temperature or increase it, using a thermometer, to adjust extraction. In my experience, you can taste every degree of temperature change, with hotter water increasing extraction and strength of coffee. Likewise, if coffee tastes too strong or ashy, you can back off the temperature to make it more mild tasting. I also recommend preheating the empty metal portafilter and basket with boiling water immediately before filling it with fresh grinds, to keep it from leeching heat away from your coffee. Which, unfortunately, takes a little more time.

And since the coffee is extracted through a mechanical process using levers and your muscles rather than a pump, you actually have to be strong to use it. Which is sort of annoying first thing in the morning. But there are no cheap motors limiting the process. You can control the pressure curve, easing into the shot and then jacking up the pressure, like in more expensive machines with programmable or manually controlled pressure profiles and pre-infusion settings that pre-wet the puck so the shot pulls smoother.

The Robot also has a full-size, 58 mm portafilter basket, just like in professional machines, so you can get a full double shot, and close to a triple, in your drink, which is the 14- to 18-gram range that most decent cafés serve at.

Hands-down, the coffee from the Robot was much better than the drinks I’ve made with most beginner machines. It just took a lot more expertise and time to use. But every time you do it the long way, you’re building up your knowledge and experience, so consider that extra time an investment in your own skills. That’s why I think the Robot is the best machine—even with all the caveats above—for a beginner who knows they are going to become an aficionado of home espresso. (However, if you’re really sure you’re going to go for it, I recommend jumping straight ahead to an intermediate model that costs more than $1,000, which will be able to create professional-quality drinks.)

After some time, you’ll learn how to adjust your coffee and eventually will be able to make much better drinks with the Robot, if you put in the time. You’ll know if the drinks weren’t strong enough, and increase the heat, increase the dose, or increase the grind fineness.

The last thing I’ll say about the Robot is it’s all metal and silicon, with no electronics or plastic bits to break. It will likely last forever and be easy to take care of and repair. And it is advanced in capability, enough so that you’ll never outgrow it, even if you end up getting a higher-end electric machine. It’s also charming to use. Buying things for life is a good thing, but buying things you can pass down to your children is better.

Water quality matters

No one really talks about this to beginners, but anyone who cares about coffee making is thinking about their water quality. I’m not just talking about filtering water. Or even softening it to avoid scale build-up, which can eventually destroy machines. Water affects taste.

Isn’t this obvious now that I’ve said it? Coffee is mostly water, and so it makes sense that water affects taste. And what might surprise you is that the purest water will not make the most delicious coffee.

I’m not a scientist, but some of my teachers are—Chris Nguyen, who is a chemist as well as the owner and barista of Tulip House, explained to me why pure water isn’t ideal for coffee making: “Since there are no minerals or ions/cations, there’s nothing for flavor compounds to bind to, so only flavor compounds that are extracted by heat will come out in the brew.” In a nutshell, and in my own back-to-back tests of water that was pure versus mineralized, using the same beans, coffee tasted flatter, less sweet, and less complex in pure water.

You’re wondering how you get decent water for good coffee, right?

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to optimize your water, and anyone who says they can recommend a silver-bullet fix for everyone’s water is probably wrong, because everyone’s water is different.

First, before you can tweak your water, you have to know what you’re dealing with and make sure it’s safe for your machine (unless it’s the Cafelat Robot, which has no parts that would scale or clog or corrode in a boiler). Maybe your tap water is fine; maybe it has too much hardness, which can cause scale, or chlorine or salt. Maybe the pH is too acidic. I don’t know. It’s beyond the scope of this article to get too deep into the topic, and, again, I am not a chemist.

What I do know is that you will start with a water test. Read your manual and contact your machine’s maker for some advice. Every maker has its own recommendations, and that varies a lot. I’ve heard some bad advice from retailers, and some technicians, but the manufacturers have always steered me right. And the scientists.

Beyond the safety of your water is how water quality affects the taste of your coffee. The information is hard to come by. Some home espresso nerds who can’t get their tap water to be ideal for coffee making recommend using bottled water. I know this sounds crazy, and it is, but I tried it. The water was soft enough to not damage my machine but on a par with my own tap water that I’d treated (see below).

One forum poster at home-barista.com even recommended Crystal Geyser water—but only from the California bottling facilities—after running a series of tests. To avoid plastic waste, you could use water that’s bottled and delivered by local companies that rent or sell water coolers with 3- to 5-gallon bottles, and that pick up and recycle and reuse the bottles. But this is all probably too excessive for most people. It was for me.

My local tap water had five times the level of salt allowed by La Marzocco, my machine’s manufacturer. The softener that the shop sold me didn’t help that, and I was putting my machine’s boilers at risk of corrosion. After thinking about this for a while, I decided to start from pure water—from an under-counter reverse osmosis system, which uses a fine-pored membrane that lets water through but traps dissolved minerals and other substances—and add minerals back in, using packets of minerals from Third Wave Water. I tried a bag of coffee I was midway through and very familiar with, and that I’d been drinking first with softened tap water, and then with pure reverse osmosis water, and finally with reverse osmosis water with mineral additives. The coffee tasted drastically better with Third Wave additives than with pure reverse osmosis water over several days, to me and to those on my testing panel. It was like night and day.

Anyone can use this method to fix their water without testing it, but you’re talking about spending a few hundred dollars on the system, when tests you may run may tell you that all you need is nothing or a softener/filter. So, again, start with a test, and go from there. And if all I’ve done is confuse you, I thought this 17-minute video by Hoffmann on water was a great, easy-to-understand summary of, well, the weeks of research I did on my own.

A dirty machine makes disgusting coffee, so clean it—often

Espresso machines are not like iPhones. Espresso machines need a lot of cleaning and maintenance—daily back flushes of the brewing system, weekly deep cleans of the group heads and steam wands and tanks, and annual changes of gaskets and/or professional maintenance. It’s a pain in the ass, and there’s not really a way around it. My machine asks me to spend 20 minutes every Sunday night cleaning it. Forever! In general, all pump/boiler-based machines require some sort of cleaning and maintenance.

What happens to machines that aren’t given regular cleaning? Rancid coffee grinds will build up in my machine’s plumbing, making its way into drinks, making them taste like dirt, and defeating all efforts to make great coffee at home. Also, drinking drinks made from rancid coffee-grind buildup is disgusting. Recently, I saw a machine opened up after seven years without cleaning. The machine had a bean grinder built in, and along with old coffee grinds, there was plenty of mold—and there were co*ckroach legs, and some plastic bits from the grinder had definitely fallen into the burrs and ended up in someone’s drink.

Use great beans, or you’re wasting your time

Espresso is easier and better, in general, with fresh beans. In my tests, I decided I like my espresso beans between five and 15 days old, which is more or less in line with professional consensus.

I know a rich guy—someone who helps run a big coffee company—with an $8,000 machine who was grinding beans every few weeks at a café. This defeats the purpose of having a nice machine. Oxidation and off-gassing happen quickly after grinding, accelerating aging. You need to grind at home for ideal home espresso. Once this person got a home grinder, he described it as “life-changing.”

Storing beans is a little controversial. Most coffee geeks recommend storing them in airtight containers, in a cool, dry cupboard. Avoid the fridge, where moisture and scents can be absorbed by coffee, and avoid storing coffee in hot, damp, or sunlit places. If your grinder has a hopper, try not to fill it with more beans than you’ll use that day, since aging will happen faster in the hopper than in storage containers (I prefer Airscape’s vacuum-sealed steel ones).

And if you need to keep beans fresh while you go on vacation, break them up into small bags and freeze them. Vacuum sealing is good. They’ll last a few months this way, but once they thaw (sealed, to avoid condensation), the clock starts again. In my experiments, the beans will be acceptable after thaw, but things aren’t exactly the same.

After running through a few dozen types of beans and roasters, keeping with the stuff my friends and I appreciated the most, I settled mostly on Olympia Coffee and Onyx Coffee as my favorites that ship. But buying locally is the best way to go, if possible, for cost and freshness.

The grinder is more important than the machine

To be honest, beyond a certain level, I don’t really care what machine you end up with. But I do think the grinder is really important.

In general, espresso machines that are between $1,000 and $2,000 are better than cheaper machines, with added temperature controls and more consistent and powerful brewing components. But beyond that, there are diminishing returns and value, according to my favorite retailer of home espresso gear, Clive Coffee. In this piece on how to choose a grinder, they say: “Any espresso machine over $2,000 and under $8,000 pretty much works the same way.”

But the grinder matters a lot. Big burrs are found in better grinders, equating to more consistently sized particles. This in turn means coffee extracts more evenly, avoiding over-extracting some of your batch of coffee, which can quickly turn a drink bitter. In my tests, better grinders equated to better drinks. I’ve had $200, $600, $1,200, and $1,700 grinders, and better grinders allowed me to pull stronger drinks without an increase in bitterness.

Clive Coffee recommends spending 40 percent of your budget on a grinder, and I mostly agree. But since you might outgrow a beginner machine, yet your grinder will be a thing you may use for much longer, I would personally be okay if someone told me they spent most of their initial budget on a grinder. That’s not crazy. That’s solid long-term thinking.

Even though I could do with a lesser espresso machine, I wouldn’t give up my grinders, which I have gone full crazy on. I started with a Baratza Virtuoso, went to a Eureka Mignon with 55 mm burrs, a Macap m7d with 68 mm burrs, and then a Eureka Atom 75 mm, a flat burr grinder, which I have no problems with. Recently, I upgraded to a KafaTek Monolith Max, a 98 mm burr machine (which I had to put myself on a waitlist to get) made by a talented enthusiast. These are too expensive and big for most people getting into home espresso, but there are some good choices out there that cost a lot less.

Wirecutter’s beginner grinder recommendations just hit the tip of the iceberg on what works well for espresso, where precision, consistent grind size, and coolness are queen. In other words, this is good starting-point advice below $500, but there’s nowhere to go but up.

Beyond this level, I would trust Clive Coffee’s guide to grinder shopping (this is where I bought my machines from, and they answered dozens of emails full of questions from me over several months) to help you decide what works in your budget, if you want something more expensive than what Wirecutter recommends. I think pairing $500 to $800 grinders with $1,000 machines or the Robot is a step up from Wirecutter’s beginner pick, if you want to change it up. I’ve also heard great things about the Niche Zero, a crowd-funded model that actually made good on its promises to deliver great-quality grinding at higher value than most other grinders. It’s about in that price range, but it performs like grinders that cost more. The best review of it is by—no surprise—James Hoffmann (video).

Are you sure?

If you’re wavering about home espresso, it’s not too late to bail. Shawn Steiman, author and scientist, with a PhD in tropical plant and soil science (with a focus on coffee), suggests some easier and cheaper options to strong coffee: “Most people who want to drink drinks from an espresso machine actually want a milk drink—get a moka pot and a manual milk frother, you can make an okay milk drink.” That’s gonna cost, like, 50 bucks.

Having said that, if you’ve read all this and you aren’t dissuaded, there’s a good chance you’ll be satisfied with a home espresso setup. When I travel, I tend to stick to an AeroPress, when I’m not around decent coffee shops. By the end of a trip, I’m usually excited to get back and drink my own espresso drinks. At this point, while sheltering in place, I couldn’t live without them.

So, if you’ve decided to go for it, best of luck. You’re going to need it!

Mentioned above

• After spending more than 120 hours researching and testing 14 home espresso machines, we found the best espresso machines for most at-home baristas.The Best Espresso Machine for Beginners
• We’ve been testing coffee grinders since 2015 and have yet to find a better value than the consistent, reliable, and repairable Baratza Encore.The Best Coffee Grinder
• We tested 37 instant-read meat thermometers and probe thermometers for speed, accuracy, and price. Here are our top picks. The Best Meat Thermometers
• We’ve been testing vacuum sealers since 2017. Our pick is the Anova Precision Vacuum Sealer Pro.The Best Vacuum Sealer
• The AeroPress coffee maker, and its travel companion, the AeroPress Go, are the best way to make single cups of coffee at work or on the go. The AeroPress is a Fast, Portable, No-Frills Tool for Making Terrific Coffee