Luke’s review of How To Make The Best Coffee At Home > Likes and Comments
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Hoffman has gone way down the coffee rabbit hole. He does s good job outlining all the different ways humans have invented machines to extract it using very nice colour images. The book is easy to read, highly repetitive in the art of coffee making and confuses the pour of water into coffee with the pour of coffee into cup. The first chapter on sourcing beans and roast is ok. He could use a graphic to outline the interactions between grain size, roast, acidity, grain eveness, grain density, bitterness, water amount and water temperature. Those seem to be the main variables as he mansplains them alot. The book is for the home coffee maker but unless you are a coffee snob and want to spend time scientifically working out ratios by weighing coffee before and after extraction, or get a thrill from why we measure weight not volume of crema, how terroir may or may not affect taste, what altitude to source your specialty coffee from (yes, really), how to taste coffee (yes really) and where in America to source your water shows, you can skip most of it. The explanations about each of the main factors affecting the brew are good and could be condensed into separate chapters. There is s chapter on why other variables thst could affect taste, like species of bean etc cant be used to standardise anything, and he says have fun, experiment, try this while making a very easy thing very complicated. Same for milk foaming. He is obviously a very particular man and well deserves his accolades but the book is way too much about his ego than his audience. Anyway I changed the water temperature and tamping as a result of the book and have a better understanding of how to adjust things. A ceramic grinder seems worth it so will save up. There are recipes at the end with his opinion about them. Other books give better recipes. Then a bi about cleanliness is godliness and how to do it which is useful. There is nothing on coffee art or how to do it or what is best served with your morning shot.
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Brenda
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Oct 15, 2026 02:35PM
Hoffman has gone way down the coffee rabbit hole. He does s good job outlining all the different ways humans have invented machines to extract it using very nice colour images. The book is easy to read, highly repetitive in the art of coffee making and confuses the pour of water into coffee with the pour of coffee into cup. The first chapter on sourcing beans and roast is ok. He could use a graphic to outline the interactions between grain size, roast, acidity, grain eveness, grain density, bitterness, water amount and water temperature. Those seem to be the main variables as he mansplains them alot. The book is for the home coffee maker but unless you are a coffee snob and want to spend time scientifically working out ratios by weighing coffee before and after extraction, or get a thrill from why we measure weight not volume of crema, how terroir may or may not affect taste, what altitude to source your specialty coffee from (yes, really), how to taste coffee (yes really) and where in America to source your water shows, you can skip most of it. The explanations about each of the main factors affecting the brew are good and could be condensed into separate chapters. There is s chapter on why other variables thst could affect taste, like species of bean etc cant be used to standardise anything, and he says have fun, experiment, try this while making a very easy thing very complicated. Same for milk foaming. He is obviously a very particular man and well deserves his accolades but the book is way too much about his ego than his audience. Anyway I changed the water temperature and tamping as a result of the book and have a better understanding of how to adjust things. A ceramic grinder seems worth it so will save up. There are recipes at the end with his opinion about them. Other books give better recipes. Then a bi about cleanliness is godliness and how to do it which is useful. There is nothing on coffee art or how to do it or what is best served with your morning shot.
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