Making good drinks at home isn’t hard. You’ll know this already, really – but it’s easy to forget just how much control you have over your kitchen, when you’re bombarded with social media content showing you picture-perfect people making picture-perfect food and drink. This is aspirational content at its worst, showing you a result that’s only possible because someone has invested far more than you can see on the screen.
This bev-related fomo is not unusual, and you’re not alone. But you also don’t need to invest serious amounts of time and money into posh, expensive equipment to make better drinks of your own. Coffee is a great leveller in this respect; someone with no budget can make a long black just as delicious as someone with a thousand-pound machine. Let’s break this down, though – and give you some tools to give you more control over your own drinks-making destiny, with better results to boot.
Start With Ingredients You Can Actually Notice
Anyone in any hobby can tell you that it isn’t the tools that define the product; just as a poor workman doesn’t blame his tools, a poor coffee enthusiast doesn’t need to blame their lack of tools. What’s the star of the show in any beverage? A device on your kitchen counter, or the ingredients in the glass?
Let go of everything else, and start from here. Good coffee has one common denominator: good coffee. That is, the beans. Finding a local coffee roastery is not a hard task anymore; every city has a handful of small-batch roasters producing incredible beans. And even if you don’t have a coffee grinder, these roasters will grind it for you. Likewise, coffee drinks with more ingredients benefit from the best of those ingredients, be it fresh milk or tasty syrups.
Use Familiar Café Menus As Inspiration, Not Instruction
If you’re wanting to make better drinks, you probably have some examples in mind. Use these as a launching-pad. You can take inspiration from coffee drinks on menus out ‘in the wild’, so to speak, using beverages you already know and love as a reference point for flavours and combinations you can recreate at home. This is a good opportunity to research – and to learn a little something about your taste in the process.
Refine Simple Techniques That Elevate Flavour
Since we’re talking basics, let’s talk technique. For many, a thousand-pound espresso machine removes a lot of this thinking – so you’re putting yourself in good stead to out-coffee people with expensive setups. There are myriad ways to prepare coffee, from simple overnight cold-brews to pour-over extractions to pressure-based extractions using something like the AeroPress.
Each have their own signature results, and adjustments in how you perform each method – adjustments in pouring, heating or timing – will have impacts on balance and texture amongst other things. Become a student; become a scientist.
Build Repeatable Habits That Fit Home Routines
All that remains is to take the above advice, and turn it into consistent practice. Consistency turns into better drinks, which turns into the habit of a lifetime. You don’t need fancy gear; you just need to be an enthusiast.
