About Beans & Barista
Espresso hardware and extraction science for people who weigh their dose to a tenth of a gram — written by one person, funded by affiliate commission, and honest about which of the two is which.
Why this site exists
Home espresso is full of decisions that cost real money. A grinder is a four-hundred-dollar bet on a burr geometry you cannot see. A machine is a two-thousand-dollar bet on thermal stability you cannot measure in a shop. And most of the coverage that turns up when you search for help is written to rank and to sell, not to help you decide — spec sheets reworded, numbers nobody took, "labs" that are a stock photo.
I wanted a site that told you which of its numbers were real. That is the whole idea.
How to read this site
Every article carries one of two badges, and the difference matters more than anything else on the page:
- 🔬 Bench Tested — I bought it and measured it. Hand grinders, WDT tools,
tampers, scales, baskets, kettles, cleaning chemistry, entry-level machines and grinders.
A piece with this badge carries its numbers alongside the rig that produced them and the
date they were taken.
Nothing carries this badge yet. The first pieces are all synthesis. The badge appears the day a tool is actually on the desk, and not before. - 📚 Research Synthesis — I do not own it. Flagship machines and grinders, commercial equipment. No first-hand measurements are claimed; everything is sourced from manufacturer documentation, independent community testing and published literature, and attributed.
I will not blur those two. A synthesis piece can still be genuinely useful — often it is the most useful thing available, because it collects testing that is scattered across forums and papers. But it is not the same as having held the thing, and pretending otherwise is how this entire category lost its credibility.
What I don't do
No sponsored reviews. No brand approval of copy before publication. No invented measurements. If a product arrives free, that is stated at the top of the article, not buried at the bottom. If I get something wrong and you tell me, I correct it in the body of the piece with a date on it.
I also don't claim credentials I don't hold. Where a piece leans on formal standards — SCA water specifications, cupping protocols, extraction literature — I cite the standard itself so you can check it rather than take my word for it.
How it's funded
Affiliate commission, and nothing else. Buying through a link on this site costs you nothing extra and pays for the gear that gets tested. It does not change what wins a comparison — see the affiliate disclosure and the testing policy for the full detail.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions, disagreements and requests for what to test next are all welcome: contact@beansandbarista.com, or via the contact page.