About The Coffee Guru

Who is behind it

I started The Coffee Guru in 2019, a few months after I moved to London. I had been a coffee lover for many years and I was working in tech, and I wanted to learn how to build a website from start to finish rather than follow tutorials. Coffee was the subject I actually wanted to write about, so that is what I built.

When lockdown hit it worked in my favour. I was stuck at home, so the time went into the site. I worked with a few writers, ran it for a few years, then stopped. Work got busier, I wanted to learn other things, and it sat where I left it.

What brought me back was simple. There was no comparison site where I could put two coffee products side by side and work out which one was better for me. Plenty of reviews and top ten lists, but nothing that just laid out the specs and features next to each other. Every maker lists them differently, so working out how two grinders actually differ means eight tabs open, clicking between them, writing burr sizes on a bit of paper.

Once I saw that gap I started planning the revamp, and I have spent the last year building it. This is it. Hundreds of products already compared, and I use it myself every time I buy something.

What that means in practice

Specifications first, taken from the people who made the thing, laid out side by side. Then a plain answer about which one we would buy, and the arithmetic that got us there. Every number comes from a manufacturer's own specification page or printed manual, every score is arithmetic over those numbers, and the working is printed beside the score. You do not have to take anyone's word for it, which is the point.

We do not test gear by hand

Every review here is research-based. We read what the maker publishes, we record it, and we compare it. We do not brew with these machines, we do not time their heat-up, and we do not tell you how the milk textures, because we have not done it, and a review site that implies otherwise is lying to you about the one thing you cannot verify.

That is a real limit and it is worth knowing before you trust a score. What this method is good at is the comparison a shop cannot give you: burr geometry against burr geometry, boiler type against boiler type, price per kilo across bag sizes that were chosen to stop you doing that sum. What it cannot tell you is how something feels in the hand. If hands-on testing starts here, this page will say so before any review does.

Blanks stay blank

If a maker does not publish a figure, we leave it empty and say so. We do not estimate it, and we do not infer it from the price. Across 469 products we are carrying 3,268 recorded specifications and a great many empty cells, and the empty cells are deliberate.

This matters more than it sounds. An invented number reads exactly like a measured one. You cannot tell them apart, and neither can we six months later. So a product with a missing spec is scored on what it does publish, and its score says how much of the picture that was.

How we get paid

Some links here are affiliate links, and if you buy through one we may earn a commission at no cost to you. It does not change a score, because scores are computed from specifications before any link is attached, and it does not change an order, because the rankings are generated from the scores rather than arranged by hand. Nobody can buy a position here. See the affiliate disclosure for the detail.

What we cover

469 products across 21 categories, from espresso machines and grinders to moka pots, scales and the coffee itself. Read how the scores are built, compare anything against anything on the comparison page, or tell us we have got something wrong. Corrections are welcome and we would rather hear it from you than not.