Supporting your local coffee shop is a wonderful thing to do, and you should! But let’s face it, there’s lots of reasons why getting into making your own coffee is a great idea. Let’s take a look at 5 of those reasons today!
Cost
First up is cost. This one is tricky because it depends a lot on coffee prices in your area. We did some math that you can find in the embedded video below that found that with decent equipment and coffee you could pay off an espresso setup after just a few hundred lattes at the national average of $4.00 per latte from the cafe. That may sound like a lot, but if you’re a latte per day (or more) drinker that means that you should pay off your machine in a year or less, and this equipment is built to last much longer than that.
This math gets even better with brew methods like press and pour over. The initial investment is much lower, and a cafe pour over isn’t that far off from an espresso drink. While there is a time investment to making these beverages at home, it might actually be lower than what it takes to go to the store!
Preference
This is perhaps the biggest reason, even more than cost, that you should be brewing coffee at home. If you like your coffee to taste a certain way, you really need to brew it yourself. When you make coffee at home you can control things like the milk texture, the strength, the temperature of your coffee and your milk, and you can of course select the perfect beans for you.
More than just preference in brewing, you’ll also have preference for timing. Do you like fresh coffee first thing in the morning? If you brew at home you can have it without a trip to the cafe. This is especially convenient for anyone who does remote or hybrid work, as you’ll be able to brew on your break schedule. We know many coffee drinkers who rely on runs to the cafe already have some sort of cheap pod based machine or drip brewer at home for those desperate moments, so why not upgrade and get great coffee every time you drink it?
Experimentation & Coffee as a Hobby
If you don’t really know what your preferences are then this is the perfect reason for you to get brewing at home. The more you get into coffee as a hobby the more you’ll find really fun things to experiment with and try out. While this can make your coffee brewing a bit more expensive as you pick up new gear to try, it will also be a great hobby for you to enjoy on a deeper level than you might have before.
Learning about coffee and developing an appreciation for different techniques and practices will help you understand what you like and deepen your appreciation for the drink immensely. And trust us, you can do this without becoming a coffee snob! You’ll find that there’s always some new gear, a new way to brew, or some delicious new beans to try, making it a really deep and engaging hobby!
Hosting
This last one really ties this list together. Hosting and entertaining as a coffee expert is really a blast. Your guests will enjoy truly delicious coffee that will give them a whole new appreciation for the beverage as well. You’ll never get over how fun it is to hand someone a perfectly brewed cup of coffee that is unlike anything they’ve had before and watch their eyes light up as they take that first sip. It’s also practical, as coffee for guests is such an expected part of hosting. If you get proficient and brewing it, it'll make that piece of the puzzle much less stressful!
We hope this list has convinced you that it’s time to get started brewing coffee at home. Head on over to our store pages to start shopping for your coffee gear, and check out our video version of this article below for some further insight from Sean.