How to make the best coffee at home: Sunday Times bestseller from world-class barista

Written by James Hoffmann

We all expect to be able to buy an excellent cup of coffee from the many brilliant coffee shops available. But what about the coffee we make at home? Shouldn't that be just as good?

Coffee guru James Hoffmann runs Square Mile Coffee, as well as creating extremely informative, and popular, kit and coffee reviews for his YouTube and Instagram channels. In his latest book he demonstrates everything you need to know to make consistently excellent coffee at home, including: what kit is worth buying, and what isn't; how to grind coffee; the basics of brewing for all major equipment (cafetiere, aeropress, stovetop etc); understanding coffee drinks, from the cortado to latte; and the perfect espresso.

(P)Octopus Publishing Group 2022

• Language: English
• Publisher: Octopus
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781784728427

James Hoffmann

James Hoffmann is the co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters, a multi-award-winning coffee roasting company based in East London. He is also the World Barista Champion 2007, having won the UK Barista competition in both 2006 and 2007. He has a YouTube channel with more than 2.3 million subscribers, where he makes videos about anything and everything to do with coffee and an instagram following of more than 760k. He is the author of The World Atlas of Coffee (first edition 2014, second edition 2018, third edition 2025) and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Make the Best Coffee at Home (2022).

Reviews for How to make the best coffee at home

[bornanalog · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A solid, commonsense guide to the world of coffee and coffee-making (focusing mainly on pour-over devices, french press, and espresso machines). Provides a lot of background about coffee roasting practices, brewing considerations and the like. However, Hoffman recognizes that there is a lot of pretentious bullshit surrounding the world of coffee-based drinks and so he repeatedly offers useful base-line approaches with an emphasis, ultimately, on making the kind of coffee that will satisfy you personally--but being able to do that consistently. Even as someone who is relatively experienced in making different types of coffee drinks over the years I still learned some valuable lessons. He also busts a lot of myths (the origin of the Americano, for example). The illustrations could be a little better and many of the images are not captioned, so it often isn't clear what exactly you are looking at. A solid intro text, but of limited repeat use, I would suspect.