Coffee Tao

This is part 2 of a holiday gift guide, aimed at making suggestions for the coffee lovers on your shopping list. Part 1 is here. I’m doing these posts because when I ran a retail floor, between October and January I was always bombarded with questions of what constitutes a good coffee-related gift. Sometimes I carried what I would suggest in-house, sometimes I didn’t; now, it’s nice to be able to suggest anything I like without worrying about sending a potential sale out the door. And that includes the stuff I would like (*cough cough*).

You may notice that there are no espresso machines in the following list. Shopping for a home espresso machine deserves its own post–maybe a book–and should never be an impulse purchase. I’ll open a discussion of what to look for in buying a home espresso machine in an upcoming post sometime soon.

Gifts for The Home Roaster

So the person you’re shopping for already knows the difference between a Supremo and an Excelso, can tell between a City and a Full City roast, and knows that a good Panamanian is ten times better than an overpriced-but-mediocre “Kona blend”. Here are some suggestions for the coffee lover that knows it all, but may not have it all (yet).

1. SwissMar Bravi Roasting Machine–The next level up from the SwissMar Alpenroast, one of the most-used home roasting machines for many years, the Bravi drum roaster will roast up to a half-pound of beans and wins points for ease of use, safety, and durability. It has a large footprint and admittedly won’t win any beauty pageants, but this is the real deal short of buying a commercial 2lb. sample roaster for several grand.

2. iRoast2 Coffee Roaster–The major selling point of the iRoast is roast-profile customizability. You can save up to 10 rather detailed roast profiles, created by adjusting temperatures up or down for five stages of the roast, then skewing the overall curve towards a fast roast or a slow roast. It’s kind of loud and has some physical durability issues, but there’s no other roaster near this price point that will give you as much control over the final product–so it’s worth being a little extra careful to gain more control over the roast.

3. Home Coffee Roasting, Revised, Updated Edition –Kenneth Davids’ book on home roasting may be the only instruction manual you need if you’ve never roasted your own before, and also serves as a handy reference for the more experienced.

4. Capresso TEAM-S Coffee Machine with Burr Grinder–Metal conical burrs and a large number of customizable settings, plus a history of mechanical reliability, mean that for the money this is one of the best conventional home coffee machines you can get.

5. Bodum Santos Electric Vacuum Coffee Pot–Bodum’s Santos unit is an excellent way to get an entire pot of French-press-style coffee in one go, and is excellent when you want to truly taste a coffee you’ve just roasted. Be careful: the Santos makes a brew that’s much stronger than you may be used to if you don’t normally drink coffee from a French press.

6. Capresso Burr Grinder–A simple but essential piece of equipment. The Capresso unit with its steel conical burrs is reliable and consistent, with a wide range of possible adjustments.