Best Coffee — Curated from The Hiro Report

The Italian espresso wizards at La Marzocco have teamed up with the Amsterdam-based design team at Polspotten to release these limited-edition handmade cappuccino cups, and I can't stop thinking about them. The set comes with four cups, one each of light blue, yellow, red, and grey, all with a lightly speckled finish and creamy white interior. They look great and are also available as latte cups, espresso cups, and breakfast bowls.

My old wooden coffee dosing tray is starting to show its age (and I'm not sure that my regular RDT'ing has been kind to it), so I've been on the lookout for an upgrade. I found this gorgeous handmade stoneware one while crawling Etsy, and plan to add it to my personal Christmas wishlist. Please don't buy them all out before Santa can order mine!

Perfect for the coffee-loving gadget geek in your life. This smart brewer makes amazing coffee. $$$$

I love this affordable, tabletop lever-action espresso machine. It’s perfect for someone wanting to dip their toes into the steamy waters of espresso without dropping a couple hundred (or thousand) dollars. $$

Probably the cutest travel drink mug I own. The cord handle is just a super fun touch, and I like drinking out of the tempered glass more than my usual insulated metal mugs. $

This tiny device lets you brew espresso from ground beans or from Nespresso pods when camping or roughing it at Folgers-loving in-laws. It’ll even heat the water for you! $$$

These are far and away my favorite cups for espresso and latte drinks, so satisfying to hold and great looking to boot. $

I recently got a new espresso machine with a notoriously small gap between the portafilter and the drip tray, meaning it will fit only very small/short cups. After seeing these gorgeous cups in Tanner Colson's reels for a while I decided to give them a shot, and am blown away by how great they feel. They feel amazing in hand, are the perfect size for a flat white or cappuccino, but also are fantastic for cupping a double shot of espresso. Highly recommended.

The folks at Outin have just launched a new, even smaller, portable, powered espresso machine for travel and camping. They have very kindly sent me one to review in the coming days, so I’ll have more thoughts soon, but first impressions based off the specs alone are positive—It’s more compact than their Nano that I used and really enjoyed on a recent trip, but claims to heat your water both hotter and faster while also including a more powerful pump for your ’spro. It looks like a winner.

I saw a woman in line at my favorite North Austin coffee truck rocking one of these mugs and immediately went down a rabbit hole online to try and find it. It's super compact, looks great, and I love the hardened glass that lets you quickly see how low you're getting on coffee/tea.

I've been on the record about really not loving this company's name or branding, but I have to say this mechanical WDT tool is so insanely satisfying to use on my coffee grinds each morning. For those not familiar, the Weiss Distribution Technique (WDT) is a method of using small, very fine needles to break up the clumps in your coffee grinds to improve their consistency and distribution for a more even and better-balanced espresso shot. There are a lot of different tools out there, but this one uses a whole system of springs and gears to thoroughly mix your grinds and leaves them looking smooth and fluffy, ready for tamping. It gets bonus points for looking and feeling like a steampunk coffee accessory.

I grabbed one of these to take on a trip late last month and enjoyed it so much that it's now my primary espresso scale and my older MHW-3Bomber scale is in a drawer as back-up. It's compact, looks great, and has been highly accurate in my testing. I particularly like that you can control whether or not it beeps when you press buttons. Though I've not used it for pour-overs, it also has a handy feature to automatically tare and track your coffee grinds to water ratio.

I picked up one of these for a series of trips I am taking through the summer and fall. I was drawn to it by the smallish form factor, the fact that it can heat water for you or take boiling water from a kettle, and brews with either ground coffee or Nespresso pods. After having gotten to put it through its paces this last week, I don't think it's going to win any world barista championships, but I am really enjoying having this as a quick and easy espresso option wherever I go and it certainly beats hotel room coffee machines. I'll be bringing it with me on the rest of my travels and camping trips this year. Schedule allowing, I hope to write a more detailed review of it for CoffeeGeek this fall. It's far from perfect but it's sparking joy for me.

Let them make café-quality espresso in their hotel rooms and at their campsites. It blew me away when I met with Flair this spring. ~$200

HomeGrind is a super fun indie app that released this week for us home baristas that are constantly taking drink orders from the rest of the family. The app lets you make a custom drink menu for your home cafe, listing all the drinks you can make and giving your guests options for the different milks and sweeteners you have to offer. Family and guests can download the app and place orders, upon which you'll receive a notification on your phone of the specifics of their orders. Your home "customers" can even leave tips in the form of emojis. I love this idea and am even feeling inspired to maybe do a free pop-up cafe for my friends in the neighborhood.

Among several big coffee announcements this week, the big one in my coffee-soaked corner of tech nerdom was Fellow's entry into the home espresso space with their countertop Series 1 Espresso machine. Apart from looking sleek and beautiful, as is their tradition, the Espresso Series 1 strikes an interesting balance in offering distinct features for both beginners and for seasoned barista pros. From newbie-friendly things like a digital display giving you feedback on your shot timing/grind size and temperature-guided automatic milk frothing, to pro features like adjustable pressure, flow, and temperature profiles, the Series 1 packs a lot of tech into a good-looking and surprisingly competitive price point. I got to try a shot pulled from it this weekend while at the SCA Expo, and wrote up my first impressions for CoffeeGeek, in case you want to go down the rabbit hole.

Speaking of coffee, I got a set of these Vero cappuccino glasses for Christmas and have really been enjoying them for small lattes, Americanos, and turbo shots. Great colorways, chunky thick glass, and comfortable in hand. A winning combination.

I’ve bought some pretty fancy and expensive coffee scales over the years, but I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by this dirt-cheap scale from the extremely awkwardly named MHW-3BOMBER. It is tiny, water-resistant, USB-C charged, and weighs accurately down to 1/10th of a gram. It also has a built-in timer for your extractions and an automatic tare function that sets the scale to 0 the moment you put a cup on it. The only thing missing compared to some of my fancier scales is Bluetooth connectivity, but that’s just not a feature I ever use. Recommended. *Amazon-affiliate link to support my tech and coffee habit.

Perfect for the coffee-loving gadget geek in your life. This smart brewer makes amazing coffee. $$$$

I haven’t tried this, but it’s on my Christmas list—this tiny device lets you brew espresso from ground beans or from pods when camping or roughing it at Folgers-loving in-laws. $$$

- After what felt like an eternity waiting for my pre-order, I finally got my thirsty, coffee-dependent hands on Fellow’s latest creation: the Aiden. This precision coffee brewer offers an insane level of control over your brewing process. Whether you’re using its quick brew mode for foolproof brewing or guided profiles to fine-tune temperatures, flow rates, and bloom times based off the roast of your beans, the results are incredible. I’m blown away by the brew coffee I’ve been getting from it… plus it’s rather handsome on the counter. *Amazon affiliate link to support the site.

– I’ll spare you the long backstory involving my wedding, tiny Argentine countertops, and 10 years of wanting an espresso machine, but I finally picked up this one, recommended by CoffeeGeek, during Amazon's Prime Day sale. It’s beginner-friendly, looks great on my counter, and offers manual controls for pulling a legit shot and steaming the perfect latte milk. I'm loving it and suggest keeping an eye out for a good Black Friday sale on it. *Amazon affiliate link to support my coffee and tech habit.

While AeroPress is one of my all-time favorite coffee brewing methods, please don’t buy this premium kit from Williams Sonoma for $149 (unless you’re super into it and can afford it, natch). I’m sharing it just to highlight how awesome AeroPress coffee is, and the fact that you can make stellar brews at home with a standard AeroPress kit* for just $39. Want to get fancy? Add a Fellow Prismo attachment* for $29, and you’ll be making even better coffee than the $149 kit—at less than half the cost. Boom. *Amazon affiliate links to support my tech/coffee habits.

I’ve been wrestling with caffeine-related issues for over a year now, constantly searching for ways to still enjoy coffee without getting jittery. The problem? Decaf coffee usually tastes like stale pond water compared to the artisanal beans I love. Enter Wimp Decaf, with a mission to bring top-notch coffee that just-so-happens-to-be-decaf to the masses. I’ve been chatting with these guys over the last few weeks leading up to their launch, and their commitment to the coffee community is impressive. This is not sponsored; I ordered a sample set of their beans when they launched, and I finally got my beans in this week– I can sincerely say that their Kubrick beans are not only the best decaf I’ve ever had, it’s right up there duking it out among my usual favorite snobby full-caff beans. Delicious.

If you’re meticulous about weighing and grinding your beans, and using the precise water temperature of water during your timed pour over, it feels wrong to just use any old to-go cup for your morning brew. This tumbler is part art piece, part ceramic-lined, insulated, leak-proof coffee delivery vehicle. I haven’t gotten my grubby mitts on one yet, but the ceramic lining should prevent it from absorbing flavors and odors, making it great for high-quality teas and batch-mixed cocktails as well.

After hearing about this for a while and thinking it was a gimmick, I was eventually swayed to give it a shot by Matthew Panzarino’s glowing review on his The Obsessor blog. They work with top indie roasters from around the country to brew their coffee exactly as recommended (specific temps, mineral content in the water, etc), then flash freeze it in pods that they ship to your door. Pop them into hot water, and you’re drinking coffee as if it were brewed fresh by a barista at home. I was dubious butmy first box has really impressed me. The coffee is much more flavorful than what I can make with my setup. [Disclosure: The link above will get you 20 free cups of coffee and supports my coffee intake. If you’re not comfortable with that, feel free to visit cometeer.com directly!]

I’ve been trying to cut back my caffeine intake over the last year, which has been challenging because I love the ritual of making and drinking coffee. As summer heats up, I started looking for low-caffeine cold brew and nitro cold brew options that would let me get my fix without making me a jittery, anxious mess. After some research, I found Explorer’s half-caff cold brew concentrate. Just add an ounce or two to 6-8 oz of water and/or milk, and you’ve got a tasty, lightly caffeinated coffee drink without the panic attacks.

My favorite local coffee roaster turned me on to these coffee canisters. At the risk of sounding like a massive snob, I've tried some others, including the beautiful Fellow Atmos Canister, but this has been far and away the easiest and most effective at preserving my coffee's freshness.