About
Espresso Gear Guide exists because most espresso buying advice answers the wrong question.
The question people actually ask is not “which machine is best”. It is “why does my shot taste like that, and will spending money fix it”. Most of the time the honest answer is that it will not — that the fix is a grind adjustment, a distribution habit, or the water coming out of the tap. That answer sells nothing, which is presumably why so few sites give it.
So we start from the technical side: grind, dose, temperature, pressure, water and maintenance. Equipment enters the conversation when technique has run out of room, and not before.
Who writes this
This site is written by Chriss R. and published by NET STUDIO LLC, a company registered in Wyoming, United States. Full company details are on the Legal Notice page, because a site asking you to trust its recommendations should be findable in the real world.
Three things in my background explain the angle of this site. A fourth thing is missing from it, and that is worth saying just as plainly.
I trained as an engineer in industrial engineering and maintenance. That discipline is not about how machines work. It is about how they fail: wear, thermal cycling, scale, fatigue, serviceability, and whether the part you will need in five years will still be manufactured. Those happen to be the questions that decide whether an espresso machine is still worth owning in year three.
It is why water and maintenance is a full category here rather than an afterthought, and why “parts availability, five years out” sits on our criteria list next to “temperature stability”. Most espresso coverage treats a machine as a purchase. I was trained to treat it as an asset with a maintenance cost attached, and I have never managed to stop.
I have run a construction business since 1997, taken over from my father, who was a contractor before me. Nearly thirty years of that work is estimating: reading a specification, working out what something genuinely costs to own rather than to buy, and telling a client when the expensive option will not fix their problem.
That last part is the habit that transfers most directly. A large share of espresso upgrades are the equivalent of replacing a roof to cure a damp wall.
I spent two years as head chef in a family café-restaurant, opened during the Covid years when a lot of people were rebuilding their working lives. I learned the trade on the job and ran the kitchen.
Service teaches something a home setup cannot. Equipment that is a pleasure to use for three drinks on a Sunday morning becomes a different object entirely at the ninetieth cover, and you learn which is which quickly or you learn it painfully.
What is missing: I am not a career barista. I have never worked for a roaster or for an equipment manufacturer, and I have not competed. On the questions where that gap matters — and on some it matters a great deal — this site says so on the page and points you to people who have measured the thing properly. That rule is written down on the How We Test page and it is not decoration.
A note on “we”
This site says “we” out of habit. Today it is one person, working from a desk, with four sons in the house and a construction business still to run. If that changes, this paragraph changes with it.
What is on the bench, honestly
At home I brew filter coffee, not espresso. A drip machine and a blade grinder make a perfectly good cup and are a completely inadequate basis for testing espresso equipment: a blade grinder has no grind setting at all, and a drip machine has no pump behind it. I am not going to dress that up as a laboratory.
So today, essentially everything on this site is labelled Documented or Reasoned. Where a page says Documented, it names the people who took the measurement, so that you can check them rather than take my word for it.
I also hold a small stake in the café-restaurant where I ran the kitchen, and its coffee equipment is commercial rather than domestic. Wherever anything here draws on that, the stake is disclosed on the page. A financial interest is a financial interest, even when it is small and even when it is family.
The Measured here label stays unused until I own espresso equipment worth measuring on. When that changes, it will be announced on this page, with the specific machine and grinder named and the date they arrived. Until then, an empty bench declared is worth more than a full one invented.
How this site pays for itself
Affiliate commissions, and eventually a modest amount of display advertising. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no units kept in exchange for coverage.
Buying my own equipment is precisely what lets me say something unflattering about it. The full arrangement is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
Talk to me
Corrections, disagreements and requests for a specific test are all welcome through the contact form. Disagreements especially. A reader who tells me I am wrong about pressure profiling is doing me a favour, and gets a reply.