How We Test
Espresso Gear Guide launched in 2026. We are not a lab with a warehouse of loaner machines, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Most sites in this category open with a number: shots pulled, grinders benched, hours on the bench. Almost none of those numbers can be checked by anyone. We would rather show you the method and let you judge it.
The rule we work by
We do not publish a verdict on equipment we have not used. Where we have not used something, we say so on the page, and the page stays on what can actually be verified.
Every recommendation on this site carries one of three labels, stated at the top of the section:
- Measured here. We have the unit in hand. Numbers come from our own bench, with the method and the sample size printed alongside them.
- Documented. We have not used it. We summarise measurements published by others and we name them, so you can go and check.
- Reasoned. No unit, no third-party data. We explain what the design implies, and we say plainly where the uncertainty sits.
A page that is mostly Reasoned is not a review, and we will not call it one.
What we measure, when we measure
- Grind consistency and adjustment behaviour. How much the shot moves per step of adjustment, and whether the same setting returns the same result after a change.
- Retention and purge. Weight in versus weight out, single dose and back to back, because retention is what makes yesterday’s coffee turn up in today’s cup.
- Temperature at the group. Stability across a shot and recovery between shots, not the number on the display.
- Pressure at the puck, distinguished from pressure at the pump. These are not the same reading, and the difference is the interesting part.
- Water. Hardness, alkalinity, and the descaling interval that follows from them.
- Time to ready, from cold, measured rather than quoted.
Where a measurement needs equipment we do not own, we say which equipment, rather than quietly dropping the criterion.
Why maintenance weighs so much here
Most equipment coverage stops at the moment of purchase. This site does not, and that is a deliberate bias rather than an oversight.
The person writing it trained as an engineer in industrial engineering and maintenance. That discipline asks a narrow and unromantic set of questions: what wears, what scales, what fatigues, what can be serviced by the owner rather than a specialist, and whether the part you will need will still be manufactured in five years. Applied to espresso, those questions separate the machines that are pleasant to own from the machines that are merely pleasant to buy.
So parts availability carries real weight in our scoring, water has a category of its own, and a design that cannot be opened by the person who paid for it loses points for that. If you only plan to keep a machine two years, weight those criteria down — the components behind every score are published precisely so that you can. More about who writes this.
What we will not do
- No best-of list assembled from other people’s reviews and presented as first-hand testing.
- No score without a stated method behind it.
- No affiliate link buried inside a sentence written to look like advice.
- No sponsored review. If a manufacturer sends a unit, it is disclosed in the first paragraph of that page, and the unit is returned or paid for at market price.
- No review written from a press release.
About the scores
Our ratings are shown in bar rather than stars, because bar is the unit that matters here, and because a star rating invites you to read a mood instead of a method.
A score is a summary of the criteria printed underneath it. Nothing else feeds it. The criteria and their weights appear on every review page, and if we change a weight we date the change and say why.
Corrections
Every page carries a publication date and a last-reviewed date. Substantive corrections are logged at the foot of the page rather than made silently.
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we fixed it. Corrections do not need to be polite to be acted on.
How this page will change
This is the version of our method that matches what we can honestly claim today. As the bench grows, the Measured here label will cover more of the site, and this page will get more specific rather than more impressive. It is dated for that reason.