Tips from a barista on making café-quality coffee at home

These days, getting a barista-made coffee can cost you upwards of $5-6; if you're a daily coffee drinker, that might be snowballing into an unwanted dent in your savings. Sure, you could cut down on your coffee habit to save some dosh, but who wants to do that? So instead, we're proposing another solution: learning to make barista-quality coffee at home. 

We consider ourselves experts on where to find the best coffee in Melbourne, but when it comes to brewing it ourselves, we're still learning the ropes. To get the answers you need, we sought assistance from Temily Howard, formerly a head barista at Industry Beans. 

What are some common mistakes that beginners make, and how can they avoid making them? 

"Depending on what machine you have, there are lots of little tidbits that can go wrong along the way. For example, just getting the grind size correct straight off the bat can be tricky. For a lighter roasted coffee, which is what we produce here, we'd recommend a much finer grind than if you were using a darker roasted coffee, which requires a coarser setting. Another common issue is simply making sure that your basket is full. A lot of people over or underfill it, and it can often be an issue with the grind size." 

How can you tell if your basket is too full or not full enough? 

"If your basket is too full, your grind might be too fine so the extraction of coffee would really struggle to come out of the machine. It would be dripping out as opposed to a nice bronzy stream. And then the opposite – if it was underfilled, you might have too coarse of a grind and the coffee would be streaming out in blonde, wiggly streams and the flavour would be quite sour." 

How often should you be cleaning the different parts of your machine?

"Keeping your coffee machine clean is very important, and something that I would suggest doing more often than most people would think is a back-flushing of the machine. This involves putting a bit of coffee cleaner into the espresso basket with a blind filter. That will help the chemical get into the machine and will flush it out. A lot of people have never heard of that and will get six months in and say their coffee tastes terrible, and that's usually why.

We'd recommend cleaning your basket once a day if you're making a coffee. Otherwise, the oils from the coffee will sit in the basket at the base and you'll be able to taste them the next time you make a coffee. All you need to do is give it a quick rinse under cold water after each use, then give it a good scrub with dish soap at least once a week. And after using the steam wand, give it a good wipe after each use and a proper wash once every couple of weeks.

Once every couple of months, we'd recommend that you descale your machine. This isn't so much related to taste but more functionality. With the machine, you can run into technical problems like scale build-up inside the pipes." 

What are your top tips on steaming milk? 

"My main tip is to achieve the right temperature; if you don't have a thermometer, a good rule of thumb is to steam the milk until it is too hot for your hand to touch the jug. Take your hand off the jug and wait for another five to ten seconds and that'll generally reach the desired temperature. 

As for general steaming tips, you want to keep the nozzle quite close to the surface and allow the bubbles to smooth out, becoming smaller and smaller and incorporating themselves into the liquid. This will give you a nice silky jug of milk." 

Once you've gotten the hang of the basics, what else can a beginner experiment with?

"I would absolutely suggest changing the coffee that you're using and playing around with different blends and single origins. It's really fun, interactive and skill-building to try to adjust your 'recipe' to what the coffee is giving you." 

If someone's brew doesn't quite taste like café quality, what are the most likely culprits?

"I would encourage them to play around with the presets on the machine; for starters, they could cut back on the shot time. A lot of machines can prolong that shot time and you end up with quite a lot in the cup, whereas if you come into a commercial space or a café, that shot would be a lot smaller and more condensed. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it, I would suggest a one-to-two ratio of coffee grounds in and grammes of liquid coming out." 

Are there any misconceptions about coffee that you want to dispel? 

"Do not put your coffee in the fridge or freezer. It ends up making the coffee moister for starters, so as soon as you take it out of the freezer, it deteriorates. Plus, coffee is great at absorbing the smells around it, so you're going to taste the contents of your fridge. Likewise, if you're storing your coffee in the pantry, put it in a cool, dark place. Don't pop it in the cupboard with all of the sauces and the spices." 

Want to give it a go? Make it easy with an Industry Beans' Espresso Club membership.