Coffee & The Bar
Honest note: no ads, no Amazon affiliate. Affiliate and referral links are always marked. Full disclosure.
Coffee is not optional in this house, and Zach and I take it completely differently, so there’s a bit of everything here. The bar is a smaller story: we don’t make fancy cocktails for just the two of us, so most of it comes out when there’s a crowd.
Espresso — Breville Barista Express
The workhorse. My daily driver, and the machine at the center of a whole blog post about how it wasn’t broken, I was. Built-in grinder, forgiving enough for a beginner, and good enough to keep you for years. If you want to get into home espresso without spending four figures, this is the one I’d point you to.
Where to buy: Breville, direct · Williams-Sonoma
As seen in: My Espresso Machine Wasn’t Broken (I Was).
Local beans — Peach Coffee Roasters
My local roaster, right down the road. The single best coffee advice I have is to support your local roaster: freshly roasted beans from someone near you beat anything that’s been sitting on a grocery shelf, full stop. Peach is mine.
Where to buy: Peach Coffee Roasters (Atlanta)
Coffee to go — Cometeer
Frozen coffee pods, and I know exactly how that sounds, but hear me out. They’re flash-frozen concentrate from real specialty roasters, they travel beautifully (I take them to work and on trips), and they taste like good coffee, not pod coffee. They also check out on values, which is why I’m here: they only work with roasters doing direct trade and paying farmers above the fair-trade minimum, the aluminum capsules are curbside-recyclable, and they compost all their spent grounds. The one honest caveat is that a pod is still single-use, even a recyclable one.
Where to buy: Cometeer
French press — Bodum Chambord
At heart I’m a French press person, and the OG Bodum Chambord is still the best there is. Simple glass-and-steel, makes a rich cup, and it’s the classic for a reason: nothing to break, nothing to overthink, no plastic touching your coffee.
Where to buy: Bodum Chambord at Williams-Sonoma
A drip confession (an honest non-recommendation)
Zach’s a drip-coffee guy, so we keep a basic drip machine running, and I’m not going to recommend it, because it’s plastic and unremarkable and I merely tolerate it. If I were buying a drip maker I actually loved, I’d go plastic-free: a Moccamaster, or one of the glass-and-steel brewers. But I don’t own one, so I won’t pretend to. Consider this the honest gap in my kitchen. (No link, on purpose.)
The Bar
Cocktail kits — Shaker & Spoon
A cocktail-box subscription, and a genuinely fun one. Zach and I don’t make fancy cocktails for just the two of us, so I get exactly one box a year, around the holidays when we’ve got people coming over, and it turns “want a drink?” into a little event. Makes a great gift, too.
Where to buy: Shaker & Spoon
Bar tools — OXO
OXO makes the bar tools I actually reach for, and they last: the steel double jigger (for actually measuring), the winged corkscrew, the steel shot pourer (which honestly lives in the pantry as much as the bar), and the steel cocktail strainer. Not fancy, just reliable.
Where to buy: OXO · widely available
Muddler — World Market
A mango-wood muddler with a textured bottom. Wood feels better in the hand than metal, and the textured end genuinely does the work on herbs and citrus. It’s from World Market, where I also pick up napkins and a lot of little entertaining bits.
Where to buy: World Market mango-wood muddler