The Coffee Guru.
Built because most coffee reviews are either a paid placement or a weekend with one machine.
An independent review and comparison site for coffee equipment. Around 98 products across 11 categories, scored from the manufacturer’s own published specifications, with the reasoning behind each score kept on the page.
- Role
- Founder
- Started
- 2018
- Catalogue
- 98 products 11 categories
- Status
- Rebuild in progress
This one is mid-rebuild. The screens below are the build in progress, not a finished product, and the catalogue is still being worked through. It is here because the thinking behind it is the point: what gets scored, what does not, and why the order of a list is the order the scores put things in.
The Coffee Guru · homeFig. 01
Coffee equipment is written about in two registers. One is a paid placement. The other is an honest account of a weekend with a single machine, which tells you how it felt to unbox and nothing about how it will behave in the second year of owning it.
The things that decide the second year are burr size, grind range, retention, boiler type, temperature control and price per kilo. Manufacturers publish most of them. Very little of it reaches a review, because a specification sheet is duller to write about than a first impression.
The Coffee Guru starts from the published numbers instead. They go side by side, scored the same way every time, for grinders, espresso machines, pod machines, drip brewers, pour over, moka pots, kettles, scales and accessories, alongside beans and the roasters who sell them.
Every score shows its working.
A rating that arrives as one number is asking to be trusted without giving a reason. Each criterion here opens to show what it was judged on, and where the published evidence is thin the page says that rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
Where something cannot be judged from a specification at all, it is left out of the total rather than scored as zero. A product is never marked down for a gap in the research, which is the difference between a score about the product and a score about how much was known when it was written.
The order of a list is the order the scores put things in.
The site earns from affiliate links and says so plainly on every page. What it does not do is sell a position. No brand has paid to appear and no ranking is arranged by commission, so a list read from the top down is the same list the criteria produced.
Comparisons then commit to an answer and name the one they would buy. The half of a recommendation that says who should not buy this is treated as the more useful half, and the reader it is written for is someone mid-purchase, down to two grinders, who wants to know what actually separates them.
Read on a phone, usually with the product page open in another tab.
The catalogue, the category hubs and the individual reviews follow the viewport. Comparison is the one screen that genuinely wants width, so on a handset it takes a pair rather than pretending a wide table will fit.
Light and dark are both first-class, with the switch in the header. Figure 01 is the dark theme on a desktop and figure 02 is the light one on a phone.
The Coffee Guru on a phoneFig. 02
Gear
11 category hubs
Grinders, espresso, pod
Drip, pour over, moka, kettles
Reviews
One product per page
Scored from published specs
Each criterion opens up
Comparison
Any two products
The same rows in the same order
Head to head, not a leaderboard
Coffee
Beans reviewed one bag at a time
Roasters get a profile
Kept separate from equipment
Buying guides sit across the top of both, by category and by price band.