Coffee techniques

Produce hot milk with a fine, integrated foam that pours as one liquid rather than as foam sitting on milk.

Reduce the air in steamed milk to bubbles too small to see, so the foam and the liquid behave as one substance.

Stop steaming at a temperature that keeps the milk sweet and the texture fine, without needing to read a thermometer mid-drink.

Texture a plant milk without splitting it, and know when the carton rather than the technique is the problem.

Get a usable milk foam using an electric frother, a whisk, a French press or a jar, and know what each can and cannot produce.

Place textured milk on the surface of an espresso in a controlled pattern, by managing height, flow and cup angle.

Leave the coffee bed uniformly dense throughout, so water meets the same resistance everywhere and does not carve a channel.

Compress the coffee bed into a level, uniformly dense puck, without introducing a slope or a crack.

Find the grind setting and recipe that make a particular coffee taste as intended, and be able to return to it.

Read what the underside of the basket is doing during extraction, and match what you see to the preparation fault that caused it.

Move the grind in the right direction by a useful amount, and know what to expect from the change.

Clear coffee left inside the grinder so the next dose is the coffee and the setting you intended.

Grind exactly the beans you weighed for this brew, with as little left inside the grinder as possible.

Find the grind and ratio that suit a particular coffee in a particular brewer, using brew time as a reading and never as a target.

Wet the whole coffee bed and let it release its carbon dioxide before the main pour begins.

Control agitation and contact time by pouring in several stages rather than one continuous stream.

Remove papery taste, seat the filter against the brewer, and preheat the equipment in one action.

Stop cold equipment taking heat out of the brew before it has finished extracting.

Slow staling for coffee you will drink soon, and slow it further for coffee you will not.

Clear milk from the wand before it dries, so the next drink is not made through yesterday's residue.

Remove built-up coffee oils and retained grounds without damaging the burrs.

Flush coffee residue out of the group head and three-way valve using a blind basket, with or without detergent.

Dissolve mineral scale out of the boiler and water path, when and how the maker of the machine directs.

Take green coffee through drying, browning and development to a drinkable roast, and know what you did.

Record enough about a roast to be able to repeat it, or to change one thing about it deliberately.

Let a fresh roast settle to the point where it brews predictably, without waiting until it has gone flat.

Notice what a coffee is actually doing, rather than only whether you like it.

Train perception using difference, which is far easier to notice than any absolute quality.

Taste several coffees against each other under conditions identical enough that the only difference is the coffee.

Turn a TDS reading into an extraction percentage, and know what that number can and cannot tell you.