• coffeegeek.com has about 7730 references to home-barista.com
• espressobar.dk has 739 references
• kaffee-netz.de has 720 references
• riktigtkaffe.se has 221 references
• coffeesnobs.com.au has 176 references
• toomuchcoffee.com has 125 references

Some people make their coffee at home. Others buy theirs on the go. My dad builds his -- from the grounds up. He has several grinders and at least five mechanisms for five different brewing methods. He's part of a subculture fixated on creating the perfect cup of coffee. To find a simpler way there, I spoke with the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, Ric Rhinehart.

<snip>

Find a local coffee house that roasts its own beans. Ask what is seasonally fresh, as well as what is fresh from the roaster. Coffee is a perishable product that is less than spectacular when it has staled. To order coffee on-line, there are great reviews of coffee (and cafes) on coffeegeek.com and home-barista.com. If you don't want to research, look for coffee that has some kind of freshness dating and is 100% arabica (the preferred coffee bean species).

Andrew Hetzel wrote:Average independent shops and some chains are doomed to failure before they begin by attempting to establish a business model that is essentially a poor man's facsimile of a fast food giant. You cannot beat the big QSR's at their own mechanized game; you must change the game to do things that they cannot, namely, make a flavorful coffee beverage that is not based on volume, dairy, artificial sweeteners or chemical flavorings. It can and is done in great shops around the world.

John Edgar Park wrote:The variable I chose to attack was the problem of tamping. I'd heard about automated tamping systems, which remove the guesswork of manually pressing grounds into the portafilter with a hand-held tamper, and instead consistently provide 30 pounds of uniform pressure. This is great, but automatic tamping machines cost hundreds of dollars. One clever member of the home-barista.com forums scoffed at the price tag and built his own, using a manual lever juicer as the platform. I decided to give it a try.