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Thinking about getting into home espresso? Upping your game on pour over? Venturing into the world of siphon coffee? There’s certainly no lack of guides online – from mainstream newspapers to obscure websites – that give you tips and advice on all these subjects and more involving specialty coffee.
I often search the Internet and RSS feeds for good content ideas for this website for myself and our writing team (in the form of assignment calls), and that means navigating through literally hundreds of these types of guides and purchase advice articles on a daily basis. They often just parrot each other as well; if a newspaper posts an affiliate-link driven fluff piece, within a few days you’ll see a near clone of that article show up on dozens of websites.
There’s a real problem with most of the results you get from these searches: the “advice” given has almost no basis is real, honest information based on experience, expertise and a core willing by the authors to provide you with truthful, helpful info. Indeed, the real purpose of those posts is to generate affiliate link income and high ranking SEO searches. I’d say for about 95% of these types of articles, the latter two intents are the only goal.
You know the kind of articles I’m talking about. With SEO heavy titles like “10 Best Products a Home Barista Needs!”, or “Everything you need to make cafe quality lattes at home!!”. And if you bother to search these postings, you’ll even discover the same sites regurgitate near clones of these articles every 1-2 months just so they can gain an SEO advantage and show up in searches and RSS feeds more often.
It’s all a game – a dishonest, crap fest of a game – being fed to consumers who are just seeking good, solid advice before spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
That isn’t our game at CoffeeGeek.
Our primary goal has always been to provide our readership with quality information and content that strives to educate, inform, and entertain in an ethical, straightforward, and experience-based way. Yes, we need to make money as a website to pay our operating costs, pay our writers for their excellent contributions, and to make a livable income. To do that, we sell ad space to a curated list of specialty coffee companies (who we hope you will support because they keep this website alive), and we run Google Adsense ads, as well as a limited number of affiliate links at the end of our reviews, first looks, and occasional blog posts.
But our goal is not to be a website full of affiliate links. Our absolute primary goal is to help you make coffee better.
The Getting into Coffee Series
All the above is a preamble and set up to give you the thinking behind a new CoffeeGeek Blog series we’ll be doing. We call it the Getting into Coffee series. Each simple guide will be designed to help you start your journey into a specialty aspect of coffee. We’ll be doing these guides for espresso (several of them in fact), pour over coffee, siphon, press pot, home roasting, moka pot, and more. The series will be easily searchable via our tags and blog categories.
These guides are designed for someone who is a complete newbie to a specific aspect of coffee in the home. If you’ve never explored espresso in the home before, we’ll give you the starting launch point of what is important and what your basic costs will be. If you want to get into siphon coffee, we’ll give you advice on that as well.
One thing our Getting Into Coffee Blog Series will not have: affiliate links of any kind.
When we do recommend a specific product, we’ll point you to the vendor site, or a review we posted on CoffeeGeek. This will be part of our transparency pledge to you that we’re trying to provide you with the best possible information we can to make some informed decisions about where to go in your new specialty coffee journey.
Of course, if you decide to purchase from one of our site sponsors, I’d be over the moon happy, but that would be your decision, and you’d have to visit other parts of our website to find their graphic advertisements by your own doing. We won’t be asking you to do that in Getting Into Coffee guides.
We’re already working on the Espresso guides, and we have four of them planned – a top ten list of the things to look for in an espresso machine, an absolute beginner entry point to proper espresso in the home, a guide to lever espresso, and a guide to exploring advanced espresso in the home.
They won’t be long articles by any stretch: they’re designed to be very brief introductions to those of you who have never done espresso in the home, or have never explored siphon coffee. We’ll point to longer guides and how tos on CoffeeGeek if you want to take things a step further.
So stay tuned, and I hope you’ll find this series interesting and helpful for you, or as a resource to share with your friends getting into specialty coffee.
Lead photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels
Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.