Coffee is in fashion and there is increasingly finer technology to prepare it at home. The followers are multiplying by the moment, sharing recipes, reviews about utensils and machinery. Coffee is refining its ritual and is, more than ever, religion.
Teleworking and the pandemic helped raise the idols: the AeroPress, the Kalita, the v60 and other coffee filtering methods became the order of the day with a little more time in the morning. Specialty coffee, which has been growing slowly but steadily over the last decade, has just taken off. And once you have tasted a good coffee, one that doesn’t taste like a burnt wheel, there is no turning back. Who tried it knows.
“Good coffee has begun to be appreciated more and there is an eagerness to learn new ways of making it. The culture of making good coffee at home is growing hand in hand with specialty coffee. Taste is becoming more sophisticated and so is the appreciation of artisanal, traceable and sustainable, something that specialty coffee offers,” says Magdalena Tortosa, founder of the coffee supply store Bean Green, where the bestsellers are the v60 cones. for filter coffee and manual grinders.
“It is a young, dynamic and new market. I supply mainly to cafes, and I think that if today in Spain no more coffee is prepared at home, or at least as much as in countries like Germany, it is because the price difference between making it at home and drinking it in a cafe does not bother us. “It seems very significant.”
For Marc Aguyé, co-founder of the roaster and coffee shop Three Marks, the market has evolved so much in recent years that today it is at the point of maturity where the public wants to replicate at home the results obtained in coffee shops. “Now it is easier and cheaper than ever to prepare good coffee at home. You just need to not be afraid and ask the baristas at your cafe to find out the best recipe and some other tricks. In this sense, at Three Marks Coffee we offer courses, tastings, advice and visits to our roastery. Empowering the home barista benefits all of us who take care of the product.”
Aguyé appreciates that there are more and more conversations around different aspects of coffee, both within the sector and on the street. “It is noticeable that there are more cafes and roasters that work well with the product: in Barcelona it has been more than 10 years during which professionals and knowledge have been added. This has raised the bar and made the client increasingly more demanding. At the same time, we feel that people spend their money differently and are sensitive to valuing this type of product. Greater quality is advocated even if it means less quantity.”
From the Complementos del Café store, its marketing director, Cristina Ferrández, considers that “the consumer is more willing, has more knowledge and access to experience new flavors and appreciate quality coffee, something for which the boom has been decisive. of specialty coffee, which is becoming a trend that does not stop growing.” Thus, according to Ferrández, coffee lovers get to the bottom of the matter: “they train themselves and find out all the details to enjoy a good cup at any time of the day. This has given rise to new drinks and ways of consuming coffee that allow us to explore different flavor profiles in coffee.”
With the right equipment, the routine of making coffee at home becomes a ritual and one of the best moments of the day. At Complementos del Café they affirm that their target audience is no longer only professionals, since an increasingly higher percentage of consumers invest in accessories to prepare coffee at home. “Many people take barista courses, and so they want to have everything they need in their own kitchen. The more you know about coffee, the more you want to professionalize. I believe that this trend is due to greater accessibility of specialty coffee than years ago.”
Omar Molinero, from the Sevillian roaster Ineffable Coffee, agrees that the home barista is becoming increasingly specialized. “Those who started in the first outpost of specialty coffee have a fairly high level and some are even shadow experts. But the important thing is that this world is opening up to the general public,” he explains from Coffee Fest (the most important Spanish coffee fair in the country), which is held in Madrid from February 17 to 20.
They notice it in everything: from the coffee they prefer to drink in cafes to the offer of increasingly exclusive coffee equipment and coffee. Molinero believes that the joint effort of the specialty coffee industry, from farmers to baristas, to importers and machinery manufacturers, has had a great weight in revolutionizing the taste of the customer who today conscientiously extracts quality coffee at home. . In their case, the biggest sales go to filter coffee tools, such as the AeroPress and V60, the aforementioned Micra espresso from La Marzocco or electric and manual grinders, such as the Comandante C40 MK4, kettles with temperature control or precision scales.