Café coffee often tastes better than home brews due to four key factors: commercial equipment consistency, precise grind uniformity, mineral-balanced water, and properly textured milk. By upgrading your bean selection, using a quality grinder, and standardizing your brewing variables, you can replicate that professional café experience at home.
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Do you find that no matter how hard you try, your coffee at home just doesn’t taste the same as it does in a cafe? Unless you are an experienced barista with specialist equipment, it’s almost inevitable that the quality of your coffee will be higher in a cafe.
But why?
In a cafe, baristas have perfected 4 elements: the quality of the coffee beans, the consistency of the grind, the quality of the water and the precision of the brewing. If you want to achieve a similar quality of brew at home, these are the 4 areas that you should focus on. If you're evaluating your setup, check out our guide on espresso machines vs manual brewing methods to see how your gear measures up.
Perfecting Through Consistency
One thing to remember with cafe brewed coffee is that the shop is running consistently throughout the day. It is a system that operates with strict parameters, considering the dose, the brew time, the temperature of the water and more. If any of these deviate from the norm, the barista will react and bring it back in line to ensure a consistent quality.
A coffee that is brewed at home does not benefit from this system. It’s a reactive action which creates inconsistency in your experience. And unlike a cafe, most home brewers can’t afford to make coffee after coffee searching for perfection. From coffee to coffee, it’s likely that elements such as your dose and brew time will vary, leading to a difference in taste.
Achieving the Optimum Grind
An element of brewing the perfect cup of coffee that’s often overlooked at home is the grind quality. A commercial cafe grinder creates a more consistent grind that’s uniform in size. And a consistent grind allows water to flow evenly through every particle, resulting in a perfectly balanced coffee. For most homeowners, the quality of your domestic grinder is lower, resulting in uneven blends and a taste that’s bitter, sour or a mixture of both resulting in grind variation that would not occur with a commercial grade grinder. To troubleshoot off-flavors, read our article on why your coffee tastes bitter and how to fix it, or consult our coffee grind size chart for perfect extraction.
Considering the Water and Milk Quality
Two aspects of a great coffee that cannot always be considered at home are the water and the milk. In a cafe, these too are perfected. The temperature and mineral content of the water can have an impact on the taste of your coffee. Too soft and you’ll notice a flat taste. Too hard and it’ll be a harsh taste. By using filtered water at home, you’ll see an improvement in the quality of your home brews.
In a similar manner, the quality of your milk matters. The blends that you’ll choose in a coffee shop are often milk-heavy such as lattes, flat whites and cappuccinos. In a cafe, it will be heated to the optimal temperature, enhancing its natural sweetness. At home, it’s extremely easy to overheat which has the opposite impact. If milk drinks are your go-to, explore our recommendations for the best coffee beans for milk-based drinks.
Choosing the Right Beans
Cafes are experts in coffee, and they play to their strengths. They’ll use coffee beans that offer balance and stability, which means they can offer a reliable service. When brewing a coffee at home, bean knowledge is often lacking. To improve the quality of the coffee you make at home, you should look for coffee beans that suit your equipment and method of brewing—our guide on how to choose coffee beans for home baristas is a great place to start.
For a great tasting cup of coffee at home, browse the range of blends at Inglewood Coffee Roasters. You will find coffee from a variety of origins and with a variety of grinds. The key is to choose a blend, grind and taste that caters to your needs. Purchase a single product or subscribe and save to ensure that you never run out. Cafe quality coffee made simple.