Digital guide · PDF
The Home Coffee Handbook
Better coffee out of the kit already on your worktop — grind, water, dose and time, in numbers you can weigh.
- Delivered
- instantly, by email
- You get
- A file to keep, on any device you own
- Not included
- Nothing is posted, so no delivery address is asked for
The twelve chapters, in full
Printed here rather than summarised, because a guide you cannot see the shape of is a guide you are being asked to take on trust.
- 01What actually decides how a cup tastes
- 02Grind: the one piece of kit worth money
- 03Water: yours, and what to do about it
- 04Dose and ratio, in numbers you can weigh
- 05The cafetière, properly
- 06Pour-over without the ceremony
- 07Moka pot, AeroPress, and the machines between
- 08Buying beans in Britain
- 09Storage, freshness, and the freezer question
- 10Milk, and the four things that go wrong
- 11Diagnosing a bad cup
- 12The one-page checklist
Most people who are disappointed by their coffee at home assume the fix is equipment. It is usually four numbers.
The Home Coffee Handbook is a thirty-three page guide to the part of coffee that is arithmetic rather than taste: how finely you grind, how much coffee you use against how much water, how hot that water is, and how long the two spend together. Get those right and the same beans and the same brewer produce a noticeably different cup.
It is written for a British kitchen — British water, British supermarkets, a kettle that boils at 100°C — and it assumes nothing beyond a £9 scale. Every recipe is given by weight, because a tablespoon of coarse light roast and a tablespoon of fine dark roast differ by nearly half.
Twelve chapters, a diagnostic table that names what you tasted and what to change, and a one-page checklist to keep by the kettle.
What the guide does
It starts with the mechanism, not the gear
Coffee is a solvent problem: hot water dissolves about a third of a bean, the pleasant compounds come out first and the bitter ones last, and good coffee is the act of stopping in the middle. Once that is clear, the arguments about equipment become arguments about one of four levers — and you can reason about them instead of guessing.
Everything is a number you can repeat
Every method in the guide is given as a ratio and a time: 30 g of coffee to 480 g of water, ground medium, at 94°C, drawn in three to four minutes. Not a scoop, not a splash. The point of a written recipe is not that it is correct for you — it is that when something changes, you know it was not you.
The chapter you will actually use twice a week
Chapter eleven is a table. Sour and thin, bitter and drying, weak but balanced, muddy, papery, flat, different every morning — each one paired with its usual cause and the smallest change that fixes it. Most people go to it before they go to anything else.
Nothing here asks you to buy a machine
The guide is explicit about what is worth money and what is not: a grinder first, a scale second, and a great deal of what is sold after that being optional. Where equipment does matter, it says why, in terms of the mechanism rather than the marketing.
- Twelve chapters, thirty-three pages, written to be read in one sitting and then used as a reference
- Starting recipes by weight for filter, cafetière, AeroPress, moka pot and espresso
- A diagnostic table: what the cup tasted like, what causes it, and the single smallest change that fixes it
- How to read a bag — roast date, process, roast level — and what is worth paying for
- Written for British water and British shops, in grams and millilitres throughout
- PDF, unlocked, no subscription, no app — yours to keep and print
The file itself
- The Home Coffee Handbook — 33 pages, PDF
- The twelve-chapter method, from grind through to milk
- A diagnostic table for a cup that came out wrong
- A one-page checklist of every starting recipe
- Format
- PDF, A5, unlocked and printable
- Length
- 33 pages, 12 chapters
- File size
- 191 KB
- Language
- English (British)
- Measurements
- Grams, millilitres and °C throughout
- Reads on
- Phone, tablet, laptop, e-reader, or paper
- Delivered
- By email and on screen, as soon as payment clears
- Licence
- One reader. Print it, keep it, do not resell it
Questions
Do I need to buy anything to use this guide?
No. It is written to be used with the kit already on your worktop, and it says plainly which purchases are worth making and which are not. If you buy one thing after reading it, the guide argues it should be a burr grinder — but nothing in the book requires one.
Is this for espresso machines?
There is a chapter on espresso and one on the moka pot, but the guide is written mainly for the brewers most British kitchens actually contain: the cafetière, the filter machine, the pour-over cone and the AeroPress. If you own an espresso machine you will find the chapters on grind, water and ratio directly useful.
How is it delivered?
As a download link on the confirmation page and in your receipt email, the moment the payment clears. There is nothing to install and no account to create.
Can I print it?
Yes. It is an unlocked A5 PDF with no password and no printing restriction, laid out so it reads well on paper as well as on a screen.
Is the coffee advice specific to the UK?
The measurements, the water chapter and the buying chapter are. Water hardness varies enormously across Britain and it changes how a cup tastes, so it gets its own chapter with what to do about it. The method itself works anywhere.
What if the file will not open?
Write to us and we will resend it or send it in another form. A file that will not open is not what you paid for, and your legal rights over digital content are set out in full on the refund page.
How it reaches you
You pay, and the download link appears on the confirmation page and in your receipt email. Delivered instantly, by email. There is nothing to install and no account to create.
Because the file is supplied straight away, the checkout asks you to confirm you want it immediately and that you therefore give up the 14-day right to cancel. That consent is recorded with your order.
Your rights if a file is faulty, will not open, or is not what this page described are unaffected by that, and are set out in full on the refund page.