My advice for anyone wanting to learning home espresso making: don’t do it. You’ll spend a fuck ton of money ($500 hardly gets you started), and will make at least one sink shot (a shot you throw in the sink) for every decent shot. And if you spend less than the minimum $1k startup costs, every single piece of equipment you buy that first round will be replaced by something better once you learn. So you’ll think you’re saving money but you’re just wasting more.

And then you’ll go to a place like 4 Barrel and realize you still have no clue what you’re doing.

And then you’ll watch someone pull an espresso wit horrible technique (wrong tamp pressure, over extracted) and it’ll *still* taste 20x better than what you make with all your fussing.