Exploring coffee

There’s a distinct difference between brewing great coffee and simply making a decent drink, and it’s one where you step out from guesswork and move into consistency and accuracy. Making that first step needs one simple and inexpensive addition to your home coffee bar setup - a set of precision scales.

A decade ago, the idea of a home coffee bar was still niche, limited to the hardcore coffee enthusiast looking to bring barista taste and workflow to their kitchen. Today, home coffee bars are so mainstream that they’re featured in articles by Good Housekeeping. Making premium coffee at home has become comfortably normal - and that’s a great thing.

Technology has long been used to improve human efficiencies and make life just that little more convenient. The Niche Zero and Niche Duo grinders are perfect examples of high-end engineering and technology used to make the hard task of hand grinding beans into effortless consistency.

Ever pulled an espresso shot that runs too fast, drips painfully slow, or looks perfect—but tastes thin, sour, and bitter all at once? This is channelling; unfortunately, this occurs when water finds weaker areas in the coffee puck and rushes through those areas instead of flowing as evenly as possible through the whole puck.

You wake up, struggle out of bed, clean your teeth*, and get to the kitchen. What you want now is a delicious coffee without fuss or effort. What you don’t want now is a misbehaving grinder that results in a muddy brew while waking up the rest of the house.

Cleaning your Niche Duo will help keep it producing quality grinds time after time. Because the Duo retains virtually zero grinds, there’s no need to scrub it daily. However, a semi-regular cleaning routine will keep it in tip-top condition. Maintaining the Duo doesn’t take long – especially with this helpful guide to hand!

Exploring coffee tastes is an enjoyable pastime that takes you beyond the simple 'relax in a chair with a cup' and into a world of delicate aromas, evocative descriptions, and noisy slurping.

Pressure matters more than you think; espresso has always been extracted using pressure, but it’s not that simple. This article will dive into the importance of espresso machine pump pressure differences for quality and how technology has changed over the years to produce the espresso we are served today.

For many people, coffee is a very passionate subject - we fall into that group! The Niche Zero was born out of a passion for engineering and top-quality coffee. When Martin Nicholson, Niche’s founder, came up with the idea of creating a home grinder that could match (and even outshine) the quality of professional café equipment, he entered a world where two passions met: one for precision engineering and one for top-quality coffee.

When you go into a café or coffee shop and order your coffee, you watch as the barista smoothly moves around the bar, puts the portafilter under the grinder, and grinds directly into it - often while doing a couple of other things at the same time. Consequently, it’s only natural that when you make an espresso at home, you want to replicate the same technique. Only… it’s probably not helping you get the best out of your coffee.

Choosing your coffee grinder is one of the main stepping stones to building the perfect home coffee bar. More than getting an espresso machine or discovering beans you love, it’s when you move to using a top-quality grinder that you really feel you’re there.

There’s a taste for every type of coffee drinker - and a lot of what influences that taste comes from the coffee roaster. What makes a good roaster, and who are some of the roasters we recommend? Let's explore how coffee roasting defines our final cup.