Kate was given an espresso machine for Christmas. Nothing fancy, she says, an entry-level model, and she has been trying her absolute best with it ever since.
“Sometimes I get great coffee,” she told the room. “Sometimes I don’t.”
We’re at the Barista Masterclass at the Artisan Coffee School, a course pitched at “home baristas with new machines”. It runs for three hours, costs £120 and takes up to eight people, in a room upstairs from a working roastery. The building used to be a scuba diving centre. Now it is industrial, relaxed and, for a roastery, surprisingly cosy.
The school belongs to the Putney family behind Artisan, who opened their first coffee shop on Upper Richmond Road in 2011. Their Curious Roo roastery works in the same building, and the Harrisons say the school puts more than 1,200 people a year through its courses. Putney.news was invited to attend the course and did not pay.
The teaching is done by Pete, the school’s head of training, who says he has worked in coffee on and off for more than two decades and learned the trade in New Zealand during a snowboarding season. The weekend courses exist, he said, “because the home market has exploded post COVID.”
He set the room two jobs. “The first one is to get you guys to buy better coffee. The next thing is to get you guys to make better coffee.” In his words, “you are actually the biggest, most important bit of equipment when making a good coffee.”
There was a range of attendees from Kate with her espresso machine, to a couple opening up their first coffee shop later this month, to someone working their way through the school’s range of classes because they simply love coffee, to your correspondent who has always loved good coffee, and makes pretty good coffee, but wanted to take it up a notch. Fortunately Pete is a mine of information. “Freshly roasted coffee is bad advice,” Pete told them. “Well rested coffee is better advice.”
Beans need time after roasting, ten days to two weeks and sometimes a whole month, before they taste their best. “Treat this like an avocado,” he said holding up a bag of beans. That makes the roast date the most important thing printed on the bag: “If it doesn’t have a roast date, do not buy the coffee.”
Is the “fancy” coffee with all the information on the front and the roast date on the bottom that much better to the beans or ground coffee that line the shelves at Waitrose?
The short answer is yes but it takes two things to realise it – and both are provided on the three-hour course. The first is tasting the difference, which we do in a ‘cupping’ room, trying out six different types of coffee and seeing, smelling and tasting different beans in the way coffee professionals do. The second is understanding what all that writing actually means and what lies behind it.
In the days after the course, we put the knowledge to good use, and the results were remarkable. But more on that in a bit: Pete has some sage advice about our Sage Dual Boiler machine.
“The espresso machine is one of the last things you should be looking at,” he argues. The first money, he said, should go on the grinder.
Buying better
The first half of the course is about the bag, not the machine. Specialty bags can carry a score, the mark out of 100 a trained taster gives a coffee, and anything above 80 counts as specialty. “Just ignore the score,” Pete said. “The score is not for you guys.”
Read the processing method first, he said, then the variety of the plant, then the altitude it grew at. The country of origin, the thing most people shop by, matters least.
The cheapest grade of coffee, which Pete links to supermarket own brands, has flavours nobody wants. The reason is the beans themselves: the high-end “specialty” coffee is literally hand-sorted for the best beans; the rest will have beans with defects of one type or another – it could have been chewed on by an insect, gone slightly mouldy, just not been the healthiest coffee plant. If you don’t sort the beans, they all go in and bring the flaws with them.
“So what they do is they roast it really, really dark,” Pete summarises. “So you can no longer taste any of those horrible things, but nor can you taste any of the good things either.” That market, in his view, “is designed to caffeinate you, not give you flavours.”
“100% Arabica” is marketing: almost all coffee on the market is made up of that species of coffee plant. The words worth looking for are “100% specialty Arabica” – those are the beans that have been picked out to make the best coffee. And that process takes time, which adds cost.
“We have no unicorns in coffee. You can’t get very cheap exceptional coffee.” At the other extreme, he said, “You can go to a place in Mayfair called Shot Coffee and spend hundreds of pounds for just one espresso.” In 2024 it was reported to be selling a single cup for £265.
Once the bag is home, keep it sealed and away from heat and light, and keep it out of the fridge, where condensation gets at the beans. Don’t squeeze an unopened bag through its valve to sniff it. Once it is open, squeeze the air out and reseal it after each use.
Making better
At the cupping table the group tasted six coffees, starting each one by smelling it, because most of what anyone tastes comes through the nose, about 80 per cent by Pete’s reckoning. Milk in filter coffee is another matter. “There’s a small part of a barista’s heart that sort of gets shattered when you give someone a filtered coffee and they ask for dairy.”
For cafetière and pour-over drinkers, he went further on the grinder. Coffee ground on a shop’s professional grinder two weeks earlier, he said, can beat fresh beans run through a cheap grinder at home.
The espresso part of the course happens at the bar, working to a recipe on the whiteboard: 19g of ground coffee in, 38g of espresso out, in 26 to 31 seconds. The espresso weighs twice what the ground coffee did.
A shot that runs too fast tastes sour. One that runs too slow turns bitter. Somewhere between the two it tastes sweet. And the remarkable thing about doing a course is that you get to experience it first hand in quick succession. Pete uses the same beans and the same machines, and adjusts them to give variations of bad coffee – which we then taste – before “dialling it in” and arriving at the coffee that you pay your £5 for at your favourite coffee shop. The experience carries over when back at home.
The board’s running order works through that recipe, shots that run fast or slow, and tamping, and suggests two YouTube coffee teachers, James Hoffmann and Lance Hedrick, if people want to keep learning more.
“You join us in what used to be the old swimming pool,” the roastery guide said. “Before we took over, it was the diving centre.” Green beans from Brazil and Colombia sit in silos for the house blend, beside a Loring roaster.
The roastery turns out about two tonnes a week, according to the guide, and the owner – Edwin – wants five. The house blend is built for flat whites, and Pete was candid about why it matters. “This is our money maker. This is where we make a little bit of profit.”
One woman on the course lives in Bath now but used to live in Putney, and she remembered queueing at the first Artisan on Upper Richmond Road.
“Every day, your flat white tasted exactly the same,” she said. “It was never any variation.”
The verdict
The worry going in was that it would be nerdy, or built for people planning a career in coffee. It was much more fun and interesting than that. One couple in the room was planning to open a coffee shop; everyone else was simply keen, some with good machines at home and some just interested in making coffee.
The cupping was really interesting and properly hands-on: you use your senses and get a real feel for each coffee. A little more time on the machines would have been welcome, though much more would have started to feel like a shift in a coffee shop. The time on them was fascinating, on very good equipment, and you could taste the difference.
Pete it has to be said is a very good instructor, passionate about his trade, willing to answer any question, and focused on giving people what they want out of the course. The time flew by.
Is it worth £120? If you can afford it, yes. A coffee in London now costs £4.52 on average, so the course costs about the same as 26 cups, and you come away with really useful knowledge. You won’t see coffee quite the same way again.
It suits anyone like Kate, with a machine at home and a cup that changes from one morning to the next, and anyone still choosing a machine, who will be told to spend on the beans and the grinder first. If you want to take things further, the school also runs a course on setting up a coffee shop, from £150, and an Advanced Barista Masterclass for people who already pull good shots.
Back home, fresh with knowledge and calibrated taste buds, an hour set aside with a home machine and grinder turned up the problem: the grind setting was wrong. And not just slightly. Filled with new-found confidence, I actually opened up the grinder and moved its inner burr to get fine enough (did you know there was an internal mechanical setting on some grinders?). A small bag of the roastery’s Barn Door blend, bought separately, went entirely on dialling it in, for about one full cup.
The next day, with a different bag, it took three goes. The result was probably the best coffee ever to come out of my kitchen: sweet, literally the sweet spot between sour and bitter, with a delicious aftertaste. It got rave reviews from my other half, and her sister, and orders for two more tomorrow.
Quite good coffee at home has become really good coffee. And if that is something that excites you, well then the Artisan Coffee School is worth every penny.
If you want to go
Barista Masterclass, Artisan Coffee School
11 Power Road, London W4 5PY (Gunnersbury)
Three hours · £120 · up to eight people
Gift vouchers: £120, for any masterclass
Book: artisancoffeeschool.co.uk
Also £120: latte art, brewing and sensory masterclasses. A private Barista Masterclass is £330.
