About

Simply put, Brown Bean is a coffee community that is currently sponsored by Seattle Coffee Gear. We began by transitioning the Seattle Coffee Gear blog and have since expanded our available resources by adding reviews, forums, videos, how-to guides, recipes and articles to the new Brown Bean community site. Our explicit goal? Giving you the practical information you need to make coffee you love at home.

Why did we decide to spin off Brown Bean? Well, Seattle Coffee Gear was founded in response to our own experiences trying to navigate the seemingly complex and overly technical world of espresso machines. We found that it was often difficult to easily locate practical and real-world information on machines that gave us the full picture of performance, ease of use, end product quality and reliability.

We did find online centers of passionate geeks who were discussing stuff like espresso machine bar pressure modification and debating the relative flavor peak of their home roasted beans — and while we loved those places, navigating through the experts and the aficionados was time consuming and generally left us feeling that making great espresso at home required a level of devotion that we perhaps didn’t possess.

But, always up for a challenge, we started experimenting with different machines, recording our experiences, taking them apart and putting them back together again — all the while learning about the technical, mechanical and functional components. This ultimately gave us a greater understanding of how great espresso is made and we decided to share that knowledge with folks that, like us, simply wanted to make amazing espresso at home without having to know everything there is to know about espresso.

We started by developing the resources we made available in tandem with the machines we offered for sale — reviews of a machine’s pros and cons, information on how to maintain machines, overviews of why certain aspects of espresso extraction really are worth the trouble — but we felt that this kind of balanced and straightforward content needed a home of its own. And, more importantly, it needed a home that offered an interactive element like forums and user reviews.

So, welcome to Brown Bean! We hope you’ll find the information we provide here to be useful and easy to understand — and that you’ll take the time to participate and share your unique view on making espresso at home.