About - Top Coffee Bean

The three minutes that set up your whole day

Most people’s first decision of the day is coffee. Before the emails, before the commute, before anyone’s spoken to anyone — the kettle goes on.

And when that cup is bad, it lands harder than it should. A flat, bitter, disappointing coffee at 6:30am has a way of coloring everything that follows. It’s a small thing that isn’t small at all.

Top Coffee Bean exists to fix that.

What we’re here to do

We help people make genuinely good coffee at home, and we do it without the snobbery.

Coffee has an unfortunate habit of being explained by people who seem faintly irritated that you didn’t already know. Forums full of acronyms. Reviews that assume you own a $2,000 espresso machine. Advice that starts three steps past where you actually are.

That’s not us.

Whether you’re brewing supermarket beans in a drip machine and wondering why it tastes bitter, or you’re dialing in a single-origin Ethiopian on a pour-over and chasing the last bit of clarity, you should be able to find a straight answer here. Same site, no gatekeeping.

Because here’s the thing most coffee content misses: the gap between bad coffee and good coffee is much smaller than people think. It usually isn’t an expensive machine. It’s grind size, water temperature, a ratio you can measure, and beans that were roasted this month instead of last year. Those things are learnable in an afternoon, and they’re worth more than most gear upgrades.

What you’ll find here

Coffee beans. Where coffee comes from, what origin actually tells you, how roast levels differ, and how to buy beans that haven’t been sitting in a warehouse since the last harvest.

Brewing methods. Step-by-step guides for every method worth using — pour-over, French press, AeroPress, espresso, moka pot, cold brew and more — with real numbers, not vague instructions.

Coffee gear. Grinders, kettles, scales, machines and accessories. What’s worth buying, what isn’t, and what you should upgrade first.

Recipes and drinks. Everything from a properly made flat white to iced coffee that doesn’t turn into brown water.

Coffee 101. The foundations, plus troubleshooting for when something’s gone wrong — and a running effort to correct the surprising amount of misinformation floating around this subject.

Culture and history. Where coffee came from, how it spread, and why different parts of the world drink it so differently.

Who’s behind it

Top Coffee Bean is managed by Samantha Cain, based in Brisbane, Australia.

I fell in love with Coffee, 15 years ago on a holiday to Brazil. I worked as a Barista, for a few years. Before taking the plunge and opening a Cafe. With my professional career and personal, I’ve been brewing coffee for twelve years and I’ve made every mistake in these articles at least once.

I’ve since moved on and write for Top Coffee Bean, trying to share me experiences with readers. I truly love coffee, and belivee a bad cup can spoil the whole day.

Brisbane-based, globally minded

We write from Brisbane, and we think that’s an advantage rather than a quirk.

Australia has one of the most demanding everyday coffee cultures in the world. The flat white is ours. The expectation that a suburban café will pull a decent shot is ours. Australians are, on average, extremely hard to impress with mediocre coffee, that’s a useful standard to write to.

But coffee is a global subject, and we write for a global audience. That means a few practical commitments:

Both measurement systems, every time. 18g and 0.63oz. 300ml and 10oz. Nobody should have to convert.
No hemisphere assumptions. We won’t tell you it’s iced coffee season in July.
Recommendations that travel. Where a product isn’t available worldwide, we say so.

How we work

Three commitments that we’d want from a site like this.

We test things. We don’t rewrite manufacturer copy and call it a review. When we recommend gear, we explain what we actually did with it and for how long. Our full testing methodology is public.

We correct things. Coffee is full of confidently repeated misinformation, that espresso means “fast,” that dark roast has more caffeine, that coffee is the world’s second-most-traded commodity after oil. None of those are true. When we get something wrong ourselves, we fix it and note that we did.

We say when we don’t know. Coffee research moves, agricultural figures change, and some questions genuinely don’t have a settled answer. We’d rather tell you a question is open than invent a confident answer.

How we make money

We think you should know this, so we’ll be direct about it.

Top Coffee Bean earns money through affiliate commissions , if you buy something through a link on this site, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you and through display advertising.

What that does not mean:

We don’t recommend products because they pay more.
We don’t take payment for positive reviews.
We say when something isn’t worth buying, including when we’d earn a commission on it.

A site that only ever recommends things is not reviewing anything. Our affiliate disclosure sets out the details in full.

Part of Digital Media Equipment

Top Coffee Bean is part of the Digital Media Equipment family of sites.

Get in touch

We read everything.

If something we’ve written is wrong, tell us, corrections are welcome and we’d rather hear it from you than not know. If there’s a topic you want covered, or a piece of gear you want tested, that’s genuinely useful to hear.

Now go put the kettle on.