What are my options for brewing coffee at home?

AThe Devil’s Bean demands serious respect and skill if you’re going to get it right. GaGu’s personal team of baristas, trained authentically in the bean mines of deepest Colombia, can create a gorgeous, glowing brew in their sleep; you are probably not so lucky.

So you might turn to a machine. Perhaps the Nespresso Vertuo (£200), with its questionablyrecyclable cup sand a rights management scheme which prevents you using anything other than the prescribed, pricey branded coffee concentrates to fill it up. Despite Guru’s obvious sneering derision at the business tactics of that and other podulikes, the results are consistent and generally highly acceptable, with a lot of variety on offer. But maybe you want more involvement from your cup.

A more manual machine, then? Both presses (such as the £26 AeroPress) and drip filters (the almost scientific £400 Wilfa Presisjon, perhaps) offer a good way to get a rich cup out of ground-up bean dust of your own provision; there’s a world of bespoke roasts out there, but tread carefully. Artisinal coffee is akin to the overflowing indie music scene of the late ’90s – you might taste a gem, but you also might be forced to stomach something cooked up in the back of a pub, a concoction whose enthusiastic label can’t cash the cheques it’s writing.

Go further. Go for beans, good beans. Subscribe to the Django Coffee Co. weekly care package (from £27), and get fancy coffee shipped to your door every month. Grind it up yourself in a Sage Smart Grinder Pro (£200) for the freshest possible cup. Repurpose your garage into a storage area for your coffee because you’ve been buying far too much of it. Roast your own. Charter a flight to South America. The ball will just keep on rolling.