The coffee obsessive

There is a point at which coffee stops being a drink and becomes an equipment question. It almost always starts with the grinder. Nobody who has ground beans that were whole five seconds earlier goes back, and from that moment they hold preferences the rest of the household cannot follow.

That makes buying for them easier than it looks, as long as you do not try to guess the machine itself. Around it sits a whole layer of equipment that is wanted and rarely ordered: an espresso machine is the thing they have researched for a year, and the things beside it are the things they never get round to.

A milk frother that does something other than lukewarm bubbles. A kitchen scale that reads to a tenth of a gram, because apparently that matters. A mug with a wall thick enough that the last third is still worth drinking.

The collection below runs from the machine to the small things around it. The small things usually win.