(credit: Kevin Purdy)

If you're like our staff, you'll understand that good cup of brewed coffee is a requirement every morning. Whether it's a simple French-pressed brew or an espresso-based drink with complex flavors and aromas, coffee has not only provided the fuel to get the Ars Technica stuff through our daily tasks but it's become a ritual that helps us start the day anew and grounds us—pun intended—amid the chaos of the world.

We asked the Ars staff to show off their coffee-making setups and tips below—they range from low to high tech, from hand-cranked grinders to automatic machines and all points in between, but all these methods have one thing in common: They make awesome coffee.

John Timmer's setup: Flavorful French press method

What I want from coffee-making equipment is purely a function of what I'm looking for from coffee. And that is as much flavor as you can possibly extract from beans that are roasted so dark that they risk absorbing all light and becoming a black hole. I want a thin sheen of random organic molecules floating on top of an explosion of bitter, complex flavors.

Enlarge / Identifying the compounds that give fermented coffee its unique flavor and aroma could allow more people to enjoy it. (credit: Samo Smrke)

Hardcore coffee aficionados are always on the lookout for the next big twist on the world's favorite caffeinated beverage, and these days it's fermented coffee that is turning heads and tickling taste buds with its distinctive fruity notes. Scientists in Switzerland conducted experiments with fermented coffee in hopes of identifying the specific chemical compounds behind the beverage's unusual flavor profile.

"There are now flavors that people are creating that no one would have ever associated with coffee in the past,” said Chahan Yeretzian , a scientist at the Coffee Excellence Center at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, who presented the research during a recent American Chemical Society meeting in Indianapolis. "The flavors in fermented coffee, for example, are often more akin to fruit juices.”

Most coffee is a little fermented since it happens naturally as wet-processed beans soak, breaking down enzymes and producing sugars. It also makes it easier to remove the husk and pulp. In this case, we're talking about green coffee beans that have already been through that initial processing. The beans are then soaked in water spiked with carefully selected strains of yeasts and bacteria and left to ferment for a couple of days. Often fruit or other flavors are added during this stage or the beans are fermented in barrels previously used to store whiskey, rum, or other liquors. Then the beans are washed and dried, and roasted as usual.

Enlarge / Tim Hortons is a coffee and donut chain popular with Canadians, Canadian-adjacent regions of the US, and statistics professors. (credit: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

All you had to do, if you really wanted some free coffee and doughnuts, was wake up around 3 am each day and click on some virtual Tim Hortons coffee cups.

It was 3:16 am, actually, that gave a University of Waterloo professor a roughly 80 percent win rate on Tim Hortons' Roll Up To Win game. That wasn't as good as the 98 percent Michael Wallace clocked in early 2020, when he discovered a quirk in the coffee chain's prize distribution scheme, but it still made for great lessons for his students.

"I really like the fact that you can take data from the real world, run it through some math, and find patterns that describe what you see," Wallace told his university's news service . "It's a kind of magic."

Enlarge / How far is too far to go for the perfect shot of espresso? Here's at least one trail marker for you. (credit: Norm Sohl)

Making espresso at home involves a conundrum familiar to many activities: It can be great, cheap, or easy to figure out, but you can only pick, at most, two of those. You can spend an infinite amount of time and money tweaking and upgrading your gear, chasing shots that taste like the best café offerings, always wondering what else you could modify.

Or you could do what Norm Sohl did and build a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia . Here's what Sohl did, and some further responses from the retired programmer and technical writer, now that his project has circulated in both open hardware and espresso-head circles.

Like many home espresso enthusiasts, Sohl had seen that his preferred machine, the Gaggia Classic Pro, could be modified in several ways, including adding a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller and other modifications to better control temperature, pressure, and shot volumes. Most intriguing to Sohl was Gaggiuino , a project that adds those things with the help of an Arduino Nano or STM32 Blackpill , a good deal of electrical work, and open software.

Enlarge (credit: Diana Gitig)

Coffee is uniquely vulnerable to climate change . It grows in tropical regions, where temperatures and rainfall are becoming increasingly erratic; it is grown by small farms, which do not have the resources available to weather the coming literal and figurative storms; and despite the fact that coffee is among the most highly traded commodities in the world, little agricultural research time or money has been devoted to it.

Right now, just two species of coffee are grown commercially: Arabica and robusta. Droughts over the past couple of years have reduced coffee yield, even as demand is exploding. Something must be done. Tea plantations are facing similar problems , so switching to tea won’t help. ( Molecular coffee might eventually be an option, though.)

But researchers in the UK and Uganda posit that coffee farms can adapt in a number of ways. They can move, they can change their practices, or they can plant different varieties of coffee. These researchers vote for option three. And they have a candidate: Liberica coffee.