About The Espresso Report

Who writes this

Stephen V.. A coffee enthusiast.

That is the entire credential, and it is deliberately the entire credential. I am not a barista. I hold no certification. I do not have a lab, a shot counter, or a wall of machines. If a site tells you its author is an expert, you should ask what that means, so it would be strange for me to open by asking you not to.

What I do have is a low tolerance for two specific things, and they are the reason this site exists.

Why it exists

Reason one: the prices are lies

Not deliberate lies. Lazy ones. Go and read almost any "best espresso machine" guide and you will find prices typed into the prose — numbers that were true on the day someone wrote the article and have been quietly wrong ever since. Some of them are two or three years old. They sit there, at the top of Google, misinforming people who are about to spend real money.

On this site, prices come from Amazon's API, they carry the timestamp of when we checked, and if that data goes stale we stop showing you a number at all. It is not clever. It is just the thing everyone should have been doing.

Reason two: the testing claims can't be checked

The guides that outrank us say remarkable things. 3,600 shots. 640 hours. Six months of blind tasting. Maybe all of it happened exactly as described — I have no reason to think otherwise, and I'm not accusing anyone of anything.

But you can't verify a word of it, and neither can I. It's an assertion, repeated confidently, and confidence is not evidence.

The tempting move for a new site is to invent a comparable story. It would take one paragraph and nobody could disprove it. It is also the move that would make this site worthless — and it's the exact thing I was annoyed about in the first place.

So instead: we compete on whether the claim can be checked.Our specs link to the manufacturer's own documentation. Our prices are live and timestamped. Our reasoning is on the page. And when we haven't used a machine — which, today, is all of them — the page says so in a badge you can't miss.

What we don't do

• We don't claim to have tested things we haven't. Every product page carries an honest ownership badge, and the ownership tablelists exactly what we have and haven't used. Right now: nothing. We say so.
• We don't take press samples, and we don't let a manufacturer see a review before it's published. If we buy a machine, we buy it at retail, and we tell you the date.
• We don't invent specs. If De'Longhi doesn't publish a portafilter diameter — and they don't — our page says they don't, rather than repeating a number from an aftermarket parts seller.
• We don't hide how we're paid. Every earning link on this site says paid link right next to it.

The honest plan from here

The weakest part of this site is first-hand experience, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose the only thing we've got. So the plan is to build it in public, on a schedule: as the site earns, we buy machines — starting with the ones that anchor the comparisons people actually agonise over — and when we do, that page gets original photographs of our unit, on our counter, with the date we bought it.

Not a stock photo. Not a render. The actual machine, with actual water spots on it.

Until then, every page tells you plainly which side of that line it sits on. You'll always be able to tell.

Talk to us

If we've got something wrong, tell us: info@theespressoreport.com, or use the contact page. If you're right, we fix it within 48 hours and note the correction on the page with a date — we don't quietly edit and move on. That's written down properly in the editorial policy.

And if you want to know exactly how a recommendation here gets made before you trust one, that's what how we reviewis for. It's the page I'd read first.