Hello, fellow coffee lovers!
Our goal at Master Your Coffee is to bring you tips, tricks, advice, and product recommendations that you can use to improve your brewing technique, expand your coffee horizons a little, and, most importantly, brew better coffee at home.
We have more than 20 years of combined coffee experience that has taken us from brewing bitter, acidic, mostly flavorless coffee to the sweet, complex cups we enjoy every morning.
When we started our coffee journey, we had to learn by brewing bad coffee, learning from our mistakes, and trying again. We read about the brewing process, dove into the finer details of roasting coffee, and learned how different origins and coffee farming techniques affect the flavors we find in our cups.
Our goal is to share the wealth of knowledge we have accumulated to make your coffee journey easier. We hope our brewing guides, coffee bean origin information, and home roasting advice will help you develop the cup that suits you best and puts a smile on your face. There’s no reason your daily caffeine fix can’t also brighten up your morning.
Let’s master our coffee together!
Meet the Team
Meet the passionate coffee junkies behind our content.
Dan
My name is Dan, and I grew up and currently live on Long Island in New York. I started drinking coffee in college out of necessity, but it quickly became a passion of mine.
After a few years and a few hundred dollars spent on coffee brewing equipment, I opened a roastery with my wife and two of my close friends and fellow coffee lovers. We’ve since closed up shop, but I learned a ton about coffee through that experience.
For one, I discovered that you can actually roast coffee without burning the ever-loving hell out of it…AND, it’s usually way better when you do! Starbucks, Dunkin, Folgers, and even Whole Foods brand coffee is all way over-roasted, in my opinion. And we as Americans have just gotten accustomed to drinking over-roasted coffee that is bitter and acidic.
From brewing at home, I also discovered that the typical brewing method — using a cheap, automatic drip coffee machine — yields one of the least flavorful and most bitter-tasting cups of coffee possible. If you feel you need to add sugar and milk to coffee to enjoy it, then you’ll definitely want to check out my guides on brewing better coffee at home. It IS possible to enjoy your coffee black and get a sweet and robust flavor that you won’t want to mask.
After years of focusing on perfecting my own cup, I now focus on bringing a little light to people’s mornings by educating them about coffee when I can. I love providing guidance on how to make the perfect coffee here at MasterYourCoffee.com.
My preferred brewing method is French press (1:15 ratio of grounds to water, add water at 208 degrees (F), stir at 1 minute, press and pour at 4 minutes). I use a Lido 3 manual grinder nearly every morning, and a Baratza Virtuoso Plus when I’m feeling a bit lazy.
Sean
I started drinking coffee during college, but I didn’t become best friends with it until graduate school. After countless months of gulping down large quantities of bland, uninspired coffee made with the world’s most neglected automatic drip machine, I decided that I needed to do something if I was going to continue the habit.
My foray into specialty coffee started with a French press, a cheap electric burr grinder, and a bag of coffee from a local café. The results were mind-blowing, and I was immediately hooked. The crazy thing is that the coffee I was brewing then wasn’t even that good; it was just far superior to the bitter brown water I had been drinking for years.
A few short months after my coffee epiphany, I owned a v60, Aeropress, and a fancy hand grinder, and I signed up for a monthly coffee subscription. There was no going back. Learning to use new brewing techniques was a joy, and I spent many happy mornings tweaking grinder settings and altering brew parameters to try and coax just a little bit more nuance and flavor out of my latest batch of beans.
These days I favor my v60 for its flexibility and complexity, which I learned to love after many years of trial and error. When trying out a new bean, my go-to recipe uses 240 grams of water at 205 degrees F to brew 15 grams of beans with a 45-gram bloom and two pours.
I hope that sharing my coffee knowledge will help other coffee drinkers learn how to make better coffee at home so they can experience the beauty that is a perfectly handcrafted cup of coffee. The coffee rabbit hole is deep, but there’s plenty of room down here for more coffee lovers.