CP On: Since When Did Everyone Get So Good at Making Coffee at Home?

Once upon a time, the office coffee run was akin to a sacred ritual. At 10am every morning — caffeine consumer or not — the crew would assemble and make its way to the local. It wasn't until you'd been invited on the 10am coffee run that you'd truly infiltrated the inner sanctum of a new workplace, a milestone more imperative to your corporate survival than passing your probationary period. And it was always one place, and one place only. Loyalty mattered. The first time the barista at LaManna&Sons in Cremorne remembered my "just the usual?" (a strong latte with one) I all but levitated off the ground.

Before we all became home baristas, coffee culture felt inseparable from identity. There was the low-stakes intimacy of the barista who knew your order, the tiny social choreography of "I'll get this one, you get me tomorrow" between colleagues, even the way a branded cup would appear on an Instagram Story like a lifestyle signifier, captioned something excruciatingly millennial like: "Keep calm and drink coffee!!!" Buying coffee at a cafe and carrying it around was simply part of how we moved through the world; making one at home meant depriving yourself of a crucial semiotic accessory and a necessary microdose of community: I am busy, I belong.

Fast-forward to 2026, and everyone I know has a coffee setup at home that could quite convincingly rival a cafe-style beverage of their choosing. For some reason, even people who have never worked a day in hospo in their lives know how to steam milk just right — so there's no head on their flat white and just enough on their latte. The most likely culprit is COVID-19. Aside from the obvious inability to leave the house — cue Melburnian PTSD flashbacks — lockdown made domestic projects feel strangely meaningful. We were baking sourdough, pickling vegetables, reorganising shelves and romanticising the kind of small, repetitive labour that made time feel structured again. Coffee fit that era perfectly: practical enough to justify, complicated enough to become a hobby and aesthetic enough to post about.

If you wanted a neat cultural timestamp for the moment it tipped into mass behaviour, Dalgona coffee probably was it. Vogue Australia's April 2020 explainer on fluffy coffee captured it exactly as a pandemic pastime — easy to make, highly visual and a way of "bonding with everyone else working from home" while stuck indoors. As of the time of writing, the TikTok #coffeetok page houses a staggering 1.3 million videos.

@imhannahcho yes i hand whisked this whipped coffee for like 20 mins bc my mommy wanted to try it 👻 she loved it!! (달고나 커피) #korean #fyp #aesthetic ♬ Put your head on my shoulder cover by karlo - K a r l o

Rohan Cooke, former barista and co-founder of Golden Brown Coffee, gives the clearest timeline for when the shift stopped being niche. In his view, home machines "finally got good enough" around 2010–15 to make cafe-quality coffee, but COVID was the real turning point: suddenly, "everyone's like, I need this great quality coffee" and plunged into a "deep dive" of learning and gear. What has happened since, he says, is that home coffee has moved beyond the enthusiast crowd and into the accessible mainstream, with better machines and more guided brewing helping "everyone at all levels" make something good.

I'd like to offer up, as research, a completely scientific and watertight sample size of the five people in the Vinyl Media office present while I'm writing this story. Of the five, four of us start our day with at-home espresso setups of varying degrees of manual involvement. Charlotte, our partnerships manager, bought a Smeg espresso machine during COVID, taught herself to froth milk on YouTube and now alternates between weekday iced lattes and a weekend French press with her partner. Denise, our head of social, has a Breville Barista Pro with saved settings and milk-specific customisation, so it makes her coffee "exactly how I want it". I start my day with a manual, no-frills DeLonghi Dedica Arte, making a latte before work — which I admittedly usually follow with a cup of instant coffee later in the day because I simply cannot be bothered cleaning the machine twice.

Jasmine, our Branded Content Director, is truly the only person in the group qualified to have a properly sophisticated home setup. An ex-Sensory Lab barista and St ALi waitress, she has an impressive Lelit Bianca, which she says has "massively improved me and my partner's quality of life". Then there's the outlier: James, our Head of Creative Strategy. In a very on-brand move (you'd agree if you met him), he "drinks rooibos tea". But on the rare occasion that he does "need a double espresso straight to the dome", it's via an Aeropress. So I guess that's the tea (or the coffee, LOL) — your average person may not be a coffee snob, exactly, but they have become oddly specific.

 

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That specificity is probably the real story. Once you've learned the version of coffee you like, and once the tools to make it have become more available, more affordable and more teachable, it becomes harder to be impressed by an average latte bought on the run. Rohan is clear that what cafes still do better is consistency: the water filtration, the repetition, the inbuilt scales, the workflow, the fact that someone is tasting and adjusting throughout the day to keep everything dialled in. At home, he says, you can absolutely get milk "just as silky and beautiful" as a cafe, but the real value a great cafe still offers is service, hospitality and understanding exactly what the customer wants. He is equally firm that "adding milk is not blasphemy" — it just changes what matters, especially when you are choosing beans that need enough body to still sing through dairy or alt milk.

The Machine Guide

If the home barista era is here to stay, the best machine is not the most expensive one — it is the one that suits the way you actually drink coffee. Rohan's most useful advice is to think less romantically about the machine itself and more practically about the hierarchy of what matters. First: good beans. Then, if you care about taste and consistency, a burr grinder and a scale will often make a bigger difference than people expect.

For the novice: Nespresso Creatista Uno Breville Black Sesame
Look for guided brewing and minimal admin. This is the person who wants cafe-adjacent results without developing a new personality around extraction, which is why assisted machines have become so appealing. They remove enough friction to make home coffee feel achievable rather than aspirational.

For the time-poor: Ninja Luxe Café Premier Espresso Machine
Go for one-touch convenience, saved settings and automatic milk functions — a machine that remembers your preferences, handles the grind and makes your coffee exactly the same way every morning. Bonus: you can head to the Ninja x Luxe Café Pop-Up, running 13–17 March in Melbourne, to give the machine a whirl before committing.

For the ex-barista: Lelit Bianca
This is the grinder-scale-separate-machine crowd. If you enjoy dialling in, adjusting dose and chasing repeatability, Rohan's advice is clear: buy good beans, get a quality burr grinder and use a scale precise enough to keep your results consistent.

For the old-school: Moccamaster Select Coffee Maker
You may not need an espresso machine at all. An Aeropress, French press or simple filter setup can make excellent coffee with fewer variables, less cleanup and less bench space, which is partly why these methods keep surviving every new gadget cycle.

Still need a little more guidance? You can catch Rohan talking all things beans, machines and accoutrements on his 'It's Just Coffee!' podcast.

Images: supplied.

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