Dick Pountain /Idealog 378/ 6th January 2026 : 10:03am
I’ve loved coffee for most of my life, which is mildly unusual in a tea-drinking nation. During childhood my mother made a sweet beverage from ‘Camp’, a jet-black treacly extract (with colonial soldiers on the label) which was diluted with hot milk. I discovered real coffee only in my teens when the Wimpy Bar first arrived in town: brewing coffee with real cream in a little jug on the side, and managed by a Jamaican youth of our age, up from London, who also brought bluebeat records and became our hero. Later, having moved to London to study, I discovered espresso (known as ‘froffee coffee’ to sceptics) and later still lived in Italy for some years and rediscovered proper espresso. But what, I think I hear you ask, does this have to do with computers?Well, an awful lot actually. Caffeine is a brain stimulant of a tone and strength particularly suited to difficult mental problem-solving (which programming certainly is), far more so than amphetamines which merely lead down rabbit holes. The Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rény was addicted and once said “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems”. During the boom of the 1980s, the birth years of our current main operating systems, US programmers found coffee insufficiently caffeinated and demanded a supercharged additive called ‘Jolt Cola’, about which the less said the better. My own first encounter with a US tech giant was at a regional Hewlett Packard HQ, where I noticed that at each main intersection of its many corridors stood an elegant automatic espresso machine that delivered shots in little paper cups for free. Why, even PC Pro’s own Sasha Muller reviews coffee makers for the Guardian. I make no more excuses and rest my case.
But of course computers-and-coffee nowadays means YouTube videos about the apparatus and technique of squeezing espresso shots. This, like photography, is an activity with so many crucial independent variables that it opens up a space for fetishisation, argumentation (often heated), OCD-level attention and artistry. And no-one has a stronger claim to be its Pope, Dalai Lama or Cartier-Bresson than James Hoffman. In a couple of previous columns I’ve mentioned my amusement at his style, but not intended as insult: I admire his highly successful combination of wry humour and scientific rigor (even his extravagant coiffure I’ve learned is in tribute to the late, great David Lynch). His recent animated feature on the laxative properties of coffee is both hilarious and a template for a whole new way to teach biochemistry…
While I’ve learned much from Hoffman’s videos about the importance of bean roast, of grinders and grind size, of pressurised versus non-pressurised coffee baskets, I am however not fully converted. As a qualified organic chemist I appreciate his sound explanations of the extraction process - which rise above the equipment-fetish of many of his imitators - but I’m also a pragmatist who baulks at spending hundreds, let alone thousands, on hardware, and has no time for roasting my own beans. I’ve had the same faithful DeLonghi Dedica espresso
machine for over a decade, running Lavazza Black ground coffee from the supermarket though it – but watching Hoffman has prompted me to attempt some inexpensive ways to up my game. I bought a non-pressurised basket on Amazon and modified the Dedica’s portafilter to accept it by removing the plastic insert (I still refuse to hacksaw the bottom off it and agonise over drip patterns). I noticed an improvement in taste, with less bitterness and acidity, but also a weaker shot.
I also bought an inexpensive hand grinder with adjustable burrs to grind whole beans, but that proved too tedious even after I added a £10 Chinese electric mini-drill to drive it. At around the same time greed-flation struck the price of Italian ground coffees which shot up by 50% in weeks, and I started examining Sainsbury’s range of single-country ground coffees, settling on their Fairtrade Colombian as quite tasty. The problem is they’re ground to be suitable also for cafetières or pour-over, way too coarse for my non-pressurised filter basket and so yielding an even weaker shot. But, given that I’m not fully inducted into the cult I decided to commit the ultimate heresy by regrinding the coffee myself with a non-burr grinder! A piece of hardware I’ve owned ever since my biochemistry days is a vintage US blender, a Waring, capable of liquidising whole rats, golf-balls, possibly even golf-clubs. I tip a 230gm bag of ground Colombian into its graduated cup and whizz until it’s reduced by 20% in volume (takes around 30 seconds) then tip it back into the repurposed Illy tin I use for storage. I may never reach coffee nirvana but it does taste pretty good.
[Dick Pountain does also enjoy tea, particularly Chinese Lapsang souchong or Pu’er]
