About Bean & Burr

Bean & Burr exists because buying coffee and espresso gear is unnecessarily hard, and most of the content meant to help you is written by people who benefit from you spending more.

The problem we're trying to fix

Search for any coffee machine or grinder and you get the same page over and over: ten products, a paragraph of hype each, prices that were typed in by hand some time last year, and a "we tested these for 40 hours" claim that nobody can verify. Readers know it, which is why so many of them add "reddit" to the search — they're actively routing around affiliate content to find someone who will just tell them the truth.

Our whole strategy is to be the page they were hoping to find. The name says the scope: the bean (what you buy) and the burr (how you grind it) — the two halves of good coffee.

What that means in practice

• Live prices.Every number on this site comes from Amazon's API and is stamped with the date we fetched it. If our data goes stale, the number disappears rather than misleading you.
• A published rubric. Every score breaks into named metrics, and How We Researchexplains all of them. If you can't see what a number is made of, it's decoration.
• We run the numbers. What a shot actually costs to pull. Why the grinder matters more than the machine. We do the arithmetic — see the cost calculator — and show our work.
• "Don't buy this if…" on every single pick. No exceptions. Not one competitor page we looked at does this.
• We say when the cheap one wins. Repeatedly, and at our own expense.

The thing most sites won't tell you

Outlets like Consumer Reports buy their own units and run a genuine testing facility. We cannot match that, and pretending we can would be the exact dishonesty we built this site to avoid.

What we do instead is research properly: published manufacturer specifications, primary standards from bodies like the Specialty Coffee Association, cost-to-run arithmetic we show in full, and aggregated owner reviews. Then we tell you which of those a claim rests on. Where we could not verify something, we write "we could not verify this" and move on. That sentence is a trust asset, not a weakness.

Who writes it

Bean & Burr is written and edited by Stephen V., an enthusiast who's genuinely into this — someone who reads the manuals, compiles the specs, and does the math. No lab coat, and no invented credentials.

We're deliberately not going to pad that with a fake biography. A lot of review sites decorate their author pages with barista certifications they don't hold and imaginary years of experience — and we think fabricating a background is worse than having a modest, honest one.

How we make money

Bean & Burr is funded entirely by the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through one of our links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

No brand pays us for placement. No manufacturer sends us products or sees our copy before publication. Commission rates have never moved a ranking — which is why you'll find a $150 machine recommended over a $700 one, and a $13 scale beating a $150 one, on pages where the expensive product would have paid us more. Read the full affiliate disclosure and our editorial policy.

The publisher

Bean & Burr is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC.

Get in touch

If we've got something wrong, tell us — we correct factual errors within 48 hours with a visible note. Email info@beanandburr.com or use the contact form.