Machines & grinders (7)
- Burr alignment — Getting a grinder’s two cutting discs perfectly parallel — the marker test, foil shims, lapping, and why a tilted burr quietly ruins a good coffee.
- Chemex Corporation — The American family-owned company that has made the Chemex Coffeemaker since Dr Peter Schlumbohm patented his hourglass glass brewer in 1941 — a laboratory funnel and flask fused into one object, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
- Espresso machine — The machine that forces hot water through a compact bed of fine coffee at high pressure to make espresso — traced from 19th-century steam boilers through Gaggia’s spring lever and the nine-bar Faema E61 pump to modern pressure-profiling machines that shape the pressure curve shot by shot.
- Hario — The Tokyo heatproof-glass maker founded in 1921 to produce laboratory glassware, whose V60 cone dripper — released by the company’s own account in October 2005 — became the default brewer of specialty coffee and the most-used dripper on the World Brewers Cup stage.
- Kono — The Japanese equipment maker trading as Coffee Syphon Co., Ltd., whose KONO brand covers vacuum siphons, the Meimon cone dripper and its own coffee beans — the second name, alongside Hario, behind Japan’s standard brewers.
- La Marzocco — The Florentine espresso machine manufacturer founded in 1927 by Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi, whose 1939 horizontal boiler and 1970 GS dual-boiler saturated group became the shape and the thermal standard of every commercial espresso machine that followed.
- Mahlkönig EK43 — The tall German shop grinder that specialty coffee adopted for espresso — 98 mm cast steel burrs, 1300 watts, and the machine an entire argument about grind uniformity was built around.
Roasting & measuring (3)
- Loring Smart Roast — The Santa Rosa, California maker of commercial coffee roasters whose patented single-burner design roasts the beans and burns off its own smoke in one flame — no afterburner, less gas, and the machine of choice for a large slice of light-roast specialty roasteries.
- Quantify CVA — An iOS and Android app for filling in SCA Coffee Value Assessment forms with several evaluators at once — one of the two digital CVA platforms the SCA named in July 2026.
- Refractometer — The little light-bending gadget that turns a cup of coffee into a number — how it works, what it can and can’t tell you, and how it became standard kit in specialty coffee.
Everything else (1)
- Urnex — The American maker of cleaning and descaling products for coffee and tea equipment, founded in 1936, sold in more than 70 countries, and now a brand of the Illinois cleaning-products group PurposeBuilt Brands.