SMOOTH UNDER PRESSURE

These high-octane espresso machines turn your kitchen counter into everyone's favourite coffee stop.

- Tom Weijand

ALMOST 60 PER CENT of Singaporeans drink coffee daily. And while some sleep-deprived folks are just looking for a jolt of anything caffeinated, many of us prefer to savour the good stuff.

Ivica Cvetanovski, the founder of Coffea Circulor, one of the world's finest coffee producers, roasters and laboratories, notes a significant "increase in consumer demand for ultra-luxury coffees, some of them produced in very small quantities". Coffea Circulor's small-batch productions of competition-grade Panama Geisha coffee, for example, can cost as much as US$1,000 per kilogram-and are so sought-after, they were sold out by early November last year. With this calibre of beans, espresso isn't something you toss back on your way out the door in the morning.

Cvetanovski recommends leaning into the ritual.

"Take your time to prepare them for yourself in a manual fashion," he advises. "This can contribute to a sense of recreation." For true coffee lovers, "a manual fashion" means ditching pod machines. Coffee tastes best when the beans are ground seconds before preparation.

A coffee grinder and a manual portafilter machine open up a wide sensory world, from smell to sound to sight, that an automatic appliance simply can't match. Think vintage Ferrari versus modern-day Toyota.

For aficionados, the trickiest part is choosing which manual model to buy. To get the best results, espresso machines must be nimble, offering both infinite variability and incredible precision. There's a lot of science to making good coffee and a fair bit of art, too, from grinding and puck preparation to tamping force, flow rate, water pressure, temperature (in increments as small as 0.1 degree) and grams in versus grams out.