We’ve all seen those fancy coffee commercials where the barista slowly and lovingly pours steaming milk into a cup of coffee, creating a smooth, even layer that covers the surface of the drink. It’s tempting to try to imitate them as best you can, but here’s the problem: it’s completely unnecessary. Trying to create that kind of layer will only result in a lot of wasted milk and coffee grounds floating at the top of your cup.

To make a truly excellent latte art foam, you don’t need to try to create a perfectly smooth layer with the pouring. In fact, if you try to do this, you’ll wind up with something that looks like cauliflower instead. Instead, think about what happens when you’re making coffee with an automatic drip machine. The coffee drips from a hole in the bottom and spreads out into a flat layer on top of the water as it hits–but it does not stay flat for long. With each drop it becomes thinner and thinner until it disappears entirely as it is absorbed by the water below.

You want your latte art foam to follow this pattern, but on a much smaller scale: several evenly spaced drops should spread out into a very thin layer of foam that disappears quickly into the surrounding milk

The first step to making a cup of coffee is to get out your hand grinder. Yes, yes, I know: electric grinders are convenient and fast, but they’re like buying instant coffee.

You want the beans to be ground just before you brew because coffee starts losing its delicate flavors soon after it’s ground.

And you want them ground just right: not too coarse, not too fine. It’s easy to grind them too fine, which makes the water rush through too quickly and makes the coffee weak. If they’re ground too coarsely the water takes too long to flow through and the coffee is bitter. You want a happy medium — enough time for all the flavor to come out into the water, but not so much time that it gets watered down.

There are fancy grinders that will do this for you automatically, but I like doing it by hand. It’s very relaxing for me — like Zen meditation or something. Set aside ten minutes of your day to do nothing but grind your beans and make coffee.

Here’s how: Put about two tablespoons of whole beans in the little receptacle at one end of your grinder; slide the receptacle partway toward the other end with one hand while turning the crank with your other hand

When it comes to coffee making, procrastination is the key. Making great coffee takes time — time to carefully measure and grind the beans, time to slowly bring them to a boil, time to let the grounds settle. The temptation is always to just wing it. But don’t!

The first step is choosing the right beans. This seems obvious — they should be fresh — but many people I know go directly from the supermarket to the coffeemaker without stopping at their local specialty-coffee store. They think they’re getting a bargain by buying in bulk, but coffee doesn’t go bad; it just loses flavor.

If you buy whole beans, you’ll find that they lose their freshness surprisingly quickly; buy small quantities more often. If you’re using a grinder at home, choose medium-roast or dark-roast beans (but not espresso), which stay fresh longer than light roast. If you use preground coffee, buy only as much as you plan to use before the flavor fades.

If you’re grinding your own beans, do it only as close as possible to when you’re going to drink coffee made from them. Some people say they don’t have time for such niceties and just grind a big batch on Sunday and

There are many different methods of brewing coffee, but the two most common are:

1. The drip method (also known as filter or percolator).

2. The automatic or electric drip.

The basic principle of both is that hot water drips through ground coffee into a cup of some sort. In the case of the drip method, this happens by gravity; in the case of the automatic drip, it happens because hot water rises and pushes the water downward.

In each case you have to grind the coffee beans (or buy them already ground) and heat the water. Then you measure out a given amount of coffee, dump it into a filter holder or a paper cone, put in enough water to cover it, wait for the right amount of time, and then push down on a plunger to trap all of the grounds at the bottom.

A nice cup of coffee can be had with either method—but if you want to become one with your coffee maker, you should learn how to do it with both.

The art of coffee making is simple, but not easy. Coffee is a lot like wine in that regard. The average person should drink both moderately, for many reasons, one of which is that when you drink too much you lose the ability to taste either. But it’s important to understand how to make these beverages well, since they are some of the most delicious things we have.

It’s difficult to describe the taste of coffee and wine in words because they are not like other tastes. Wine experts can distinguish thousands of different flavors in wine, but this doesn’t mean that most people will be able to tell Tuscan wines apart from South African wines. It just means that there are a lot of flavors out there, and the experienced palate is better at detecting them.

The same goes for coffee and tea; most people won’t be able to tell Kenyan from Ethiopian beans or Darjeeling tea leaves from Chinese ones. But then again, most people will also fail to distinguish between a good cup and a bad one, even if all the ingredients are exactly the same.

First, buy the right kind of coffee. In the United States, you usually find two kinds: “regular” and “dark roast.” What this means is that the beans were roasted until they were brown enough to taste pretty bad. The darker the roast, the longer it was roasted, and the more bitter it will be.

I have found that almost all coffee tastes best if it is light-roasted. If you look at a cross-section of a bean after it has been roasted, you’ll see that light roasting is when the bean is tan except for a few dark spots; dark roasting will be uniformly dark.

If you are in a shop and forced to choose between different brands, pick one that says “light roast.” You might also look at the expiration date: fresh coffee tastes better than stale coffee.

Coffee comes in many varieties. Most people prefer blends because they are smoother than a single-origin coffee from any one region. But also some people prefer single-origin coffees from places like Kenya or Jamaica or Hawaii.

The main thing to know about coffee beans is that different kinds of beans produce different flavors of coffee. Central American coffees are often fruity; African coffees can be earthy; Asian coff

“Hand art” is making art with your hands, not using mechanical tools. It’s very satisfying to make something that feels good, that feels right, by putting your hands to work. But it’s hard to do well. It takes a lot of practice, and you need to know some tricks.

It helps if you have any kind of manual dexterity at all. If you can tie your shoes or use chopsticks, you’re off to a good start.

If you don’t have any manual dexterity, you should still try hand art (see below for suggestions), but I won’t be writing about how to make things without tools; that’s a whole different branch of crafts, and the techniques are so different that I wouldn’t know where to begin.

And finally, a warning: if you make something ugly or useless, don’t get discouraged. Each new skill takes experience to learn how to use it effectively. Even the people who’ve been doing it all their lives don’t always get it right on the first try.