The news never sleeps. It’s a good job that many of the greatest minds at the FT are so caffeinated they can’t rest either. Ahead of Saturday’s FT Weekend Magazine Coffee Special, our journalists detail their speciality coffee passions.

The Gearhead

Robert Smith, Corporate Finance Editor

It began innocently enough, a decade ago, with a thoughtful gift from my other half: a ￡30 Hario V60 drip decanter. I started making filter coffee with the equipment I already had kicking around, and the results were generally good, if inconsistent.

Confined to my house during Covid, however, the urge to improve one of my few remaining simple pleasures grew. That’s when I discovered James Hoffmann, the internet’s favourite coffee geek. I soon learnt a better technique and acquired new equipment: a temperature-controlled gooseneck kettle, a Norwegian grinder and a Hario scale. Given that home espresso-making requires an outlay measured in the thousands of pounds, the cost seemed justifiable. The five minutes of preparation also provided a morning ritual, a moment of calm before trying to make sense of the wild gyrations of markets during a once-in-a-century pandemic.