For years I felt anxious about the coffee gear piling up on my shelves. I'd buy a brewer, use it, shelve it, and buy the next one. What finally made that feeling go away wasn't buying less. It was actually using what I bought.
If you want a piece of gear, buy it. Then use it long enough to see what makes it different from what you already own. That part is what took the anxiety away for me, and it's the only real responsibility that comes with the purchase.
Five or six years on one V60
The Hario V60 is the brewer that got me into specialty coffee. I had a French press, and it worked fine. But something pulled me toward the V60, reviews online and things I was reading at the time, and it became my daily driver for five or six years. I'd guess 80 to 90 percent of my cups went through it. Sure, I had an AeroPress. I also used the slow Hario filters for years without thinking twice.
When I thought I needed everything
Once I started watching more YouTube, seeing what other people brewed with, and eventually making coffee videos of my own, I figured I needed to buy as many things as possible. The shelves behind my coffee bar are full now. Most people would call it excessive and ask how anyone could use all of it.
For a long time I felt the same way. If I owned something and didn't use it, I felt like something was wrong with me. And when I did use it, I never stayed with it long enough to understand what made it different. Buy it, use it, shelve it. Buy it, use it, shelve it again. When a big box showed up, I'd wait until nobody was home so I could pull it out of the bag and marvel over it in peace. My wife told me plenty of times that I was doing way too much.
What changed
I can't tell you exactly when it flipped. At some point I stopped caring about the pile and started enjoying whatever I brewed with.
It went away because I started putting on my engineer's cap. I paid attention to the brewer itself, to water chemistry, to why I'd reach for one kettle over another. I learned that different papers do different things to a cup. I've got a lot of paper filters, and I'm still working out whether anybody needs ten or twelve of them.
Once the FOMO left, the gear turned into a reason to explore: what's really the difference between this brewer and that one, and how is my palate changing along the way?
Buying is how my palate got honest
The clearest example came when I was moving from lightly roasted coffee toward more developed medium and dark roasts. I kept going back to the well on acidity. Where was the sweetness? And I realized that, for me, the V60 produced acidity like nothing else.
So I tried a flat-bed brewer. I tried different filters. Eventually my palate got honest with me, and I started seeing things for what they were. That only happened because I kept buying and kept challenging myself.
Reviews won't always get you there. I bought an OXO brewer on the hype, and a couple of days in I'd figured out what bugged me: something about the way it brews and leaks through. It'll have its time and place, but it's been on the side of the cupboard ever since. You can sometimes catch that in a review, if you haven't already told yourself you're getting it.
What the drippers on my table are teaching me
Right now I'm playing with a $70 dripper with swappable bottoms, and the marketing says changing the bottom changes the flavor drastically. Does it do something? It does. How much, I don't know yet. I'll spend real time with it before I say more.
I've also noticed I like wider, flat-bottom drippers, because the drawdowns run a little slower and, to me, the coffee comes out sweeter. Some of the narrow ones with grooves drain fast. My most versatile flat-bottom dripper takes any paper filter I throw at it.
You only find that out by brewing with it yourself.
Why "nothing left to teach you" is a cop-out
I saw a line on Reddit about the V60 problem: only buy a new dripper when your current one has nothing left to teach you.
I don't think that's true. A brewer always has something left to teach you. The way I see it, that rule is boredom hiding in you being a teacher. I buy gear because I want to buy it. If you want it, buy it. We're grown.
And for a lot of us, between family, work and everything else, this is one of the few things we get to enjoy every day. Worst case, you waste $70, and most of mine were $30 or $40. You spend more than that on coffee anyway.
So what is gear for?
The point of gear is to taste coffee in an interesting new way. Change the paper on the same V60 and you're tasting a different coffee. That's the whole idea: get everything you can out of a 12-ounce bag by trying it through different variables.
There's a law of diminishing returns, and there are phases. Some days you'll feel like you don't need anything. Then you'll feel like you need everything. Then you'll notice a lot of these do more or less the same thing, which still leaves you free to pick whichever one you want that morning. I still come back to the V60 all the time, because it works.
You can do a lot with one brewer. You probably don't even need anything. But if you're curious, buy the thing, use it, and see how it's different. If it ends up sitting in the cupboard, sell it, or give it to someone who's getting into coffee and show them how to use it. Then buy the next one if you want to.
