Field notes for coffee people
The Barista Lab
Find a drink from what's in your kitchen — coffee, tea, matcha, cocktails, and mocktails — learn where your beans come from, dial in your method, and pick the right milk.
What can I make?
Select what you have on hand. We'll show exact matches first, then drinks you're one ingredient away from.
Where it's from
Origin shapes flavor before a single bean is ground. Tap a bean to see its cupping profile.
Add a single-origin bean or build a blend. Fill in what you know off the bag — leave the rest blank and let the barista infer the flavor profile and dial-in, or set it yourself with the sliders.
Ingredient library
Herbs, botanicals, fruits, spices, syrups, and spirits — with an Asian bent. Each entry tells you what it tastes like, what it pairs with, and how to actually get the flavor out.
The methods below are how you move flavor from an ingredient into a drink. Most entries above reference one or more of these.
Dial it in
Ratios and targets by method. Pick your grinder to translate vague grind sizes into your actual setting, and adjust the dose to scale a recipe up or down.
Is it rested yet?
Fresh-roasted coffee off-gasses CO₂ for days. Too soon and the gas disrupts extraction (gushing, sour, unstable crema); too late and it's stale and flat. Enter your roast date to see where you are.
Guided brew recipes
Pick a method and your dose — the timer builds a pour schedule and walks you through it live, signalling each bloom, pour, and the drawdown so you can keep your hands on the kettle.
Build a pour schedule. Give it a name, ratio, and dose, then add steps — each with a time (seconds from start), a label, and the cumulative water as a % of total. It's saved to "Your recipes" in the picker and scales to any dose.
Shot logger & dial-in coach
Log each espresso shot and I'll suggest the single most useful change for the next one — one adjustment at a time, the way you actually dial in a coffee.
Fix my brew
Something off? Pick your method, tell us what tastes wrong, and we'll walk you through one change at a time — the variable most likely to be the culprit first.
Choosing milk
Fat content changes sweetness, foam stability, and how much coffee flavor comes through.
Snap or upload a photo of a carton or its nutrition panel — the barista reads the fat and protein and tells you how it'll steam, foam, and pair.
Steaming & foaming milk
Great microfoam comes down to two things: adding the right amount of air at the right moment, and stopping at the right temperature. Here's the technique, the targets, and a troubleshooter for when it goes wrong.
Judge it by touch: hold the pitcher on the base — when it's too hot to keep your hand there comfortably (about 3–4 seconds in), you're at roughly 60–65°C. That's your cue to stop.
The hidden ingredient
Brewed coffee is about 98% water. The minerals in that water do the actual work of pulling flavor out of the grounds — get it wrong and even perfect beans and technique fall flat.
Balance coach
Every drink is an argument between its parts. Pick what you're making, enter your spec, and I'll tell you where the balance sits — and the one change most likely to fix it.
The most common mistake in home bartending. The rule is simpler than people think — it's about what's in the glass, not what feels fancy.
Water is an ingredient. It's in every spec you've ever read, just never written down.