I began my coffee journey in around 1987, when (aged 10 ish) I started going coarse fishing locally, always with a flask of coffee.

Coffee then became something that reminded me of the tranquility of sitting for hours at the edge of a pool, usually not catching anything, but as happy as a pig in muck nonetheless.

So I've been a big fan of coffee since the mid to late 80s, but this started to develop further in the early 00s when I became a trainee sales rep, with meetings usually involving filter coffee machines, and jugs full of fairly bitter coffee, which were an amazing hangover cure the morning after “sales meetings”.

Also, driving around the North West, South Yorkshire & the Midlands for this role always involved at least one or two, or three (shhh, don't tell my father-in-law, he was my boss!) trips to coffee shops, to grab an Americano to take with me on the way to my next appointment.

So my love for freshly brewed coffee continued to develop into my early and mid 20s, but it wasn't until 2014/2015 that I really started getting interested in coffee as a hobby, rather than just as means to an end.

Early into my new hobby, I realised that there were many other people like me who were also on a voyage into coffee discovery, so I decided to start coffeeblog.co.uk to log & share my journey to becoming a home barista & speciality coffee enthusiast.

Did I expect this to become my full time gig a few years later, haha, no way! Am I happy that by some amazing miracle this actually happened, flipping heck, yes!

I just kept writing content, for a while I had maybe three readers, at least one of them was my mum ;-). Eventually I noticed other people were reading, that was a nice surprise, it spurred me on, and a few years later, all of a sudden I have hundreds of readers, then thousand, then tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and somehow my little hobby became my “job”.

I am an SCA certified (Speciality Coffee Association) barista, however, I've never actually worked as a Barista. All of the learning and training I've done has been to improve my home barista skills and coffee knowledge to enable me to become better at what I do, and just because I love learning more about coffee.

The majority of my coffee knowledge comes from the research I do when writing each blog post. Over the course of writing hundreds of blog posts I've continually developed and improved my knowledge of coffee, and coffee machines, which I very much enjoy sharing with my readers & viewers.

When it comes to product reviews, I think what sets my reviews apart from many other blogs reviewing similar machines, is simply how interested I am in genuinely discovering the facts about each machine, and sharing it with my readers.

This is one of the things I really wanted to achieve with coffeeblog, to create genuine, warts ‘n all reviews from proper investigative use and practise over a prolonged period by someone who knows what they're looking for.

When I look for a product review on something I'm thinking of buying, what I end up finding is several almost identical “reviews” written by people who, even if they have actually been in the same room as the product they're reviewing, they've usually not told me anything that I couldn't find from the sales blurb, there's often very little real value in the review, and I find I've wasted five or ten minutes of my life reading a “review” which is a thinly disguised advert, basically.

In my humble opinion, in order to write reviews that are worth people investing their time reading, the reviewer needs to be knowledgeable enough to know what they're looking for, and needs to spend enough time with the product, and enough time researching, to be able to share the right kind of info in order for that review to serve as a guide as to whether that product may or may not be the right choice for the reader.

This is what reviews should be about, in my opinion, helping the reader to understand whether or not that product is right for them. If I told you how long I usually spend researching and learning about each coffee machine, coffee grinder or coffee maker I'm reviewing even before I start using it, you probably wouldn't believe me!

When it comes to using the machines, I don't just have a quick play and then write down my thoughts, in many cases I use that machine as my main coffee machine, grinder, or whatever the case may be, for weeks or even longer, during the course of writing my review.

And even once I've finished and published the product review, it never ends there. I continue to learn about most of the products I write about, as time goes on, often thanks to emails from readers which prompts further investigation. An example of this is the update to the Sage Bambino Pus post and YouTube video explaining why many people are complaining of sour shots, and updates to the Rancilio Silvia review on the hex bolt situation after hearing from readers on the subject.

I know this probably sounds like I'm blowing my own trumpet now, but I just want to make it clear that I really care about my readers, I care about people ending up with the right coffee machine or grinder, or coffee maker, etc., for them, and put a lot of effort into properly researching and reviewing each product to ensure that I'm delivering real value to my readers in this regard.

When it comes to coffee beans, yes I do run The Coffeeworks, selling freshly roasted coffee beans, so you may think that this makes me biased towards my own coffee when I'm writing about coffee beans. This isn't the case, though.

Yes I'm passionate about my own coffee, I put a lot of time and care into choosing what I believe to be among the best-tasting coffees to share with my readers & customers – it's a hard job, but someone has to do it 😉 – but I'm passionate about freshly roasted coffee beans in general, and the UK coffee industry.

This is why I created the UK Coffee Roasters directory, and the UK Coffee Subscriptions directory, which are completely free for roasters to enter, and which serve as a platform with which coffee roasters and coffee subscription businesses can shout about their high quality, freshly roasted coffee beans.

If you'd like to get in touch, just email me: kev@coffeeblog.co.uk

Please note, there's no advertising sold on coffeeblog, I don't sell links or anything of that nature, and I very rarely run guest posts these days. The only guest posts I'd consider running would be content of an extremely high standard, something that I think offers fantastic value to readers on a subject that I've not already covered in-depth.

Life is like a box of chocolates, subscribe to my YouTube Channel, try my coffee at The Coffeeworks (use discount code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order), follow me on Twitter & Instagram, follow the coffeeblog FaceBook page, and that’s all I have to say about that.