Abraham Lincoln once quipped, ‘If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.’ If you share a passion for a good cuppa with our 16th president, then Honolulu Weekly has some resources you might wish to check out.

Every passion seems to start with an epiphany and mine came when I went out to interview Dave Hoselton of Surftown Coffee Roasters/Northshore Chocolates in Hale’iwa. While doing a photo shoot and interview, Hoselton handed me a cup of his iced mocha latte, and after the first sip I was completely hooked. I left thinking I had to learn to make this bit of wonderfulness at home. Since then, Hoselton has been my guru in all things caffeinated.

The first thing I learned was the importance of freshly roasted beans and how within just a couple of weeks of the roasting, the quality and flavor of the coffee diminishes noticeably. There are several home roasters available, the one we got is called IRoast and sells for between $150-$180. You must use the roaster outside. It takes only about 7 to 10 minutes to do a batch, but it will smoke up an enclosed area. There are other brands out there, and I’ve even heard of people using the oven or a hot-air popcorn popper. Buy the beans green. They have about a two-year shelf life, depending on how they’re stored.

The next bit depends on which path you take when you leave the temple. If you just want an excellent cup of coffee, fresh beans will make a huge difference, but if you have your sights on the elusive mocha latte, read on.

The mastering of espresso must be your next step. An inexpensive way to do espresso at home, is with the mocha pot, but since the pressure of the water in the lower chamber never comes anywhere near that of an espresso machine, the results are merely acceptable.

There are a great many espresso machines available, and perhaps the best resources for information on them would be sites like [www.home-barista.com] or [www.coffeegeek.com]. Here you can find reviews and recommendations on various machines from the people that own them.

Before you dash off to purchase that new espresso machine, there is another factor to consider, and that’s the grinding of the bean. In order to pull a perfect shot, the water must go through the ground coffee uniformly, and for that you need a precise grinder or your results will be unpredictable and inconsistent. Coffee grinders are also discussed and reviewed on the websites mentioned.

Lastly we come to the foamy, frothy, hot milk that finishes off your latte. Most espresso machines have a milk wand that will direct hot steam into your cold milk and cause it to froth. This milk frothing comes with a satisfying range of sounds–from the first high-pitched screech of the steam entering the milk to the eventual deep basso profundo of the hot, foamy result. For those of you that wish to achieve hot, foam milk the easy way or just want to make enough to top more than one cup of espresso, there’s an inexpensive machine, about the size of a blender, called the Froth Au Lait, that does the job quite well but alas, without the lovely sound effects.

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