About Ground Truth

What this site is

Ground Truth is a UK-focused coffee gear site. We compare espresso machines, grinders, frothers and beans that are actually sold here, with UK prices, UK plugs, UK warranties and UK water in mind.

We're not a magazine and we're not a shop. We pick a narrow shortlist for each budget, explain the trade-offs honestly, and tell you what to skip. Then we link to the retailer. That's the whole business.

How we decide what to recommend

We're straight with you about our method, because most coffee sites aren't:

• We research rather than pretend. Our recommendations are built from published specifications, manufacturer documentation, third-party test data, and the accumulated experience of a lot of UK owners in forums and review sections. Where we've personally lived with a product, we say so. Where we haven't, we don't invent an anecdote.
• We weight UK use cases. Counter width in a British kitchen, 240V, 13A sockets, hard water, and retailers that honour a warranty here. US-centric reviews miss all of this.
• We name what's wrong with our own picks. Every product card on this site has a "watch out for" section. If it's empty, we haven't looked hard enough.
• We re-check prices. Prices change constantly, particularly around Black Friday and January sales. Pages carry an "updated" date and we revise the notes when prices shift meaningfully.

What we don't do

• No paid placements. No brand can pay to appear, move up, or be described favourably.
• No fake testing. We don't claim to have run a lab test we didn't run, and we don't use stock photography of someone else's lab.
• No scraped reviews. We don't paste other people's reviews onto this site.
• No recommendation we wouldn't make offline. If a friend asked what to buy with £400, our answer would be what's on these pages.

How we make money

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through one, the retailer pays us a small commission. This costs you nothing — you pay the same price.

Affiliate income is the only way this site earns at the moment, alongside clearly-marked ad slots that will appear once there's enough traffic for them.

Two things worth stating plainly:

1. Commission never changes a recommendation. Some of our top picks earn us less than products we tell you to skip. The shortlist is chosen first; links are added afterwards.
2. You can always buy elsewhere. Every product here can be bought from John Lewis, Currys, a specialist coffee dealer or the manufacturer direct. We'd rather you bought the right thing from someone else than the wrong thing from us.

See our full affiliate disclosure.

Corrections

If something here is out of date, wrong, or unfair to a product, tell us at admin@affiliate-marketing.x10.mx and we'll fix it, with a note on the page if it's a substantive change. We'd rather be corrected than confidently wrong.

Who writes this

Ground Truth is written and maintained by one person in the UK, with an unholy number of hours logged reading grinder adjustment mechanisms. If you want to know what we drink: a 1:2 double from a medium-roast Brazilian blend, in a flat white, before 7am.

Editorial standards, in one line: recommend only what we'd buy, disclose every commercial relationship, correct every mistake in public, and never invent a test.