About
I’m Marcel. I’m not a barista.
As a kid I loved the smell of coffee and hated the taste — really bitter.
Then a few years ago we stayed at a hotel in Italy where breakfast came with any coffee you wanted, made fresh, one at a time, on a proper espresso machine. That changed things.
We started with a moka pot at home, making cappuccinos. I liked it, but I could never get the crema right. Then I got a proper espresso machine for Christmas — one of the best presents I’ve had — and I’ve used it constantly since. I started watching YouTube tutorials to learn latte art. By now my heart is consistent. The rest I’m still working on.
The other half of this is computers. I programmed a bit when I was younger, and when AI came along that small, rusty knowledge suddenly became useful — enough to build real websites and apps myself. So I built Brew, because I wanted something that could tell me what was actually wrong with a pour instead of me guessing.
How this site is made
I should be straight about how this is made. There are more than forty recipes here and I haven’t personally made all of them — I’m one person with one machine. And I use AI to help me write, which I direct and edit rather than publish raw.
What I do stand behind is the checking. The risk with AI writing is confident-sounding nonsense, so anything on this site explaining why something happens gets verified against published dairy and coffee science before it goes up, and the sources are listed. I’ve thrown out claims I’d already written that didn’t survive that check. The latte art advice is the part I can speak to first-hand — that comes from my own pours. If you find something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.
The recipe pages came later, and from a different trip. We went back to Italy in a heatwave, drank a lot of iced coffee, and my son got completely hooked on strawberry matcha lattes.
You can see what this advice is built on, browse the latte art guides and recipes, or try the pour feedback that started all of this.