The marginal utility of a better cup of coffee

David and I are specialty coffee enthusiasts.

Over the years we've put together a real setup.

An Aeropress, a Kaffelogic for home roasting, a Flair Pro 2 for manual espresso, a DF64 grinder, a V60, a Subminimal NanoFoamer, a Hario Switch, and most recently an OXO brewer for soup shots.

With this collection, we can make almost any coffee you'd want.

But there's also plenty of coffee gear we've never bought.

Recently, coffee YouTuber Lance Hedrick released a video listing ten popular coffee purchases he reckons won't meaningfully change your cup of coffee.

The list included:

High-end distributors
Every new dripper on the market
Refractometers
Overly expensive scales
Fancy tampers
Fancy baskets
Expensive latte art pitchers
Expensive filter papers
Designer decanters
Over-promised espresso machines

While these items can be fun or luxurious to own, they aren't necessary if your main goal is simply a better tasting cup of coffee.

What struck us when watching the video wasn't the list itself. It was how familiar the pattern underneath it is, across every area of life.

Every pursuit starts with inputs that actually move the needle. Add more, or better, and quality climbs. But past a certain point, the climb slows. Each further dollar or hour buys less than the one before it.

Economists call this marginal utility.

And yet plenty of people keep investing into diminishing returns anyway.

Why?

Often, the goal was never clear in the first place.

Is it simply a better tasting cup, or is part of what you're chasing the joy of owning something beautifully crafted?

When the goal blurs, the default is to keep adding.

If all you care about is something to pour your coffee from, a regular decanter works just fine. But if you get genuine pleasure from collecting decanters for their aesthetic value, the investment might be worth it for you.

Even with a clear goal, you might not have the right misconcepts to make an informed decision.

Perhaps all you want is a better tasting cup, but without fit-for-purpose misconcepts of what actually contributes to one, it's easy to be misled into thinking a high-end distributor or a pricier machine matters, when it doesn't, and your resources would do more elsewhere.

And even with a clear goal and the right misconcepts, a better cup of coffee is still one small claim on a much bigger, finite pool of resources.

Once you've hit the point of optimal utility for your coffee, putting more into it returns less than putting that same time or money elsewhere, however nice the gear looks on the counter.

A blind taste test won't find the difference. But your bank balance will.

On the surface, Lance looks like he's discounting those ten items. But he owns several of them himself, which is exactly how he tested them thoroughly enough to reach his conclusion in the first place.

His point was never that the items are worthless. It's that their marginal return, against the single goal of a better tasting cup of coffee, is close to flat. Your money is better spent elsewhere, such as on better beans or a better grinder.

Marginal utility curves run through every domain of your life, not just coffee, and they stay invisible until you go looking for them.

What makes all of this tricky is that the curve looks different for every person. It depends on what you value, what you're optimising for, and what resources you have to spend.

A thing's worth is a judgement call you make against whatever you're actually trying to achieve. And if you haven't paused to work that out for yourself, you'll default to what someone else tells you it's worth.

We could buy every item on Lance's list tomorrow. But none of it would move the one thing we're actually optimising for, a better tasting cup of coffee. And it would come at the opportunity cost of investing that money elsewhere.

Before your next upgrade, in coffee or anywhere else, ask yourself whether you're still climbing the steep part of the curve, or whether you've already hit the plateau.

P.S. Marginal utility is one way of looking at opportunity cost, one of the four high-level misconcepts behind every decision you make. We wrote the full piece on it here.