Why coffee crazes are always a hot topic

About a year ago I wrote a piece for G2 on my struggle to brew a half-decent espresso at home. The paper, as is their way, posted a version on the Guardian website and were amazed by the resulting flurry of response.

We knew there were some pretty vocal communities of coffee nuts online, but this was, approaching the strange. I got letters and emails calling me a heretic for not trying hard enough, closely-reasoned and frankly unhinged screeds on the fineness of my grind or additives in my local water and a man who turned up at my house at 9pm with a crate of coffee who wouldn't rest until I understood the importance of filtration (we're friends now, check out his site).

Perhaps the strangest was the founder of an online community in the US who recorded a half-hour long podcast apologia for failing to evangelise sufficiently to convert me. The fact I'd never been to his site made this vaguely surreal - the fact that he sounded like Leonard Cohen, just off the pills and about to open a vein made it the most authentically tragic thing I've heard in years.

Suffice it to say, I took all the advice in the spirit it was given - except the suggestion that I should file the lugs off my Portafilter to make it easier to 'shove up my ass' - and started turning out much better coffee.

But last week, my faithful Rancilio 'Miss Silvia' failed me and so, in a general spirit of making the experience billable, I tried some of the other methods of coffee making our respondents had suggested and wrote about them for G2. You can see how I got on here. There was, though, one suggestion considered too outré for regular readers which I feel I can share here amongst friendly foodies.

It was suggested by a coffee geek in Texas and I initially thought it was a cruel joke - perhaps it's best to give you this one verbatim: "Pour water into a metal jug or old bean can and heat to boiling on a fire or potbellied stove. Take off the boil and shovel in plenty of coarse ground coffee. Stir and allow to steep. Crack a whole egg into the jug, crumble the shell in too then stir rapidly. Filter into a mug - or another bean can - through your bandana".

Any chef would recognise the egg stunt as the traditional technique for clearing a stock and it's certainly useful for discouraging guests who 'drop in for a coffee' unannounced, but I must have grabbed a suboptimal bandana because the brew I ended up with had a crunch, a faint taste of custard and the texture of stringy frogspawn. Still it was markedly better than the stuff on the high street and after a mugful, I certainly felt a day of hard riding and buffalo castration would be a comparative delight.

Obviously, as committed foodies, you've all got huge, expensive, chromed altars to the Gods of espresso, plumbed and wired into the corners of your kitchens, but what are your other favoured methods of brewing the morning dose?