Good, Fresh Coffee
As obvious as it seems, start with good coffee! It's amazing how easy it is to make good coffee taste good, but if you start with old and badly roasted coffee there is only so much you can do to it!
I recommend drinking coffee from about 1 - 6 weeks after it's been roasted. But that being said, I have definitely had some of "the good stuff" my Mum was saving that I had roasted a year previously when I went round to visit. It wasn't as good as it had been, but I still drank it!
And buy coffee from a good speciality roaster. Either from their website or in a cafe. Generally speaking, I would avoid supermarkets but this is more from a shelf life point of view.
Freshly Ground Coffee
Coffee will start to stale quicker when it has been ground, so storing it as whole bean and grinding fresh gets you best results. However I would be wary of some of the cheaper grinds out there doing a bad job of grinding!
If you cant afford a good grinder yet, I would buy smaller amounts of coffee and get it ground weekly in a cafe. A 250g bag of coffee makes about 12 cups of coffee (depending on your brew method) And most specialty cafes will use a £2000 grinder to grind your coffee!
I think I would rather drink a whole bag of ground coffee every week from a cafe then use a cheaper £40 grinder that doesnt do the coffee justice. But maybe thats just me.
Filtered Water
Using good quality filter water is so important to helping coffee extraction!
This can either be bottled water or I recommend the BWT premium bestmax jug, or the Peak Water.
Jonathan Gagne in his book Physic of Filter Coffee explains in more detail how important the right water is for dissolving coffee. Along with Water for Coffee by Christopher H. Hendon and Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood.
And for all these recipes you can use water straight from the boil. All of the coffee we roast is light roast and you'll need nice hot water to brew them properly. If you're buying darker roasts you can get away with less hot water around 92 degrees.
0.1g Scales
It is possible to make coffee without scales, but I highly recommend a good pair of digital 0.1g scales.
It's sort of like the difference between baking in cup measurements or by weight. Cups aren't as accurate as grams, and you'll be able to bake a cake using cups.
However, if you want to make the same cake again and again, it is easier and more accurate using weights.
If you brew a coffee without scales that you like, it's really hard to repeat it again and again. Alternatively, if you brew a coffee you don't like and you didn't weigh everything, its hard to know how to make it better next time!
Gooseneck Kettle
Using a goose neck pouring kettle isn't essential for all brew methods. But if you are making a V60 or Pulsar then you should definitely consider investing in one. Due to the spout coming from the bottom of the kettle, They make pouring a lot easier and more accurate along with being able to pour slower and control the flow rate of your water.