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Would it change the tone if I said I was reading this while drinking a cup of Tea?
Would it change the tone if I said I was reading this while drinking a cup of Tea?
Now we're talking. Are you a milk in first or last kinda tea drinker? This is important.
I probably know the answer to this, but are all the Nespresso machines a much of a much-ness? Or do some give much better coffee?
Burn.
The.
Heretic.
all the pod machines i've had coffee from are shit compared to fresh ground beans. (or chopped up beans in my case as i'm lazy). any port in a storm and all that but if you have choice non-pod is better.
Certainly better than any high street coffee place and to my tastes, better than any speciality coffee shop I’ve been to
This (or words to the effect) has been said more than once on this thread. I get it that Costa et. al. use shit coffee and burn it to make your pint of hot milk taste of something other than milk, but what are all these speciality coffee shops doing wrong with thousands of pounds of equipment that can be beaten so easily at home with a £200 machine?
As with all these things it's a matter of taste. Milk isn't an issue with espresso but there are lots of compromises a commercial enterprise has to make to be profitable that an individual doesn't and frankly, the cost of the machine makes far less of a difference than the user and the beans.
Plus the fact that they have to cater to wider tastes then it's not unexpected that I've made coffees more to my liking than shops have.
Expensive machines (assuming good training) buys you speed and consistency. It doesn't mean you can't make great coffee on cheaper equipment if you put time into getting it right whether that be beans, grind, tamping or extraction time.
That's not to say it's easy (and I didn't). Though for many it might well be.
That's not really true - most proper speciality shops make very few compromises.
Let's look at Colonna and Smalls in Bath, for instance. The water is optimised for coffee, which very few home users do (we're talking Mg, Ca and Bicarbonate levels here, which can be adjusted by using the correct filtration systems and levels of filtering.) This alone makes a big difference - the owners and Chris Hendon from MIT have had an academic paper published in a respected peer review journal on this topic:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf501687c
Unless you're very fortunate, water from the tap is not going to make great coffee. High Bicarbonate levels, that are common in many areas, inhibit extraction and result in sour tasting coffees.
All coffees are weighed in and out, and are dialled in by a team with great experience. The quality of the beans used will be much better than most home users have.
Whatever you say, equipment does make a difference - grinding on an EK43 produces a better coffee than almost any other grinder. Few home users have access to this sort of equipment.
What you really mean is you prefer your own coffee. I can't argue with that, as it's your own subjective experience, but if you think that, objectively, the coffee you make at home on normal home coffee equipment is demonstrably better than that which you get in a proper speciality coffee shop, I would suggest that you are wrong. If you still won't accept this, then why don't you enter the UK Barista Championship - if you can make world class coffee at home then I'm sure you'll have no problem wowing the judges.
If, however, you've not been to a proper speciality coffee shop and tasted decent coffee, you're welcome to drop by my business and have some coffee on the house. We're near to Wind Hill Bikepark if you're ever heading down there to ride.
JP
there are lots of compromises a commercial enterprise has to make to be profitable
I think it's true that plenty of places make those compromises, though I don't think they're always necessary economically, and I've been to plenty of them - but they're more of the we're-a-proper-hipster-"speciality"-coffee-shop-because-we-have-an-aeropress-and-some-industrial-looking-furniture type. There are also plenty (though maybe less) of proper coffee shops who put a lot of effort into the details that make great coffee.
Plus the fact that they have to cater to wider tastes then it’s not unexpected that I’ve made coffees more to my liking than shops have.
It's also true that personal tastes vary. I find a lot of "proper" coffee shops produce the most strongly flavoured coffee possible - using lightly roasted beans - which is very acidic, whereas I prefer something more darkly roasted with more of sweet/malty/chocolatey flavours, which a lot of coffee snobs would call "burnt." (Over-roasted or over-extracted coffee is bad, but there's a sweet spot.)
The reason most speciality shops don't serve dark roast coffee is that is disguises the flavour of the beans with a generic roastiness. We're all about showing the flavours of the different beans and how they're grown and processed - you only get this with a fairly light roast.
If there's too much acidity, then it's probable that the coffee has been under -extracted; not all speciality coffee shops get this right.
I'd suggest that next time you visit a speciality shop, look for a coffee from Brazil - these tend to have less natural acidity, with more of the flavours that you like being evident without the need for then to be over developed in the roast.
JP
For what it's worth I would ask the question at what point would you give up on espresso before moving to a different brew method. Obviously expensive equipment can make great espresso and cheaper equipment less good. Below a (subjective) point that espresso is pretty rubbish, yet it's also true that a very good quality coffee made with a different brew method can be had for under £100.
I have decent espresso machine and grinder at home. At work I had a nespresso machine. I decided after a while that I just couldn't get anything I really enjoyed out of the nespresso machine, wasn't going to fund a gaggia/similar and grinder, but I could take to a hand ground filter coffee made with nice quality fresh beans instead - fiver or so for the v60, hand grinders out there variously £20-£100. I spent towards the top end of that on the grinder but I almost certainly didn't need to. It's not an espresso, or even close, but it is definitely a nice coffee.
If cost is a major issue then that's running costs too, and nespresso is as bad as the really expensive stuff on that front, and environmentally terrible. Even if the pods are biodegradable or recyclable, they still have to be made, shipped (at least twice?) and recycled, with all the various impacts of those operations.
Your mileage may vary of course. And some would call me a coffee snob!
Unless you’re living in Scotland, water from the tap is not going to make great coffee.
FTFY
Now we’re talking. Are you a milk in first or last kinda tea drinker? This is important
Definately milk last, i heard it can clog the holes in a tea bag.
My issue with the little Bialetti isn't that it won't stand on the hob, it's that the smallest ring is basically the same diameter as the base. I've got one the same size as the one on the brake disc and that works fine but this one is just too small, the flame isn't heating the base so it takes ages to heat up and doesn't push all the water up. I've wondered about trying sitting it inside a small frying pan but I think really it needs an electric hob
Moka pot wise - my coffee never looks great and is not overly pleasant.
What grind size for the moka pot, espresso?
do i fill with boiling water to speed up/prevent the coffee tasting burnt?
smallest gas ring on highest setting?