Learned discussions of coffee technology (i.e. my coffee maker broke)

My coffee technology has gone the way of all flesh. The only functioning coffee maker I now own is an aluminum drip pot, courtesy of my grandmother, who died in 1984. Yes, it works like a champ, BUT it's lousy at hot coffee, and there is a bit of coffee sludge at the bottom.

My ancient Braun, a beast of a drip coffee maker, gave up the ghost with its power switch. While never my favorite coffeemaker, it was great for brewing 6-8 cups for the thermos and for when I had company. I bought it second hand in 1995. My cappuccino machine gave up after 3 years,which isn't bad for a sub-$100 machine. I used that thing nearly every day.

So, the question is what to buy. Here are considerations.

1. I love stronger, hot coffee. I really love espresso/cappuccino. I would gladly get a new machine (give me suggestions).
2. I find that making more than one cup at a time is convenient, but I dislike the coffee getting cold as it sits, and I don't like my coffee to be cooked if it's sitting on a burner.
3. My husband is completely useless at making any kind of coffee unless it is a Keurig. I dislike Keurig machines. He's going to have to man up and learn to grind coffee like the rest of us.

What are your favorite coffee technologies? What do you like about them?

My advice is to get a simple burr grinder, an Aeropress, and a decent hot water kettle. If you like your milk frothy you can get a frothing wand.

Aeropress will give you strong coffee - you can add more hot water or hot milk to the brew afterwards to adjust it to the strength you desire.

I'm really not a fan of cheap "espresso" machines. An aeropress is going to give you better coffee, and the stuff coming out of those cheap machines isn't real espresso anyways.

Things I have used over the years:

1. Capresso Coffee Team Therm. This is an integrated all-in-one grinder and drip brewer with a thermal carafe. If you want an all-in-one that you can schedule for when you wake up and what-not, here you go. Otherwise, I don't recommend it compared to either of the next two options.

2. Burr grinder + French press. This gaves you really wonderfully intense and flavorful coffee, and if you like French press style coffee, it's impossible to beat this. But it is definitely coffee that you pay attention to, not one you swig down by the gallon. I actually find it too intense to drink if I'm not having it with food.

3. Burr grinder + Aeropress. I find the Aeropress coffee to be much less memorable and distinctive than French press coffee, but it's totally chuggable and still tasty; it's filter coffee that's better than you're going to get from most drip machines.

For either of the second two, get a hot water kettle like Reldan linked to, and a thermal carafe (or thermal mug, if you want to make smaller quantities, as with the Aeropress). The nice thing about them is that the Aeropress and French press pots are both cheap, so you can actually buy both and see which you like (or make them both as the mood strikes you).

The one thing I'm interested in, but haven't tried, is the drip coffee machine that everyone agrees is by far the best -- the Technivorm Moccamaster. I want to try it, but on the other hand, it's kind of expensive, and I don't really need a giant machine on my counter when the low-tech methods work well.

These days I use a burr grinder + moka pot for my morning coffee. Combined with a nice dark roast it provides a really intensely flavored coffee. Bonus pretentious points if you've got a little 2oz cup to drink it out of!

I ended up getting a Rancilio Silvia for my fancy-schmancy coffee needs. For when I want something in-between drip and press I use a Clever - it's got the easy cleanup and smoothness of filtered drip coffee but builds up the flavor of being full immersion like a press-pot.

I'm a fan of the french press. Dirt cheap, and it makes coffee that'll put hair on your chest. I've also got a moka pot and a run-of-the-mill espresso maker, but the french press hits the sweet spot of flavor intensity, ease of use, ease of maintenance, and speedy preparation for me. True, there's occasionally some sediment in the bottom of the cup, but I don't bother it, and it don't bother me.

...I just use a Keurig. But that's because I prioritize the ability of my non-coffee-drinking spouse to bring me delicious coffee in the morning above all else. I would swap to god damn instant if that's what was required to get coffee delivered to me while I blear awake.

That said, all my coffee snob friends use the french press, so I will recommend that for your needs based entirely on secondhand information!

How spendy? We have french press, but 99% of the time use a krupps 8080 beans-to-cup expresso machine. But they are spendy. Luckily it tells us we have made over 4000 cups with it so far, so amortising it makes it seem less spendy - was about 800 USD

Cheap burr grinder, pour over kettle and a Chemex. I think the Chemex tends to make slightly weaker coffee than other things so it might not be what you're after, but I've yet to find anything better for the price and time.

I think I'm going to give the Aeropress a try. I own a Meyer tea kettle. It's a basic electric kettle, and it's served me well for nearly 20 years. I'm familiar with french press coffee. I like it a lot. The cleanup is a bit messy, and the Aeropress makes hockey pucks, from what I've read, and it looks as if they're cheap enough that I could go both french press and Aeropress if I wanted.

For those of you using the Aeropress, did you spring for the metal filter, or do you buy the paper ones? The paper ones are definitely cheap, but I like the idea of the metal one.

The correct answer is a Nespresso machine!

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/julian-baggini-coffee-artisans/

http://www.nespresso.com/us/en/

Makes a really nice coffee.

We have a Lattisma plus at home, makes a nice cup and has semi integrated milk frother.

It a fairly European style espresso though, so don't got there if you don't like that style of coffee. One relatively common complaint from uncivilised heathens is that it doesn't make the coffee "hot" enough (ie. fails to burn the fuck out of it)

Thankfully Australia had heaps of Italian migrants post WWII so we get decent espresso in cafes. (Drip coffee is an abomination that must not be tolerated!)

How we make coffee:

1. Baratza Virtuoso grinder. They also sell a cheaper model, the Encore, that is supposed to be good. The Virtuoso is more sturdily built (heavy cast metal instead of plastic) and has better burrs, though. For drip coffee you can get away with a blade grinder, as consistent ground size is less critical. A burr grinder will make a cup that is less bitter, though. Consistent grind size means fewer "fines"--the powdery dust that you invariably get when you use a blade grinder. Fines tend to over-extract when brewing, which produces bitter flavors.

2. Hario pouring kettle. You can use a regular tea kettle, too, but the spout on the Hario makes steady, controlled pouring much, much easier.

3. Bonmac ceramic dripper. Put it directly over cup, insert filter, fill with 27 grams of coffee. I weigh out the beans and dump them in the grinder. We also have a second dripper, so that we can make coffee for both Karen and myself at the same time.

4. You'll need filters, of course. I like the regular #4 size cones--they stick up a bit over the rim of the dripper, which makes it easier to pull them out when you are done. Make sure to pour some of your boiling water through them before you brew, to wash out any paper taste (I find that the Melitta bamboo filters have the least paper taste, but it's still good to rinse them; avoid unbleached paper filters). I do that before grinding my beans, and let the hot water sit in the cup until I am ready to pour. That warms up the cup and makes sure you get a hot cup of coffee at the end.

I find that this "pour-over" method makes much, much better coffee than I have ever had out of a machine. A large part of it is water temperature--if you didn't spend ~$300 on a Technivorm, then it's almost certain that it doesn't get the water hot enough to extract coffee well. When boiling your own water in a kettle, it is trivially easy to make sure that it is at the proper temperature--198-204 degrees F. This method also has the advantage of being inexpensive--you can get a ceramic dripper for less than $20. It only makes a cup at a time (or two, if you have two drippers; that's my limit, though, as the Hario kettle only holds enough water for two 10-ounce cups). That said, using this method means that every cup you drink is freshly brewed.

There are other, similar methods that you can use that let you control water temp via boiling your water in a kettle. The Aeropress was mentioned upthread, and the press pot ("French Press") is similarly advantageous. A French press would allow you to make more than a single cup of coffee, if that's what you want. Just get a larger press, and a metal thermos. Pour some of your boiling water into the thermos when you start brewing, to warm it up. When you are done brewing, pour yourself a cup, and then pour the rest into the thermos (remove the water first, obviously). Simple. Press pot coffee, which is steeped, tastes different than drip coffee. It is more intense and has more body, and is a bit more bitter. You might want to try some first (at a coffee shop, perhaps), if you have never had it before. Some people like it, some don't.

I'd recommend any of those methods over using a drip machine, and even the French press is cheaper (you can get a really nice press for the same price as a mediocre machine) and will make better coffee.

Currently I am using a DeLonghi EC 330 S, and a simple Zassenhaus manual grinder. The DeLonghi can take E.Z.E pad, which I sometimes use when I can't be bothered to grind for 30 sec. Advantage of E.Z.E. pads is that they are generally cheaper than other pads. more friendly to the environment since they are made of paper and the foil wrapping is easier to recycle, and finally they can be purchased from many really nice coffee producers.

Edit: You will need a cheap kitchen scale and a tamper if you do not go for the pads. The machine is pretty cheap and brews nice coffee, if you have a good roast. Also, two cups in one go possible. Finally you can make really nice milk foam if you are into that. No clue if it is available outside Europe, but I think so.

I sprang for the Aeropress metal filter some time ago, and don't regret it. More of the oils get into the coffee as opposed to paper, so there is a not huge but subtle difference in taste. One of the little benefits of it is I no longer have to fumble with separating little paper discs from each other at home. Which is a tiny thing but still good when you're on fumbling wakeup autopilot mode in the first moments of morning.

For awhile, I used a mypressi twist espresso gadget. It made decent espresso shots, but was a bit too fiddly for my coffee routine. Also one clumsy morning I dropped the thing, and apparently knocked some critical bit of valving offkilter, and it mostly stopped working, so I went back to the Aeropress. (The extra N2O cartridges now fuel a whipped cream maker, so have not gone to waste.) But if you're less clumsy than me, it does indeed make a decent espresso. Can't compare it to dedicated machines, though.

Reldan and Ben Sones are right. Everyone else is wrong. If you want drip coffee instead of espresso, doing pourover is (a) cheaper (b) simpler and (c) will give you better tasting coffee than just about any other method.

Here's my personal Amazon shopping list for everything except the grinder. I just got the cheapish KitchenAid burr grinder at Costco, and i'm happy with it.

Porcelain filter holder: http://www.amazon.com/HIC-Porcelain-Coffee-Filter-Cone/dp/B001W6Q53C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1359476956&sr=8-2&keywords=porcelain filter holder
Kettle for heating the water: There are tons of these, pick whatever you like. Here's a fancy expensive one just because: http://www.amazon.com/Breville-SK500XL-Cordless-1-7-Liter-Stainless-Steel/dp/B000A790X6/ref=sr_1_11?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1359476993&sr=1-11&keywords=stainless steel kettle
Thing to pour the water over the coffee in to: http://www.amazon.com/Zojirushi-Premium-Thermal-1-Liter-Stainless/dp/B00004S56U/ref=sr_1_14?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1359477043&sr=1-14&keywords=zojirushi thermos (I actually have the 'non-premium' version and like it a little better, but this one is on Prime)

You grind your beans, heat the water, put the porcelain filter holder on top of the carafe, put a paper filter in the filter holder, put the ground coffee in the filter, pour the boiling water over straight into the carafe. Simplicity itself.

Also, with the Aeropress: I was super, super underwhelmed with it until people told me about the inverted method (where you flip it upside down and let it steep), which more or less turns it into a filtered French press.

I am in both the Reldan/Ben Sones/peterb camp and the Aeropress camp. I do most of my coffee drinking in my office and thus I have a pourover setup: hand mill, electric kettle, pourover, and mug. It takes about as long to mill the beans as it does for the water to boil. Cleanup could not be easier, as I just toss the filter and rinse out mug and pourover. I use an Aeropress at home because I usually make coffee for two at home and Aeropress is faster than pourover for multiple cups. I like the pourover better.

Also: coffee filters do not trap coffee oils, or any other kind of oils. You can actually use a coffee filter to strain oils (we use them to strain cooking oil after use). The oil goes right trough. The only things they stop from getting into your coffee are the fines, which does change the flavor, but only by making the coffee less bitter (as mentioned above, fines floating in your cup = overextraction). It also changes the mouthfeel by removing the thin sludge of fines that is typically suspended in French press coffee, and (albeit less so) in drip coffee made with metal filters. Some people prefer the French press flavor and body, but personally, I think a cleaner, filtered cup showcases the nuances of the beans better.

It also varies widely with the quality of your coffee. The gap between french press and pourover is very small if you're using lousy or stale beans -- in fact, the astringency of the french press 'oversoaking' can kinda hide the flaws, comparatively.

If you have really good coffee beans, the gap is huge. Pourover will make you a cup that is awesome, and french press will make you a cup that is ruined. IMHO.

I think there are some basic truths for brewing good coffee. The specific method I'd recommend is going to vary with how much active time you want to put into it (for both brewing and cleanup) and how important brewing multiple cups at once is. If you are willing to put a couple minutes of effort into making good coffee and are fine with doing 1-2 cups at a time ad not 6-10 then there is no need for an automatic machine. Heat your water in an electric kettle. Grind beans fresh in a burr grinder (electric or hand, based on if you value your time or your money more).

Easy Process:

-French Press
-Aeropress
-Clever Drip

Easy Cleanup:

-Clever Drip
-Aeropress
-Pourover

Multiple cups at once:

-French Press
-Aeropress

Stronger brew:

-Clever Drip
-French Press
-Aeropress

Balanced brew:

-Clever Drip
-Pourover

Why do you think cleanup of a French press is hard? Rinse it out down the garbage disposal, make sure you get the little screeny thing good, put it through the dishwasher if you feel like it. The only reason the Aeropress is any easier is because it uses paper filters instead of a mesh one, as far as I'm concerned.

It's relative. Toss a filter and a simple rinse is faster and easier than cleaning a mesh screen or running a dishwasher. I'm not saying it's hard, but it's more time-consuming.

Fair enough. I do think that French press is easier cleanup than drip machine, though, especially if you use a "goldtone" filter for your machine.

The French press is slightly more time-consuming to clean than a pour-over dripper, but I'd put both in the "easy to clean" category. The difference is pretty small. I agree with Reldan's list except to add that it's just as easy to brew two cups at a time doing pour-over as it is to do one (you just need to have two dripper cones), so it deserves a nominal place in the "multiple cups" category. It's not the sort of method that you'd want for brewing extra coffee to have later, but if you need to make coffee for two people, it works fine.

Before getting one at work, I would have sworn that Nespresso was never the answer.

But it does make a pretty decent and consistent espresso - since I onlt drink pure espresso after big meals, I prefer the Lungo type capsules for a more standard cuppa. It's not as good as my dedicated espresso machine*, but for ease of use it's hard to beat. Of course the official capsules aree expensive and the compatible ones made by others are like using unorginal inks for photo printing - it looks alright at first, but the taste is off.



*the Ascaso Dream, still broken...

I pulled the trigger on an Aeropress. My spouse is underwhelmed by the thought, but what does he know about making coffee? The drip pot was too complex for him.

I got the Aeropress, the metal filter, and a burr grinder. I'd been using a blade. I experimented this morning with coffee.

1. The burr grinder results in a much better, smoother taste. We are currently using Starbucks, so it's not my favorite roasts. Still, the difference in taste between burr and blade is astounding.
2. The Aeropress makes a decent espresso, but I use it on top of a large coffee mug. I am not a coffee sipper. I swig mine, hence the need for a large cup. I need to play with coffee quantities. The Aeropress seems to use a lot of coffee for the amount of liquid, and I speak as someone who's used cappuccino machines.
3. I will try the inverted method to see how that works out.
4. Yes, the Aeropress is cheap enough for me to get a french press, too. I just haven't bothered. Yet.

I still need to play more with the results. I can taste the difference, but adding water to the mug makes the coffee too weak. However, I don't want to drink what amounts to 4 cups of espresso in the morning each day, so I'm going to have to play with the whole water/coffee ratio sort of thing. I like intense coffee.

Glad to hear it's working for you!

One thing I just want to say because it kinda bugs me a bit, but espresso is not specifically just a term for a very concentrated coffee brew. You can make more intense coffee in a variety of fashions by increasing the ratio of grinds to water, but that's what it is - strong brewed coffee. Espresso is something different and only gets created when near-boiling water under high pressure is forced through extremely fine ground coffee - this dissolves the grinds to a greater extent than you can get through drip or immersion brewing and emulsifies the oils (creating crema). Espresso is coffee, but not all coffee is espresso.

Every time I hear someone refer any strong coffee as "espresso" it's like when old people call any video game a "Nintendo."

So I've taken to re-evaluating how I deal with my Moka pot. As per the Stumptown instructions, I now pre-heat the water to boiling before adding it to the pot, and then I pour of the coffee as soon as the coffee comign from the spout gets lighter. The result is a much more enjoyable coffee, though I get dramatically less. Given the price of grinds, I'm not sure I can persist with this as my regular coffee method; while it's nice for a lazy Saturday, during the week I need more than 3oz in my travel cup, for pursely psychological reasons.

Which means I might grab a pourover setup tomorrow and see how that works. God, my coffee nerddom is growing!

I'm just going to go through the very detailed instructions on how I use my nespresso machine

• Turn on
• Put a pod in, click on milk dispenser
• Check water, Put some milk in (if required)
• Press button
• delicious coffee comes out
• Press the steam clean button for milk dispenser, put milk dispsner back in fridge
• Drink coffee

It's fine for what it is, but it comes nowhere near a freshly ground freshly pulled espresso shot.

... and it's more expensive even than using the beans that's been shat out by some gerbil. I'll give you the speed and ease of use, though.

It's not quite that expensive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak :-)

And did you see my original link about Nespresso machines being in used in over 100 michelin starred french restaurants?

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/julian-baggini-coffee-artisans/

That part might have been hyperbole. The cheapest I can get a capsule is $0,50, so it's not cheap, though. Good thing that Nespresso lost their EU case against manufacturers other than them making capsules, bad news that none of the unoriginal capsules I've tried are as good (I think they lack the tools to pack their coffee as effectively).

Nope, missed it.

As I said above, it's good. And it beats a bad barista with a good machine, because beans, freshness, grind and technique is more important than the machine. A real espresso machine will offer you more variety and cheaper coffee and the opportunity to use the freshes beans (Nespresso capsules says nothing about date of harvest, roasting and grinding), but as the article notes also more opportunities to screw up. It's true and an important point that Nespresso offer uniform consistency.

The taste test in the article doesn't tell me much. Nespresso wins by a small margin in a very limited field and with only four judges. I am dissapoint that so many good restaurants (if true) uses Nespresso, but not surprised - in the Michelin restaurants I've been to, coffee has always been an afterthought. Some would tell you what coffee they were using in their French Press, but offer almost no choice (as opposed to a 50.000+ winelist), but most would just serve "an espresso" with some nicely homemade chocolates.
And 100 Michelin restaurants is still "just" 1 out of 6 in France (a little over 650 restaurants with one star or more - even more if he's also counting Bib Gourmands)... in Italy, inventor of good coffee, it's 1 in 15.

But it is a clever piece of technology and I drink it every day. It's just not as good as the single cup of freshly ground coffee made on a gasheated La Marzocco by a really good barista I also drink every day.

That just tells me that coffee is an afterthought for these restaurants and they've gone with the option where you pay a premium for a consistent product. Nespresso is strangely popular in a lot of parts of the world - to me it's like the McDonald's French Fries of coffee. You know they're frozen and reconstituted and being prepared by a minimum wage fry cook, but they're a known quantity that's been heavily designed to hit the right notes and satisfy. They don't hold a candle if you put them side-by-side with freshly prepared real fries, but they're consistently better than most of the competition, and so ubiquitous that everybody's had them and accepts them as counting as fries.

Yeah, "consistently okay" is also how I would rate the Keurig-type coffees as well. That's not meant as a diss; they are often a step up from drip coffee in a restaurant setting, especially if the restaurant is not that into coffee (which is, let's face it, most restaurants). Because at least with the Keurig-type machines, you get a fresh cup that hasn't been sitting on a hot plate, and the machine comes closer to the right water temperature (though it doesn't quite reach it) than most drip machines.

Yeah I agree, the Nespresso is mostly about consistently good/reliable coffee, not the world's best coffee. not sure I would dump it as bad as McDonalds fries though.

The Michelin restaurant no doubt are using it because coffee is not their focus - and they just want something that puts out reliably "good/acceptable" espresso every time, so the last thing people remember isn't the damn horrible/burnt espresso some waiter stuffed up.

I think I drank like 4 cups from the work nespresso machine today, so I do value the ability to kick out good coffee every time in about 30 seconds of work for me.

Agree.
I'm on my fifth today.

See, I don't think McDonald's Fries are that bad though. For something that keeps for months and can be prepared with almost no effort from the freezer to GBD in a couple minutes by somebody with no training, they're downright awesome.

I've started trying this Aeropress-upside-down thing, and a few days into it, it seems promising, but uneven--I've had a couple really good cups, but others that are worse than the regular aeromethod. I clearly have to experiment with different water amounts and soak time.

I made a mess first time, so am perfecting the normal approach.

I also learned that my husband has decided to get me a sub-$100 cappuccino maker for Valentine's Day. He gets high marks for thinking of an appropriate gift (I like cappuccino). The machine will break in a year, but I'll probably enjoy it for frothing milk.

Was just checking on a reservation at Noma, and fell over this blog update on their coffee - as in everything else they do, there's no compromise and they even had special glasses blown.
http://noma.dk/the-weather-report/new-coffee-is-brewing/

tl;dr they share Ben Sones love for pour over.