Look, I’m sorry you’re feeling insulted somehow. I probably should have said “the Nespresso is not a solution that would work for me” rather than “we weren’t in the same boat.” Because when you mentioned how much you liked it, I looked into Nespresso machines on Amazon, thinking it would be a possible answer. I was disappointed to learn it’s a stale-grounds capsule machine, like the Keurig.
I did mention the importance of fresh beans in an earlier post, but really, it was an assumption on my part. Coffee quality trumps brewing method, any decent quality fresh beans in a Mr. Coffee will produce better results than 6 month old supermarket coffee in a Clover, because a sophisticated machine can’t restore organic compounds that have oxidized. What I actually said was “I’d love something that was less work if it produced comparable results,” but built into that was the unspoken assumption that comparable results requires fresh coffee beans.
I made the transition from supermarket coffee (my wife’s Starbucks French Roast) to fresh beans before I switched to the aeropress. I don’t have a lot of experience comparing brewing methods of supermarket coffee. While they obviously can’t do anything about the lost flavors, I imagine different brewing methods can control the negative aspects like bitterness.
I do enjoy my coffee; there’s a coffee shop nearby which roasts their own beans in-house I quite enjoy. But, it is pricey at $2 + per cup. With the Keurig, I can have my quick morning coffee, or late afternoon bump, and not have brew an entire pot which ends up getting tossed out. I have to think in the long run, all that wasted cold coffee poured down the drain ends up costing nearly as much as the avg $0.52 cup I pay for Keurig pods.
I basically started drinking coffee with the arrival of a Keurig in my home, five years back. And it was fine, but I could tell by going to various local coffee shops, including one that actually uses Aeropresses to make cups with fresh roasted beans, that there was significantly tastier coffee to be had.
I can drink the good quality, non-Keurig stuff black, whereas I tend to need some milk and half a Splenda in my Keurig brewed coffees, no matter the brand/flavouring. Most recently, I’ve switched back to using the Aeropress I experimented with a bit, but this time I’ve got a small manual burr grinder and I get semi-monthly deliveries of Tonx (that’s my referral link, if you decide to try it out). I’ve received three shipments from them now. The first was spectacular, the second OK, and the third excellent - and I’ve gone back to Aeropressing. It’s not much of a hassle for my one cup a day, and I’ve got it down to about a 2 minute, 30 second process, not including grinding the 14g of beans each time – which makes me feel like I’m getting a small arm workout each morning ;)
So, yeah, whatever Keurig. There are tons of great alternatives, and I’m already moving past you, even before you pulled this kind of manoeuvre. What’s next? Gilette putting in authentication chips in their blades?
Well to be specific, I wasn’t insulted so much as confused by the apparent insistence that my general experience wasn’t comparable even though my basis for making the comparison was solely based on what you wrote.
That being said, as I stated (and have in other coffee threads here previously) I have used locally roasted fresh beans and aeropress combo for years. So whatever you may think of pod-type systems, the results have been terrific for me and that’s the only reason I brought it up.
I mean I’ve gone from using those fresh roast beans ground at brew time in my $300 grinder to the Nespresso system and I’m surprisingly happy. Full stop.
I promise not to force you to purchase one at gunpoint, I was only sharing my experience.
No wasted coffee poured down sink (or microwaved, which is nearly as bad)
Better quality than some coffee snobs might admit; there’s good K-cup coffee (Tully’s et.al.) and there’s fucking terrible K-cup coffee (Donut House)
A certain geek couture about it; you pop a little plastic thingy in there, press the lid down, and voila! a cup of piping hot, fresh coffee! SO JETSONS
You keep saying “stale grounds,” but the coffee pods / discs / whatever should all be airtight. Is the tiny bit of oxygen left in the pod enough to oxidize the grounds into shit?
I would add that it seems the Nespresso capsules are sealed aluminum, and typically if order before say 2 PM est, they show up the next afternoon. These are well packaged with minimal turn around time. Not that I give a damn, it’s what ends up in the cup that matters.
My experience has been that freshly roasted beans cannot be equaled by ANY beans that have been preserved by any method. Once you roast them the clock is ticking and there’s nothing you can do about it. The only thing is if you make no attempt, or a lame attempt, to seal roasted beans they will go stale faster. But you can’t stop the stale process. So roasted and immediately vacuum sealed airtight is the best preservation you can have but it still does not come near freshly roasted.
But it’s so barbaric, and frankly, I think bean-guns should be banned anyway. Too many inner city young folk can’t seem to tell a coffee bean from a black-eyed pea, these days. . .
While light and air are the enemies of coffee, there’s more to the process than that. Roasted beans change with time, period. The most obvious example is that they outgas CO2, which is why coffee bags usually have a one-way valve to allow gas to escape. Or, if the bag is cheap, a simple hole.
It’s like donuts. If you seal away a donut from all air, you don’t expect it to be fresh and moist if you open it up a month later.
“… into shit” is something of an exaggeration. Really stale coffee beans don’t taste bad, exactly, they’ve just lost most of the flavor.
If the only objection to the Keurig is that it’s not delivering the freshness one gets by raising their own beans tenderly in a free range organic bean ranch and then freshly slaughtering them right before making the coffee, I’m going to have say I’m just fine with it.
I love my Keurig and it’s comparable to the coffee I used to french press for myself every morning. Not quite the same flavor but much much more convenient.
If you like the Aeropress, but find it a bit flat due to the paper filter like I did (you lose some of the crema, I guess you’d call it), do yourself a favor and get a metal filter, they’re available on Amazon. To me, it made a world of difference, the difference between ‘eh, ok, it’s better than Keurig, but…’ to ‘wow, that’s a damn fine cup of joe!’.
Yeah, that was my experience as well. I currently use a S filter, and it’s a big improvement over the paper filters. I don’t know about crema, but you definitely lose flavor with the paper filters.
Paper filters trap essential oils and a lot of flavor from entering your coffee. I use metal filters in every coffee brewing device I have. It even improves drip coffee as well.
Becoming a coffee snob makes me finally appreciate whatever the hell it is wine snobs are talking about. Until I explored fresh coffee, I didn’t really understand that coffee naturally has flavors beyond this-is-coffee. Which is why origins matter. I’ve had coffee that I swear tasted like bananas. Often what I’m tasting doesn’t match the stuff on the label - blueberry pie, really? - but there’s definitely something there.
I tried to explain this to a friend-of-a-friend once, and she thought I meant flavored coffees. Sigh.
