So I’m a casual coffee drinker. Don’t drink a lot, not a coffee snob. I make coffee for myself at home maybe 2-3 times a week, using a drip machine, standard pre-ground grocery store coffee, and what is labelled as about 4-5 cups of water (it’s a 12 cup machine I think). Results are mediocre, but drinkable.
Lately I’ve started hitting the local Starbucks a bit - I like cafe lattes…
My wife occasionally drinks various fru-fru coffee drinks (mainly mochas). Some she makes at home (Nescafe I think), some she gets at Starbucks.
Our kids occasionally have hot chocolate made at home.
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So I’m wondering if I would get much value our of a fancy coffee solution of some sort, or even a switch to a basic drip maker that’s more geared towards small servings.
Primary options:
K-Cup based maker. Advantages - Convenience, quality. Disadvantages - Machine expensive, cups expensive, can’t make espresso stuff, takes up counter space.
The ability to make hot chocolate, tea, cider might be useful too…
Espresso maker. Advantages - Can make lattes. Disadvantages - Really expensive for the all-in-one machines. Is the quality really comparable to Starbucks?
Single cup drip machine. Advantages - Not sure. Any better for making small servings than a ~12 cup maker?
Browse the coffee dork thread for options. If you want espresso you’re in trouble, if you only want coffee then you have plenty of options. Most will recommend some sort of monstrosity called an aeropress, but the real secret of great coffee is simple: find a source where you can get coffee within 3 days of it being roasted, and only buy enough to last two weeks. After that the quality plummets.
Hardware matters about 10% compared to fresh coffee.
I have a Kreuig one cup maker. You are absolutely correct about the expense of the cup…which is why we only have them on special occasions. The solution is the mini drip basket that fits right in the machine. Grind your own beans, spoon it in and push go. I can make a pound of Trader Joes beans last a really long time at a huge savings.
We do have some of the fancy cups sitting around including hot chocolate.
Not making a full pot of coffee every day is nice, the one cupper is slightly more work but after a year, I am perfectly happy with it.
Get a small french press if you just want straight up coffee. And listen to Houngan’s advice about beans. Although I would say only buy enough for a week, but if you only have ~3 cups a week that may not be worth your while.
Have you had K-Cup coffee before? I would definitely put “quality” into the disadvantage category, as they’re certainly worse than drip coffee, leaving convenience as the only advantage.
I’ve had K-Cup coffee once recently and one or two times further back. Seemed ok. I was kind of assuming that keeping the packets sealed until use results in fresher coffee than my current practice - opening a can of store coffee and using it up slowly over a couple months or so.
You can get by with a cheap blade grinder for quite a while. If what you’re accustomed to is shitty canned coffee, you’ll see a lot of improvement in quality without a lot of increase in cost by going the blade grinder/Aeropress route. I’ve been using the same ~$20 grinder for a couple of years now and it still works fine.
Yeah, forget about your coffee maker, your problem is your coffee. Don’t buy the stuff in cans, ever ever ever. Even if your store doesn’t freshly roast the stuff they have in their bulk whole-bean bins, it’s going to be way fresher than anything pre-ground. Buy the bulk beans – enough for 1-2 weeks at most – and grind them at home when you need them. A burr grinder is better, but if you don’t want to get fancy, even a $20 blade grinder is going to be a major step up vs. Folgers.
Do that and use your regular drip machine, and you’ll have vastly better coffee.
I’ll second the small 2-cup french press and a half decent but cheap blade grinder as well.
Even if the beans aren’t the best or freshest and the grinder isn’t as good as a burr grinder, you’ll experience a great improvement over stale ground coffee slowly getting aired, which is what you have now.
If you want espresso then a decent low range espresso maker and a good grinder will get you a better result than Starbucks once you learn how to use it.
But you’ll need a good burr grinder for this and it’s timeconsuming to make that single cup.
You can wear the same undies for quite a while too. Moving to fresh skivvies daily is a huge quality of life improvement.
Blade grinders are inconsistent, leading to some beans being chopped up too large and some way too small. The large fragments are underexposed to the hot water and don’t contribute much of anything. The small ones are the real problem; they’re way overexposed, and give you bitter coffee. They’re particularly bad in a french press because they go right through the press and continue to leech bitter flavor into the coffee even while you drink it.
If you want good coffee, you need to look at every step in the process, not simply what coffee maker to buy. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a pretentious beret-wearing douchebag who spends hundreds of bucks on equipment for a decent cuppa joe.
Buy good whole beans: If they’re pre-ground in a can, you’re already off on the wrong foot. Ideally you do what Houngan suggests - buy freshly roasted local beans - but if you’re too cheap and/or lazy for that (I sure am) or don’t have a good roaster in your neighborhood, there are a number of decent packaged coffee beans out there. 8 O’Clock Coffee is one of the better-rated (by Consumer Reports) national brands, but feel free to do your own product testing. Buy bags or cans which hold a max of 2 weeks’ worth of beans; obviously how much that winds up being depends on how much coffee you drink and how strong you like it. Keep them somewhere cool & dark, preferably in an airtight container or maybe a ziplock bag; don’t put them in the fridge or freezer.
Grind them just before brewing: everyone insists burr grinders are better than blade, but geez, why the hell are burr grinders so damn expensive? I’ve been using a cheap blade grinder for ages; works fine for me, though I usually use drip makers. Just do your best to get an even grind without turning the beans into dust.
Brew what you want to drink when you want to drink it: i.e., don’t brew a big pot and leave it sitting on a burner all day; coffee’s best while it’s still fresh before it turns bitter. I usually use one of these or a small drip brewer. But if you want to step up your coffee, follow stusser’s advice; a small French press or Aeropress are good choices and fairly cheap, though cleaning them out is a bit of a nuisance.
There are several options less than $50, but be warned that you should examine a burr grinder and determine if you can take it all the way apart to clean it. I have a cheap black and decker burr grinder that does fine, but is hard to clean. Cost 25$.
Why a burr grinder? Because blades produce everything from powder up to the size you eyeball as “done.” The powder overinfuses almost instantly, causing bitterness. Burr grinders give you a consistent size for consistent steeping rate.
For fun you can get a manual grinder, though they usually only grind a single size.
Perhaps they’re right about the blade grinders. My cheapo grinder is in fact a burr grinder.
Like Houngans it can’t be disassembled for cleaning and it’s not good enough for espresso (even the finest espresso grind isn’t fine enough), but it’s fine for French press. It’s a Krups and I think the price is $30-40.
You use a paper filter, put in enough fresh ground coffee for one cup, add just-below-boiling water, stir, and then let sit for 2-3 minutes. When you put it on top of your cup it releases the coffee through the bottom and cleanup is just a matter of throwing the filter away.
Bean Grinder:
Yeah, it’s a manual grinder. So what? It’s a burr grinder that will give you much better results than any blade grinder, and it only takes the same time to grind 1 cup’s worth of coffee as it does to heat the water up. All for < $40. Oddly, it actually does medium to fine espresso grind much better than it does the coarse grind you would use in a French press. At its finest setting you almost could make Turkish coffee. It is an absolute snap to clean, as the burrs are ceramic and the entire thing can be disassembled in about 15 seconds.
This, water, and fresh whole beans are all you need to make fantastic coffee anywhere.
I’m saying this as someone who owns all of the above devices, an aeropress, a melitta cup, a Zojirushi drip machine with a thermal carafe, a $250 burr grinder, a small blade grinder, a couple French presses, a Moka pot, and used to own a full double-boiler espresso machine. I’ve had the experience of trying just about every coffee brewing method and device out there, and the $60 solution outlined above makes as good a cup as anything I’ve tried.
Now if you want to make your own espresso drinks at home I’d suggest a Mypressi Twist, but then you’re talking some real money.
Last year I got my wife one of the nice Keurig machines. The machine, plus a subscription to a variety pack of K-cups at Amazon, have basically completely curtailed her Starbucks habit. She was only going a time, maybe two, per week, but that still adds up quite quickly.
We’ve recently discovered (overpriced but still lovely) high quality tea, and are now using the Keurig just to give us hot water for tea as well as making coffee. It’s not perfect (it doesn’t get quite hot enough) but we get decent mileage out of it nonetheless. It’s probably one of the true home-run gifts I’ve gotten her in the 9 years we’ve been a couple.
(FWIW, the prices on Amazon, with the subscription discount, are about 44 k-cups for ~$20, or just under $0.50 per cup of coffee; not cheap compared to generic stuff and a drip maker, but far, far cheaper for being able to have whatever flavor she likes today than going to Starbucks, or even one of the cheap Starbucks knock-offs.)
I believe you can find a decent price on the machine at Costco these days. Not sure if it still does, but ours came with a sampler of about 30 different cups of all types (coffee, tea, maybe a hot cocoa or two).
