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Hehe LucyE at first your question confused me. LOL However, I think either a Pod or an Espresso.
There's a bit of difference between a pod and good espresso machine. Do you want something fairly automated with little user variables?
How much of a coffee snob are you? How much coffee do you think you'll drink in a week?
With the pod machines, the coffee are in foil sealed pods so in theory, stay fresh longer. It doesn't change the fact that they have been roasted and ground, potentially 2 years ago. The coffee will never taste as good as a properly made espresso. But it's convenient.
With espresso machines, there are a few variables. You can get manual, semi automatic and fully automatic machines depending on how skillful/control freakish you are.
Even with a perfectly tuned machine, the biggest impact will be the beans. You want to only buy small amounts regularly. We've found grinding our own to be best BUT that's with a conical burr grinder which produces nice even grinds. I notice taste differences using the same beans but different grind settings.
If you don't want the hassle of an espresso machine but to still get the good fresh taste, I recommend a stove top coffee maker. It takes a few goes of minor tweaking til you can make very good quality espressos. I would choose this method over an automatic espresso machine.
Or, a plunger can make excellent coffee if you have the right sized grinds. The trick is to slowly depress the plunger. Again, I'd choose this over an automatic machine if I was drinking coffee regularly.
We have all of these and at the moment, the only one on the bench top and in use is our DeLonghi pod machine. We don't drink coffee at home much at the moment so it is the convenient option when it isn't worthwhile to buy even a small bag of beans. They go stale before we use them all. The pod machine is a convenient and tastier alternative to instant coffee.
We have the Lastissima which also froths up the milk so very easy to make fancy coffees for multiple guests too. The milk container just stores in the fridge until needed. It just makes everything so easy. The coffee is reasonable but for a Puritan, it doesn't have the depth of flavour and I think it has a bit of a funny 'finish'. Still easy and pleasant to drink. It's consistent and much better than bad cafe coffee.
Coffee Makers, Which one?
21/12/2012, 10:11 PM
Thanks.
