I’ve never been a coffee connoisseur, and mainly drink it for the caffeine boost in the morning. I only recently started making it at home using a cheap $20 machine I bought at Target. Since I live alone, the 4 cups it can make at once is usually sufficient for my needs. But I see much fancier coffee making contraptions at others’ houses. Is the produced coffee from these machines any better than mine?
I think this should be in Cafe Society. My bad.
I am not a coffee connoisseur either, enjoying a good cup for its, um, physiologic benefits as well as taste, and have an inexpensive Black & Decker coffee machine that provides a good brew (in my unsophisticated opinion).
In a blinded taste test I doubt I could tell the difference between the same ground coffee prepared in my machine as compared to upscale models. And that’s the (sorry) acid test. It’s unlikely there are many people who could consistently do it.
Recently I was caught in an emergency situation without access to a coffee maker and had to make do for a few days with instant coffee (freeze-dried Juan Valdez brand) :).
Darned if it wasn’t as least as good as the stuff churned out by Keurig pod machines, though not as tasty as Black & Decker coffee.
In a blind taste test I’ll match my thirty dollar Aeropress against any coffee maker in the world and put up a good fight. I do take a little more care with the brewing than is strictly necessary, but I can produce a cup of coffee from start to finish in less than three minutes including cleanup. Less than three minutes if the water is already hot.
Part of it is convenience. With the push of a button, a fancy machine will heat the water, grind the beans, brew the coffee, and clean itself, taking only seconds if it’s already warmed up. When you make coffee yourself, whatever method you use (Arabic, Turkish, Italian, press, …) it takes a few minutes.
Some coffee makers do not get hot enough, but besides that there is not all that much difference that I have found.
The Keurig machines can make a adequate cup of coffee, but there’s not enough coffee in it. When I make my Aeropress coffee I use 20 grams of coffee and finish with 320 grams of water, or a 1:16 ratio. I don’t really weigh the water, I do a espresso and make an Americano, but I know my mug, and I’m within 10 grams of the 320 when I’m done.
K-cups have between 9 and 12 grams of coffee, depending on the brand and style, so they can’t make more than a 6 ounce cup of coffee. I suppose I could use the smallest cup setting on the machine and brew two K-cups into a mug, but at that point it’s really more trouble than making an Aeropress coffee.
The Mr Coffee I have made coffee that sure tasted like plastic for a while. Doesn’t get hot enough, either. It was cheap and I don’t like it.
The water really needs to hit about 205F to make a good cuppa. Many cheap percolators don’t make the grade. The coffee may be okay, but it won’t be at full potential.
I have never made coffee in a machine that is as good as what I get by cold brewing it. The Mrs. And I go thru about two gallons a week. The only drawback is that it takes a good 24 hours to brew it to our taste.
Aeropress is the way to go for me if I need to make it NOW.
My Rancilio Silvia makes some of the finest espresso in the land, but she is finicky, and brewing a shot is a fusion of art, science, luck, and love.
Tl,dr version: most commercial coffee machines produce shitty coffee that’s hardly worth drinking. If you want good coffee, you need to up your game and learn about the intricacies that are involved in producing good coffee.
Now then…
“Better” is, of course, a rather subjective term.
That said, there are a number of variables that are involved in making a good cup of coffee. The most important are:
- Beans
- Water quality
- Water temperature
- Time — that is, the length of time the hot water has in contact with the grounds
The coffee brewing method you use, of course, has nothing to do with the beans you use. Like most other things in life, if you start with subpar components you’ll end up with a subpar product. Beans should be freshly ground using a quality burr grinder that produces a uniform size of grounds. Those cheap whirly-blade grinder you can buy for $7 are pretty worthless. They’ll produce a fairly fine grind if you run it long enough, but the heat from the motor and the friction of the blades (which is not negligible; I use them for grinding spices and those mofos get hot) will change the flavor profile of the grounds and thus your finished product. Different brewing methods require different grind sizes: espresso is, contrary to popular belief, not a particular roast or flavor but rather a grind size. Espresso grind is exceedingly fine. However, if you use a French Press you’ll want a much coarser grind so as not to plug the metal screen. Drip pots and percolators fall somewhere in between.
Water quality is simple. Use clean water that tastes like, well, water. If you use city water that’s heavily chlorinated or well water that has various off flavors in it, invest in a cheap Brita filter and utilize it. Personally, I’m on city water but we don’t have chlorine flavors in it so I just use tap water for my coffee.
Temperature. This is the big one. For proper flavor extraction, the water you use to make your coffee should be about 205° Fahrenheit, give or take a couple degrees. I should most certainly not be boiling. If the water boiling, as you would use for black tea, it’ll essentially scorch the beans and give you an overly bitter brew. If it’s not hot enough it will simply fail to extract all the desired flavors, oils, and other goodies from the beans and leave you with a cup of swill that tastes like it came out the urn at a 7-Eleven. So the water at the correct temperature is vital.
Time: coffee grounds should be in contact with the water for 4-6 minutes. Like tea, if the beans don’t have enough time in the water it’ll produce a weak brew, and if they sit too long it’ll produce a bitter brew.
Most — actually, pretty much all — of the countertop coffee machines that you can get at WalMart or Target fail miserably to achieve even one of the above targets. Bean and water quality are outside the control of the coffee machine, but time and temperature are. Your average Mr. Coffee gets water “hot,” but nowhere near boiling and thus the coffee they produce is weak and flavorless. The baskets are simple, well, baskets and the water doesn’t stay in contact with the grounds longer than a few seconds before draining into the carafe. Those two elements alone make for bad coffee.
Also, in my personal experience, some brands (like Mr. Coffee) impart a plastic taste into the brewed coffee. Yuck.
Probably the best countertop, drip-basket coffee brewer available on the market is this one, which heats up the water to the requisite 205° and has a basket that’s designed to keep the water in contact with the beans before the finished brew drains into the carafe. It has no other features like clocks or timers or other such piffle, it simply makes a good cup of coffee. It’s also made out of copper and stainless steel, so it is built to last.
It also costs $300. For a damn coffee pot.
I’m assuming you are talking about a drip brewer or basket brewer, like your standard Mr. Coffee. An actual percolator should, in theory, make a decent cup of coffee because the time and temp requirements are met. However, since it requires the coffee to be continuously ran through the grounds until the desired temperature / strength is met, it actually produces a pretty bitter brew. A house with a coffee percolator slowly doing its thing on the stove smells wonderful, but that’s because all those aromatic compounds that should stay in the brew have been released. The resulting black stuff in your cup is not nearly as good as you would expect. Personally, I prefer percolated coffee to cheap drip coffee, but that’s just me.
Keurigs are simplicity itself, and you pay for that simplicity by accepting shitty, weak coffee. The grounds are, of course, old and stale because they’ve been packed in those little plastic cups since the gas in my Honda was lumbering around as some dinosaur. The machine itself is 100% plastic, and the water, like all the other machines, gets “hot” but not nearly hot enough. Finally, the water has about .0097 seconds of contact with the grounds and so the brew is exceedingly weak. Indeed you can watch this when you use one those infernal machines: during the first 2 or 3 seconds that the machine is making your “coffee,” the stream will be nice and black. This is essentially the smallest particles of coffee being utilized. Once those are washed out the stream turns piss-weak and you’re basically filling your cup with slightly brown-tinged water. Many of the arguments in favor of Keurigs — that you can make a single cup instead of a whole pot, that you can choose different flavors for different people or tastes or decaf for the evenings — all fail to address the simple fact that Keurigs are shit. Additionally, as noted above, cheap ones will give your “coffee” a plastic taste.
(We have a Keurig at work, and I’ve tried using my own grounds, which is about the only variable that I can control. It still makes absolute shit coffee. So when I’m at work, I switch to tea since I can’t really use a French Press.)
Right now, as I’m typing what has turned out to be a damn thesis, I’m drinking my morning cup that was made using an original, Swiss-made Bodum French Press that I received second hand from a family member a couple of years ago. There’s a few extra steps involved in using a press, including the need for a dedicated kettle to heat the water, but if you use good beans and clean water it meets all the requite elements for a good cup of coffee. You can get the water (via the kettle of course) to 205°, there’s no plastic that comes in contact with the liquid, you can let the grounds steep in the water for the requisite 4 minutes, and thus the result is… divine.
Of course, all this is predicated on the assumption that you like your coffee for the taste of your coffee. If you dump flavored creamer and sweetener in it simply to have a convenient vehicle for caffeine at 6am, then it probably doesn’t matter. Get yourself an $8 Mr. Coffee drip brewer from Target, a can of MJB (gag me), and some Coffee Mate and knock yourself out. Personally I’d rather pop a Vivarin and call it a morning.
I like my coffee strong and straight black with no adulterants, so better coffee machines and superior brewing techniques make a big difference.
There’s a real difference in espresso from a cheap machine that just uses pressure from boiling water versus a pump. But if all you make is drip coffee, price isn’t as big a deal as long as the water gets hot enough.
I’m wondering how you can claim that the water doesn’t get hot enough. In all the automatic “Mr. Coffee”-style machines I have seen, they heat the water in very small batches, and it has to turn to steam to be propelled up the tube into the drip basket. So it must reach 100C to do that, right? You can’t make water any hotter without a pressure container or some other trick.
America’s Test Kitchen tested automatic drip coffee makers. Most didn’t keep the optimal temperature, which is ~195F-205F, throughout the brew cycle. Here is their video review: Equipment Review: Best Automatic Drip Coffee Makers - YouTube
The device used to make coffee is far less important than the quality of the beans. If you have a good fresh roast freshly ground you can make good coffee with a drip (Mr. Coffee type thing), French Press (cafetière), Chemex/pour over, whatever.
I dont know the physics involved in a $10 Mr. Coffee, but clearly the water that comes out of the machine and into the filter basket is nowhere near 212°. My home hot water tap releases hot water that produces copious amounts of steam even on a warm day, but the water is only about 140°. Clearly the water that’s pumped through a Mr. Coffee is hot enough to create convection (is that the right word?) In the internal pipes and move the hot water up to the basket, but again it’s nowhere near hot enough to make a good cup of coffee.
I’m glad to see my choice for a good drip coffee maker matched theirs, as did my reasoning for choosing that particular machine. I’ve never heard of the Bonavita and now I’m intrigued.
If you are just making coffee, assuming it’s being made with the same water, grinds or beans, they will taste far too identically for the human palate to tell a difference (between two of the same basic kind of machine; a Keurig isn’t the same as a drip coffee maker.)
I have it and I am quite pleased. It was the happy medium between Mrs D_Odds, who is happy with Keurig, and me, who wanted the expensive model.
Stepping back from the intricacies discussed up-thread, the answer to your question is “Yes”. If you can get to a kitchen store like William Sonoma, or Sur La Table, they will often have high-end home machines running to give out samples. Try a taste some day and you will have your answer.
I’ve tried all the hoopla, all the different methods and contraptions.
To me, the best taste comes from the simple little single cone dripper – I’ve had this type in many European hoity-toity restaurants. The Melitta Pour-Overthings are widely available and very inexpensive; the super cheap ones from the dollar store work just about as well.
That said, in actuality my usual routine is a big mug of water heated just to the point where I can comfortably stick my finger in it, dumping in a good sized spoon of Folgers Crystals.