Coffee costs

Or maybe they just don’t like the flavour profiles?  I dislike Lavazza, and illy for that matter.

Possibly, but to say ‘Be as well with nescafe’ is very wide of the mark.

A bag of 250g from a good roaster costs about £10 and does 20 shots, so about 50p a shot.

I buy 1kg bags for my shops bean to cup machine £13 a bag (free postage as I’m buying 6 at a go) – but I also sell them on to customers for £15 a bag. Our big commercial machine would do 80-100 coffees out of a bag depending on drink selections and grind. Total material cost Inc water, the cup/lid and power is around 50-75p per cup.

Possibly, but to say ‘Be as well with nescafe’ is very wide of the mark.

Agreed.

I’ve a second hand Sage Barista Express machine (and i weigh 18g  of beans out each time!).

We just have the 1kg bags of Rave house blend, find it a good compromise between the espresso/ americano that i like and the latte my wife likes, and then buy the odd 250g bag of coffee when we are out and about to try.

Once you get the feel for what you are doing with under/over extraction etc, then i can make better coffee than i will have in 90% of coffee places.

Plus I tend to find i drink less, quality over quantity.

I will then grind it more course and take some to work when in office for Aeropress.

All in all, probably costs us about £25-28 a month, which bearing in mind it is £3.5 an americano in cafe near work, and i’d have two a day, works out a lot cheaper for me than what i was spending.

1kg of bean from a really good roaster like Redber is around £18 + shipping at £3 or about £17 locally.  Typical double espresso is around 18-19g of coffee, so you only get 50-55cups from 1kg so around 38p per cup.  It tastes waaaay better than Nespresso.

Jeez coffee, where do we start.
Coffee (good coffee that is) should be stored cool in a sealed jar and a bean and only ground when needed (a burr grinder which mills the beans with a consistent as opposed to a blade grinder which does not)
Below is a good starting point for not too much money.
I have a Gaggia Classic (for over 25 years) as well as an Ibertial grinder and love the faff, grind, tamp and extraction.
On a Sunday morning as a starter there is nothing better.
For beans I have been buying from Happy Donkey (for 15 years to be precise) , they a well priced and consistently very very good.

https://www.gaggiadirect.com/all-manual-machines.html#!/Gaggia-Espresso-Style-Stone-Black-with-MD15-Grinder-EG2111-01/p/624294561/category=113117320

Classic Italian coffee beans 2 x 250G strong espresso blend.

Dark woods under milk wood is my bulk purchase of choice, buying 1kg effectively gets you a 250g bag for free

Under Milk Wood

That Under Milk Wood is amazing, but difficult to get the best out of it. Not sure I’d recommend it for a domestic bean to cup machine.

For beans I have been buying from Happy Donkey (for 15 years to be precise) , they a well priced and consistently very very good.

+1 and half the price of the competition.

I keep my unopened bags in the cupboard under the stairs and once opened the beans are in a tin in the fridge waiting to be ground.

I like the Union coffee too.

I have a Sage barista thing i bought for around £300 rather than getting separate grinder and espresso machines.  It’s probably 95% as good as say a a gaggia and grinder set up but it’s packaged well and easy to use.  Not a bean to cup one button job but easy as and as far down the rabbit hole as i’m prepared to go.

We rinse through it – 6 cups a day between us maybe?  I found Tk maxx sells a kilo for about £10 – £15.  had some rotters but some good ones too and the roasting dates arent too far out.  Occasionally buy some nice stuff from local roasters for about £30 a kg.

So I think it works out at about 18p per cup for cheap (tk maxx coffee lottery) to about 50p for the really good stuff.

At the moment you’re paying 50p for Nespresso.  They are foul.

IME buying a 1kg bag doesn’t make sense for my two cups/four shots a day, because it does get worse with time and after three or four weeks it’s not as good. If you really want to buy 1kg bags split it into four and keep three sealed in the freezer and don’t take them out until the one out is used up.

A bag of 250g from a good roaster costs about £10 and does 20 shots

You can get a perfectly reasonable supermarket coffee for £4 a bag, so the maths stacks up better.

Please don’t listen to the snobs talking about common people’s coffee being ‘foul’.  They’re just attempting to show off their ultra-rarified pallettes.  Nespresso may not be the last word in coffee but it’s certainly not ‘foul’. I can take you places that serve genuinely foul coffee if you really want. My work, for one.

Dark roasts get similar scorn, but if you like milky coffee then the darker the better IMO, provided you use whole milk. The cream and the bitterness mix together beautifully and that darkness becomes fantastic depth of flavour.  So don’t get hung up on fashion.

In terms of faff, I have worked out that a heaped one of my scoops is about 18g so that’s good enough. I adjust the grind depending on the coffee to get what looks like the right flow rate.  However, I don’t like the faff, and I would probably have bean to cup if I could afford it. In the mean time, I have found that putting the coffee through my cheap burr grinder twice makes a dramatic difference (but something of a mess due to static cling).

A measure of how fresh a coffee is, is whether or not it has a roast date on the bag.  Supermarket coffee doesn’t

Sometimes it does.  In my Waitrose there are lots of expensive coffees but they don’t shift fast enough so they have been roasted a while ago.. Conversely, Asda (the horror!) doesn’t carry much in the way of decent whole beans so what they do have moves quickly so it is more likely to be fresher.

Please don’t listen to the snobs talking about common people’s coffee being ‘foul’.  They’re just attempting to show off their ultra-rarified pallettes.  Nespresso may not be the last word in coffee but it’s certainly not ‘foul’. I can take you places that serve genuinely foul coffee if you really want. My work, for one.

+1

If the requirement is Nespresso quality or better then the solution is pretty much anything.  Pre ground supermarket espresso grind coffee is probably about the par for Nespresso.

Dark roasts get similar scorn, but if you like milky coffee then the darker the better IMO, provided you use whole milk. The cream and the bitterness mix together beautifully and that darkness becomes fantastic depth of flavour.  So don’t get hung up on fashion.

+1, either that or set up your machine for an espresso / americano with a slightly lower extraction (more ground coffee / less water) and most machines will let you hold the button down a couple of seconds longer to get a more “coffee bitter” taste that works with milk.

In terms of faff, I have worked out that a heaped one of my scoops is about 18g so that’s good enough. I adjust the grind depending on the coffee to get what looks like the right flow rate.  However, I don’t like the faff, and I would probably have bean to cup if I could afford it.

+1 Although my grinder (the dualit one that coffee snobs hate)  just takes 250g in the hopper, grinding it twice would be a monumental faff.  And I still use a pressurized basket because no one has come up with a good reason why they’re worse other than they compensate for poor grinding (which is a good thing?) and give a consistent flowrate (which is a good thing?) and mean the whole basket is under the same constant pressure rather than dropping from 10 bar to atmospheric over the depth (which is a good thing?) etc.

Although my grinder (the dualit one that coffee snobs hate)  just takes 250g in the hopper,

I just put two scoops of beans in the grinder and grind on demand.

Agree about the pressurised basked (I assume this is the same as the crema basket thing).  Double grinding lets me get the grounds the right consistency and size to restrict the flow just right (I had to change my over-pressure spring though).  However you might as well do this with the pressure/crema basket.  In fact you might get better extraction because the pressure would be high throughout the puck instead of just at the top.  Like you I can’t see why this is worse. Perhaps I’ll try mine out again.

Yea, the only downside I can actually perceive to the Delonghi version is the screen inside it is loose and held in by an o-ring, so when you bash it to get the puck out 50/50 the screen comes out.  Gaggia ones are pressed together so it looks like one basket but has hundreds of holes in the inside and one on the outside.

My spidey senses are detecting a passive-aggressive death ray directed towards us coffee snobs from some on this thread! 😂

Pressurised basket?  The very thought! I’d rather hump a tiger with catnip tied round my neck…😜

Hoffman had it right – “Your taste is beyond criticism”

What tosh – why do people spout this sort of nonsense? Did they hear it once, then just repeat it again and again believing it must be true?

what that both taste shit ?

because – they both taste shit.

Wars were started over differing coffee opinions on the internet, we know what’s important.

Mmm coffee.

Pressurised basket?  The very thought! I’d rather hump a tiger with catnip tied round my neck…😜

Haha, but why?

From a process engineering perspective it’s the better solution.

It’s like rim brakes on road bikes or 26″ wheels and 71deg head angles on mountainbikes.  No one seems to be able to articulate why bottomless baskets are better other than being harder work and generally producing inferior coffee unless everything is perfect in which case you get the same coffee from either. Presumably it’s the sense of achievement when it is right is all the more intense after several disappointing coffees.

Talking of foul coffee, people used to think a percolator was a good idea. It’s hard to imagine any modern method being comparably poor.

A posh grinder was a surprisingly significant upgrade for us. Consistent particle size means the extraction is more controllable. We already had a burr grinder, but just a fairly basic one.

Haha, but why?

If it works for you crack on!  The only reason pressurised baskets exist is ‘crema’.  Crema is seen as one of the defining features of true espresso, something you don’t get with any other brew method.  In reality it’s just CO2 from the roasting process which is released by the high pressure (~9 bar) in an espresso machine.  There’s a lot of bollox talked about crema – it does nothing for the taste of coffee but it looks good and people expect to see it in ‘proper’ coffee.

If you put pre-ground coffee in a conventional basket it won’t produce any crema as there is insufficient resistance. With one it will, but (arguably  😉)  the coffee is still too coarse, with too little surface area exposed for optimal extraction.

Hence pressurised baskets allow people who don’t have access to a good burr grinder to use an espresso machine and still see crema in their brew.  You will never see one used in a decent cafe though!

No one seems to be able to articulate why bottomless baskets are better

Are you getting confused with bottomless portafilters?  A ‘bottomless basket’ wouldn’t work at all! You have a conventional basket – with hundreds of holes and a pressurised basket with one, or just a few.  Either can be used in a bottomless or a spouted portafilter.  The reason why conventional multi hole baskets are ‘better’ (arguably again perhaps) is that they allow you to grind the coffee much finer to increase the surface area for a better extraction.

And then there are ‘precision’ baskets….!

The only reason pressurised baskets exist is ‘crema’.

That might be why they were made but they do more than that – they slow the water down as it goes through the coffee.  You can achieve this with the perfect amount of coffee ground to the right granule size and consistency, packed to the right density and with the right pressure, all of which is quite tricky. I know because it’s what I do. However the basket does this easily every time, and I can’t see a downside to using one.  What is the downside?  You can still grind just as fine with one.

And crema isn’t useless, it creates nice mouth feel.

What is the downside?  You can still grind just as fine with one.

Not my experience.  The finer you grind coffee, the more resistance you create. It is easy to cause a conventional basket to choke if you grind too fine, let alone a pressurised basket.

Getting the most out of espresso, especially with lighter roasts is often about about pushing the grind as fine as you can to maximise the extraction (up to a point).  Go too fine though and you start to get channelling or worse still, the shot will ‘choke’.  That is with a conventional basket with hundreds of holes.  You’ve got no chance with a one holed pressurised filter – nothing is going to come out with a normal dose and a true espresso grind

And crema isn’t useless

I didn’t say it was 🙂

Interested to know what the latest trends are for a decent cup of coffee when camping/bikepacking. Premium instant and coffee bags have got a lot better over the last few years.

At home have an Aeropress which is brilliant (it doesn’t make an espresso but the overall principle is the same) and also use filters and/or a cafetiere. I have an electric grinder. Can’t justify the price of a bean to cup machine as I’m the only coffee drinker in the house. I’m happy with my setup to be honest.

Interested to know what the latest trends are for a decent cup of coffee when camping/bikepacking.

Aeropress mostly, but I’ve been looking at collapsible V60 style filter holders.  You can get silicone and wire basket types, both of which fold flat so take up very little space and weigh next to nowt.  Not actually tried one yet so don’t know what they’re like, but in principle should be similar to a normal V60, i.e. very good.  I use a Jet boil so like the idea of all my brew kit fitting inside it. Filters, coffee, brewer and tea bags. I can’t do that with an Aeropress.  I do have a french press adapter for my Aeropress- it works well enough but is a bit messy and faffy to clean when wild camping. The collapsible V60 should be easier in that regard.

Ortlieb filter holder and a Paper filter.

Beans ground at home and taken with.

Accordingly sized Meth stove for the trip.

What is the downside?

You get something that looks as good as coffee ground finer and distributed and tampered correctly, but doesn’t taste the same. It masks problems. That in itself means less faffing getting things looking right and tasting okay… which is great… if that’s your priority (and why shouldn’t it be). But coffee can be better… reading the signs, making changes… which all takes time and hassle you might not be interested in… but can’t be performed properly with a pressurized portafilter.

Previous place of employment had this cheap Delonghi thing with a ‘pressurized’ basket. It was better than instant but a bit shit really. I once ground some nice beans at home, with the setting on the Sage grinder I use for my Gaggia Classic (fine/espresso ’10’) and took it to work where it blocked the Delonghi basket and next to nothing came out. Not sure it was ever the same after that actually 🤣

That particular Delonghi’s milk frother was also a complete bastard son of a milk frother. It had a compartment for the milk that obviously people would forget to remove the milk from. Rancid.

For camping I use a collapsable filter cone (makita type filters rather than v60 but only cos that’s what i have). I grind and pre-dose into the papers at home then fold & seal with scotch tape. Can definitely taste the coffee ‘character’ fading over a few days but still tastes better than coffee bags or instant IMO. Bonus is the cleanup is very easy – I just have a ziplok that I dump the used filter & grounds into. Nice and easy to fit hte various parts in around whatever your cooking/drinking kit is.

I love a coffee thread!

Having bought “artisan” beans for 4 years, I’ve recently switched to Aldi “Latzio” medium beans.  I don’t think you can get them in the northern hemisphere, but they are a big hit for Aldi in Australia – some cafe’s have been rumbled using them whist advertising that they’re using more expensive/trendier beans.  They are about 1/4 price, and just as good, roasted in Melbourne.

Re:  Bean-to-cup.  I bought my mum one – and if what you want is “coffee better than Nespresso” but you don’t want any faff, they achieve that.  Even with great beans, they don’t do a great job, but will be consistently “ok”.  As mentioned above, if you are prepared to endure slightly more faff, the Sage oracle etc are a better compromise.  What you are getting here is “proper” espresso and can produce very good coffee.

I’m deep down the coffee rabbit hole, and IMO, the best ROI for coffee stuff is:

• Not-shit beans (ie: freshly roasted)
• Not shit grinder (ie: burr not blade)
• Not shit machine (ie:  one that can be consistent/accurate with temp and pressure)
• Scales for weighing in/out

Once you have achieved “not-shit” (+scales) then really it’s all just technique

Interested to know what the latest trends are for a decent cup of coffee when camping/bikepacking.

I have an upcoming trip. I have one of those little baskets in a stick (Brew It) which is ok and weighs little. An Aeropress is much too heavy for me. I am considering putting grounds in the pan and straining through a filter instead. The mesh on the Brew It isn’t quite fine enough so the coffee gets a little muddy.

@batfink Agree with that but I’d argue your first 2 points are by far the most important and give the biggest bang for buck. You don’t really need a machine of any sort. Fresh, quality beans ground immediately before use will make a dramatic improvement in taste, however you brew them. V60, Aeropress, French press, Moka Pot etc. are all cheap but make incredible coffee with the right technique. Great coffee doesn’t have to be faffy and expensive.

I’m fairly deep in the espresso rabbit hole but that’s because I enjoy the ritual, gadgets and geekiness of it. Espresso isn’t ‘better’ than other brew methods it’s just different.

No need to spend thousands to get great coffee. But a decent grinder will help. If you’re not making espresso, something like the Wilfa Svart at around £100 will make a massive difference. Half that price second hand. So for around fifty quid you could elevate the quality of your home-brewed coffee enormously.

Looking at the Delonghi Magnifica or Evo machines which have manual frothers rather than an automatic milk frother.

Not sure anyone really answered this. Personally I’m a big fan of the Delonghi Magnifica. It just makes the same shot of espresso every time – there’s nothing like the adjustability of a Sage Barista, it’s just reliable coffee. Love it.

And definitely the manual frother is the way forward IMO – less to go wrong and get rancid milk trapped in.

Beans-wise, this thread reminds me I need to buy some more. FWIW, I get 2kg of Lavazza red at a time; it’s definitely not the best bean out there, but it’s the right blend of price and good coffee for me, and easier to live with than €15/ 250g bags from the local coffee shops

blokeuptheroadFull Member

@batfink Agree with that but I’d argue your first 2 points are by far the most important and give the biggest bang for buck.

yes, almost like I’d put them in order!

FWIW, I get 2kg of Lavazza red at a time; it’s definitely not the best bean out there

This. Always have a kilo bag in the freezer, regardless of other beans around. I bought from the local-to-work roaster – Roos, but they’ve just closed. I prefer buying from a shop rather than by post but have used Rave in the past. My Delonghi produces a consistent cup at no pfaff, and the Velveteer milk frother makes a dry foam and is easier to clean that the Nespresso version it replaced. I also have a cheap Delonghi bur grinder, figuring that the grinder would be the same as the bean-to-cup. That does great work for the afternoon Aeropress.

Nobody has yet mentioned water. What are you filling your Nespresso machine with? Hard Thames, filtered by the machine in my case. Or bottled Buxton? Like tea, water will make a difference.

EDIT: One last point. I had an old used Ena Jura that leaked a lot and died. This filled from the top. A pain when placed under a kitchen cupboard. The MOST annoying thing is the water filling. The Delonghi fills from a tank you pull out from the FRONT. You will be doing a lot of water filling for a bean-to-cup, so this ease of filling is a huge bonus, often overlooked.

Being a tight Fifer , occasionally I will mix my fresh ground beans with some m&s Italian beans still get a great crema only when I’m feeling skint and as for scales surely the scoop is perfect not even needing to flush off the top

Another hack I may have picked up from here to make the ooni £20 bag of pellets last is used the kitty litter pellets to get the stone hot and oven up to temp then if it’s to impress folk use your ooni apple and walnut # hardwooddearasfuckpellets

Recommend what you use.  I’ve tried the supermarket stuff and it’s stale when you get it. I’ve done the artisanal £10 for 250g, but 72p a shot is a bit steep.

Settled on Martin Carwardines Classico – £17 a kg (30p for a 18g shot). Small UK roaster. Fresh when it’s delivered. We use a kilo in under a month (2 people, 1 coffee a day.  plus visitors and the odd extra cup).  Kept in an airtight container in the cupboard it’s not noticeably degraded over that time (you can tell when it’s no longer fresh as have to adjust the grind).

Buy 4 kg at a time to get free postage – I don’t notice any difference between the last bag and the first when I open it. It’s way better than anything I’ve had from a supermarket and any further gains as you get more expensive are very marginal for me YMMV.

Freezer and fridge have issues for storage that seem to outweigh the benefits if you’re using it up in a few weeks.

According to the National Coffee Association, you can freeze whole coffee beans for up to a month. It’s best practise to freeze your coffee beans in airtight bags where possible. It’s equally important to leave your coffee beans to thaw once removed from the freezer and to consume within two weeks.

Never store coffee in the fridge
All in all, coffee should never be stored in the fridge. Refrigerators are humid, moist and light. The process of taking your coffee in and out of your fridge every morning results in constant temperature fluctuations, which breeds both condensation and microorganisms – neither of which you want associated with your coffee.

from here

I enjoy getting 250g bags of different beans, I cant imagine have the same coffee week after week. Its a bit like wine tasting, some you like better than others.

Refrigerators are humid, moist and light.

They aren’t light – the light goes off when you close the door! – but mine is also very dry. It’s a frost-free model that works as a hardcore air conditioner so it cools and dries the air first before blowing it into the fridge and freezer.  Works a treat, in fact we have to work quite hard to stop some things drying out that we don’t want to.

A must-have for the truly discerning coffee connoisseur.

(I don’t keep coffee in it though. Unopened 250g bag in the freezer, then the current bag stays out since I will use it in a week which is quick enough to prevent it going stale.)