Serving a perfect cup of espresso or cappucino after the lovely 27 course (semi-healthy) dinner you cooked for your beloved friends is almost expected these days. The regular cup of joe coming from your 60 dollar coffee machine just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. This trend of course has led to an amazing selection of single cup coffee makers being dumped on the market (some celebrity endorsed), all claiming to provide you with the best coffee experience known to man.
I’d like to start off with saying that I don’t believe in this, it’s a trend so you have to love a good cup of espresso nonsense. If you don’t like coffee then please don’t buy one of these expensive machines just to please your guests at dinner parties. If you enjoy tea, offer them a nice cup of tea after their meal. They don’t like tea? Offer water, beer, or even carrot juice. I myself like coffee, for sure. But I also like tea and just plain water. My parents like their coffee a lot, so opted to buy an automatic espresso machine. In this article I will outline some of the available single cup coffee maker options there are and give some of their pros and cons. This is definitely not an exhaustive review since I’m only talking about products that I’ve owned or at least tasted.
Senseo
First of all, we’ve had a Senseo single cup coffee maker for a while and I can be pretty short in reviewing this machine. I do not recommend it for the real coffee lover. Perhaps if you are not too interested in a great tasting cup of coffee but just want a machine that makes a quick cup in the morning in order to give you that caffeine boost you need, then this might be a good choice. If you want a good tasting cup of coffee however, the Senseo is not going to produce it for you. I’ve tried several kinds of coffee pads for the machine and although some were definitely a lot better tasting than others, they all still produced a watery tasting cup of coffee. The Senseo machine just doesn’t use enough pressure (1,5 bar) to really get the coffee flavour out of your ground beans into your cup. Also, it doesn’t produce a hot enough cup of coffee to my liking either. Therefore I do not recommend this machine.
Dolce Gusto
Nespresso and Dolce Gusto
Both of these systems (they have several types machines you can buy but the coffee is all the same) provide quite a good tasting cup of coffee or espresso. Definitely a lot better than anything a Senseo can produce (they use about 19 bar of pressure I believe). I think these are a great option if you drink just one or two cups a day and like the coffee blends they put into their aluminum cups (because these are the only choices you have unless you try to refill the cups with your own favourite brand). If you drink a lot of coffee, have a favorite brand of beans or want a lot of options, these systems are probably not what you are looking for however. The cups are quite expensive, not quite environmentally friendly and for the Nespresso system they can only be bought online. Dolce Gusto also offers cream cups for lattes and capuccinos, which I don’t quite like because they contain sugar so there’s no option for having a sans sugar capuccino without having to froth some milk yourself. If however you like their coffee (it definitely tastes pretty good to me) and are not a coffee junkie, check out this Nespresso machine or the Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffee maker .
Full Fledged Espresso Makers
When you are particular about your coffee, espresso and capuccino, a full fledged espresso maker is probably the best way to go (bear in mind that there are cheaper alternatives for creating good coffee/espresso though). Asumming you want the easy all-in-one option you’d probably want to go with a fully automatic machine. However if you prefer going through the process of grinding, tamping and everything else a real coffee barista gets up to, you might want to go with a semi-automatic espresso maker combined with a good coffee bean grinder. Espresso makers definitely offer lots more options than any nespresso type single cup coffee maker. They allow you to use any type of beans or ground coffee so you don’t have to adapt to what Nespresso or Dolce Gusto is offering. You can set the amount of beans that is used per cup as wel as the size of your coffee (the amount of water used), so you can make your espresso exactly the way you like it. At the moment I’m using the Saeco Talea Touch of which I’ll put up a more extensive review soon. It’s definitely a machine I’d recommend although I cannot really compare since it’s my first automatic espresso maker.
Saeco Talea Touch w/.4l Milk Island Espresso Machine
Amazon Price: $1,899.98
List Price: $2,100.00
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