In search of Caffeination

I tend to separate work and home by the type of beverage I drink. At work it’s coffee and at home tea. But recently I’d been trying the idea of having a coffee machine at home. I used to have a cafetiere in the UK for those odd occasions when I needed a cup of joe as they say out here I would brew up a pot in that however I would often forget to clean it up and given the infrequent use this deterred use when I did fancy a coffee.  On that note I decided this time to try one of the new pod coffee machines that have been sweeping the market.

The first task was to identify which type to go for since they all have a certain type of pod and none of them are compatible with any other. There seem to be three main types of coffee pod available in the consumer arena there are a few specialist ones as well but since they are special order and the pods not available in the shops I’ll ignore those. So I had to chose between Senseo (which is Philips and Douwe Egberts, a subsidiary of Sara Lee Corporation), Keurig or the K-cup system, and Tassimo or T-Disk System (made by Kraft foods).

The prices of the machines was not much to choose between them so I hammered the various reviews. It seemed the Senseo system was a bit of a dead end hard to get so I ruled it out. That left the other two, the reviews were fairly even a lot of people liking one machine over the other. Eventually I picked the Tassimo machine for it’s ability to do Cappicino with milk frothing out of the box and its impressive array of name brand drinks (like Starbucks twinings and so on)

The machine I picked was made by Bosch a neat little black box with the water tank on the back with an integrated water filter to keep the machine ungunked and improve the taste of the coffee. It has a sort of clamp system where you put the T-disk into the slot clamp it shut and then hit the go button. The machine reads a barcode on the disk and from that works out what to do to make the drink. There’s no settings to do just hit the button and away it goes. Once it’s finished you have the option of adding more water for larger cups. For Latte or capicinos the milk comes in a separate disk you do as a second stage. For most single disk drinks it’s done in 30-60 seconds and ready to drink you just pop the finished T-disk out and you’re done no mess and very quick and easy.

I purchased a batch of different disks off amazon who have a lot of different brands at reasonable prices and spent the weekend trying out various coffee brands. It does also do hot chocolate and a pretty good earl grey.

One thing I noticed that may mean I backed the wrong horse in the long run was a lack of choice of T -disks in the regular stores. They did maybe one or two types but the K-cups are ubiquitous and in every flavor imaginable. Since getting stuff from amazon is not a big problem for the more fancy Caramel Latte Macchiato and the like it’s probably not a big problem since I can fuel up on my more generic morning blend of coffee at the local target.

In the end I have a machine that with very little effort I can stuff a cup under press a button and then get a nice steaming hot cup of coffee for no effort and with no fuss. Clean up us as simple as pop out the dead disk chuck it and the machine is ready to go again. Which is all I really wanted.