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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

This is why I love my fully automated <s>luxury</s> mediocre espresso maker (https://www.seattlecoffeegear.com/blogs/scg-blog/jura-a1-rev...). I push a button, it grinds the coffee and does stuff inside that I can't see, then moments later I have a perfectly average cup of something resembling burnt bean soup. I don't know whether it's megasonically brewed or absolute-zero infused or just wet caffeine pills. Sometimes it's OK, other times it's mediocre, but it's never been excellent or terrible. That's the same kind of consistency my code has, so I'm fine with it.

It comes out lukewarm, hovering somewhere between room temperature and minutes-old vomit. If I want it hot, I microwave it. If I want it cold, I add ice. If I want a cold latte, I add milk. If I want a hot latte, I'm in the wrong house.

It costs less than $1 for a quad shot. It provides caffeine or at least a close-enough placebo effect. What more could an old, washed-out dev ask for?

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But how do you waste time in the morning if you’re not concocting some over complicated drink?

I feel like my morning coffee is the one part of my day that I can control. You bet I’m gonna take my time and make it enjoyable.

I also like the "ritual" of brewing a coffee to help me wake up in the morning. And even then, it's less than 10 minutes total preparing a pour over, it probably takes less time than cleaning out a filter machine would.

And for people thinking you need some $$$ machine, even the most pretentious experts agree that pour over is about as good as that style of brewing can get (IE not something like espresso). A hand grinder and plastic v60 will get you to the point you're not limited by the equipment. The biggest expense is the beans themselves, and that's as much a taste thing as anything else.

But I guess like any hobby you there will be people selling you all kinds of things at any price people are willing to pay - maybe it makes it a bit easier, maybe a bit quicker, maybe it looks better on your counter. Maybe it gives you something a bit different and unusual. But none of it gives you better coffee.

> there will be people selling you all kinds of things at any price people are willing to pay - maybe it makes it a bit easier, maybe a bit quicker, maybe it looks better on your counter. Maybe it gives you something a bit different and unusual. But none of it gives you better coffee.

The Faema e61 Legend isn’t quicker or easier, but damn it is pretty.

And that makes the coffee better. It’s also an effective space heater.

https://www.faema.com/uk-en/product/E61-MONOFASE-ANNIVERSARI...

Oh, THAT's pretty? I give you the Manument: https://manument.com/en/manument-leva-machine

Well. Not GIVE. It's $20K.

> But how do you waste time in the morning if you’re not concocting some over complicated drink?

Many relaxing things are part ritual. I like your thought process.

I'd say in life you generally want to stick to 20/80 80/20.

Spend 20% in effort and/or currency to get 80% of the optimal result. Spending the other 80% to get another 20% gain is rarely worth it.

I recently dipped my toes into the world of coffee brewing. It all began with a simple realization: I enjoy coffee a lot, so why not elevate my at-home coffee experience from instant to something better?

Using my v60, the slightly longer brewing process has led me to cut down my daily intake to 1-2 (sometimes 3) cups from my previous 4-5.

As a parent with young children, finding time for myself is a rare luxury, even going to the toilet isn't the private sanctuary it once was. Yet, on weekend mornings, I steal away 10-15 minutes to focus on brewing my coffee.

I'm not overly precious or meticulous about it, but the result is a richer, more flavorful coffee. The act of brewing itself becomes a calm and relaxing ritual as I watch the water soak into the coffee grounds and the aroma fills the air.

And its just a good way for me to start the day, before whatever madness and challenges my kids are about to create.

Well, you're lucky to not have spoiled your palate, in a way. I learned to love good coffee through my friends and I now only drink regular espressos from a machine if there's no other choice. And I'm not being snobby or anything, I fully understand why people drink it, I used to do it all the time. But my friends had to go and teach me about brewing methods and beans and yadda yadda.

Friend of mine had a similar issue where his parents were wine people and, ever since he could drink, taught him how to pick good wine. Except he realised he does not want to pay that much for alcohol so he now just sticks to beer.

Can you try and explain the difference? I've tried many brewing methods and quite like Aeropress, but can't say that I won't like anything else because of it. I also quite like the stuff from my automatic espresso maker, especially if it's just been cleaned.

> now just sticks to beer.

Guess he's lucky he hasn't tried good beer ;)

I've been mulling this over since yesterday. The best way I can explain is that I genuinely taste different "notes" in coffee brewed in different ways and from different beans, whereas with most espresso machines the taste feels overpowered by one singular note, usually something nutty, close to peanuts. It's not disgusting or bad, but it' kind of like having a preference in tea or sauces. You could eat your meal with that one sauce you're offered, but you might have a different preference. And coffee is the sauce of my days, heh.

I was recently discussing this with a colleague and we settled on calling it quality creep - as you become used to better things, the stuff that was previously acceptable becomes unbearable.

e.g. I used to drink any old instand coffee, then I found Douwe Egberts and strongly preferred that for a few years, then I started making pour-overs with pre ground coffee in a v60, then I found a better grind/roast/etc of the beans which is my go-to - now I drink 'real' coffee black and can only tolerate instant if it's adulterated with milk and a little sugar.

I'm trying to avoid making the jump to pulling my own espressos, it looks like way more fuss than the pour-over...

Making espresso with my semi-auto Breville Infuser is almost exactly as much fuss as a pour-over:

- Turn it on to heat up - Grind the beans - Weigh the grounds - Fill, tamp, and attach the portafilter - Start the infusion - Remove and dump the grounds - Clean the portafilter

It's a $600 electronic device, not a simple funnel and filter, but it's not a fussy process.

You still weigh the grounds? The difference with eyeballing it is probably too negligible to be noticed.

I'm not very good at eyeballing it, so it helps me stay consistent.

>ever since he could drink, taught him how to pick good wine.

Except that people who think they can "pick good wine" actually can't (there have been studies, too lazy to Google), and for the most part quality and price aren't correlated.

Luxury beliefs and all that.

I love that! The context I didn’t put in my top comment but added elsewhere is that this old washed-out dev requires low acidity because regular coffee was causing inflammation in my throat. That’s really all I want, less acid in my coffee, not something fancy. Except that I don’t want it cold, I want it hot like I’ve always had it. Other than that, I’m like you, I’m also perfectly fine with a perfectly average mediocre cup of joe.

Small amounts of potassium bicarbonate can be used to neutralise the remaining acidity. This helps prevent bitterness, and should not harm other aspects of the taste, unlike sodium bicarbonate. Dissolve into cold water, mix throughly, then add coffee grounds and stir. If you intend to store it, complete absence of light and absence of O2 wild also help prevent bitterness.

Our Breville makes good espresso for 1/4 of the price of that machine. (We have a separate grinder, so it's a semi-manual process to grind each day.) So much depends on the quality of the beans you buy and how you store them.

This is more or less what I get as well with my Nespresso machine (it costs 1€, you have to buy x€ of coffee every month which is OK for me). The average cost of a coffee is 0.4€.

The great thing is that it has zero maintenance and zero cleaning. I should probably do some de-limestoning (yes, there is a correct word for that that escapes me now) but I just avoid looking too closely.

Totally. I think the Nespressos actually make better coffee. I just wanted something that produced less plastic waste. The only waste outputs of this machine are spent grounds and water (well, and heat). And I can put in any whole beans I like (we just get ours from Trader Joe's), not limited to the Nescafe ecosystem.

Oh, absolutely. I wanted a zero-maintenance system because I know myself and it would not end well.

My wife was considering a mid-range+ coffee maker where you would have two bean containers and make combinations. It cost a fortune (on my personal scale) and I told her that she lost her mind. And then did an Excel sheet where I realized that the two lines meet at 12 or 15 months...

> moments later I have a perfectly average cup of something

Something about this description brings to mind the tea made by a Nutrimatic machine.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/tea.shtml

Friend of mine, with money, has a coffee machine, by a company I’d never heard of, called “Jura”[0].

I’d not heard of it, because it’s not for plebes, like me.

Grinds and brews a perfect cuppa in about a minute.

I used to have a toddy maker, where you dumped a whole pound of ground coffee into a bucket of water, let it sit overnight, in the fridge, then you drained through a filter.

The resulting thick liquid was like really good instant coffee. You threw a bit into a cup, added hot water, and it tasted great.

[0] https://us.jura.com/en

Looks like the comment you replied to links to a Jura as well

Yeah. My friend has one that cost around 3 grand.

The main issue that I would have, is maintenance. I would guess that it would need a fair bit of cleaning.

I just use a fairly basic Braun Melitta filter, and it does great.

It's got a decent self-cleaning cycle. Every month or two, it'll ask you to put in a cleaning tablet (about $2 for the OEM version, or there are cheaper generic ones). It goes through an internal cleanse and poops out a slop of muckety muck. I put on soft yoga music for mine, but that's optional. Ten minutes later it's ready to use again.

About half as frequently, it'll also ask you to put in a descaling tablet. Similar process.

Beyond that, day-to-day, it can make about 8 shots of espresso before the grounds hopper is full. You just dump it and rinse it in the sink (no need for a thorough wash) and it's ready to use again. Less cleanup than a regular drip coffee maker (no filters to deal with, no grind dust to rinse/brush, no glassware, nothing to dry).

It's super convenient. The main downside is really just taste. I tried to do a blind taste test with my coffee snob friend (he's the kinda guy who measures everything down to the milligram and gives his grounds acupuncture before sending them to the spa). We used the same bag of beans, same water, same cups, etc. His came out with a layer of fine oils and sparkling foam. Mine looked like someone opened a dishwasher prematurely. We couldn't even get to the taste test part because you could smell the difference with your eyes closed. And I had a clogged nose that day.

Maybe the $3k Jura is different, but my janky little unit is definitely a poor man's machine – the hand-me-down Civic of superautomatic coffee makers. I'd buy it again in a heartbeat though.

Kind of interesting.

I have the Jura Giga 5 and I would say it produces coffee which is better than I can get in any chain store, and, better than the average specialty shop as well. Obviously there are some specialty shops which produce excellent coffee which is better than the Jura, but, not by a massive margin. Interesting that you find the A1 to be much poorer in quality, or my pallet just sucks. Either way I fully agree with you that having "push button, make coffee" is fantastic, I don't want to fiddle with scales and worrying about blooming my coffee grounds for 14 seconds at 92c before brewing with water at 90c. Push button. Make good coffee.

The other "maintenance" item I've noted after having this machine for >10 years is that every 5 years or so it breaks and I have to send it back to Jura.

Their warranty service is a flat-rate $500 and they either repair yours or send you a refurb unit, for something which I spent almost 5k on, I'm very happy that they seem to have the option to basically keep the Jura working forever if I want.

The Giga 5 prefers to listen to the Spotify "upbeat pop music" playlist when I run the cleaning cycle FYI.

I would buy a book of you talking about coffee.

For anyone who hasn't gotten into the coffee insanity yet, he doesn't mean his friend literally gives the coffee acupuncture... but a cork with some acupuncture needles (or a device that looks like such) is commonly (!) used to stir/even out/redistribute/break up clumps of coffee in the portafilter before tamping. And reading that I now need to go get some coffee.

That's actually the brand I have, and I'm as plebe-y as they come! I even have a mining pick in my garage that I use for manual labor. I'm nothing like the guy in the photo, more like the guy who makes the coffee for the guy who makes HIS coffee.

You can get Juras for pretty cheap if you go bargain hunting. There are also other similar but cheaper brands. As a category, they're called "superautomatic espresso machines". I don't know why they're not more popular, but it's been a total game-changer for me.

I got my Jura A1 (their discontinued base model) used, third-hand re-refurbished, a decade ago for like $700. A chunk of change upfront to be sure, but since then it's consistently made like 4-8 shots of espresso a day, every day. If reliable mediocrity were a virtue, this thing would be the patron saint of saints. And if a cup of store coffee were $5 (which is cheap nowadays), the machine pays for itself in 3-5 months. Best purchase I ever made.

It need not be mediocre. I have a Jura J5 which has, as of this morning, made 18,901 espressos. A few years back, I bought the tool to open it and recalibrated the conical grinder. There are now videos that can walk you through this process.

The mediocrity disappeared. It produces a fantastic brew close to the quality of the shop where I buy the beans.

Before attempting all this, I ran an experiment. I had my shop grind the coffee one notch back from where they grind for their in-house espresso. Then I put that into the by-pass chute and brewed it. This confirmed to me that machine’s grinder was not getting fine enough.

If you grind truly as fine as you would for an espresso machine, you may get a very slightly better brew, but it will come with a 5% chance of clogging the machine and wasting the ground coffee. Best not to fly too close to the sun.

A friend who knows a few things about coffee stopped by not too long after I did this conversion and asked if I had bought new beans, because “this shit is top notch”. It was a revealing experiment about the importance of the grind.

It’s a fascinating machine to take apart. We’ve had it for 15 years and I’m optimistic it will just keep going. At this point my goal it see when the espresso counter will roll over back to zero.

We have a Jura machine at my workplace since the beginning of time. It brews coffee as good as good the bean you use. After a month it asks for a cleaning cycle which is arcane magic, but other than that it just works and creates its daily 50-100 coffee as usual. I can recommend it, it just works.

We have 2x Juras in my office. They cost a significant portion of my annual salary last time I checked.

Reliable, repeatable, the coffee is not super duper excellent, but it's also not terrible. It's perfectly passable and it's free. My type of coffee.

I'm not sure I'd even want a Jura in a home environment. There's so much cleaning and maintenance required! My style is more like good hand grinder (simple, very low maintenance, doesn't take up counter-top space) and an Aeropress and V60 (both simple pieces of plastic, super easy to clean).

It's kind of unavoidable that it's going to be expensive and higher-maintenance to be able to make espresso at home, so I simply don't. Not worth it for me when I already have access to high-end espresso machines at work 5 days a week.

Oh yeah, weekly cleaning cycles, filters, special rinsing fluids and milk tubing that requires daily flushing. Also the machine needs to keep it's water block hot, else the startup time is a few minutes - so constant power draw.

If you have an office where the machine makes 100+ coffees it makes perfect sense. In a domestic setup it makes 0 sense.

Yeah, good point on the constant power draw too. I forgot to mention the last bit of kit I use to make my simple at-home coffees: an electric kettle. (And speaking of which, if I ever build my own home, I'm putting 240V counter-top outlets in the kitchen.)

Yeah thats a strange US only quirk: lack of kettles and 120V power. I have a 3Kw kettle at home. I boils 2l of water in a few minutes. If I add just enough for one hot drink, then it finishes before I have my mug and ingredients ready.

I cannot imagine a home without a kettle, its the first appliance I bought when I moved countries. I also cannot abide by a kettle less than 3Kw anymore either.

It's annoying because we have dedicated 240V circuits for all major installed appliances in US households (drying machine, electric stove, HVAC), as well as, increasingly, 240V circuits in the garage for EV charging.

But no one is putting in 240V circuits for countertop plug-in appliances afaik, even though there's absolutely no reason you can't do so.

And by the way, electric kettle are quite common in the US amongst the tea or fancy coffee drinking set.

Jura seems to be more aimed at companies (who also have money), we had a few at HQ until we "upgraded" to a full on coffee/espresso machine, the type you see at proper coffee shops.

In Germany, Jura coffee machines do come up on the used market frequently enough if you really want one. If you're "lucky" enough to work in an office / for a company that is shutting down, you may get a "sweetened deal" with your layoff ...

Anyway, as others said ... good coffee they make, and some effort on cleaning they need (deserve).

On office coffee machines ... give me anything but syrup post-mix. Douwe-Egberts, I call you out. You make decent machines as well, stop peddling those abominations.

> What more could an old, washed-out dev ask for?

From the sound of things, Soylent.

https://soylent.com/

Heh, we actually order many boxes of a similar thing (Huel) every month. It's about half of our monthly food intake (by calories).

As a kid I used to dream about being able to photosynthesize. I'd love to never have to worry about food or beverage intakes again.

> somewhere between room temperature and minutes-old vomit

New unit of measure unlocked.

You've got a perdy writing style

I like the cut of your jib.

Your ambivalence contributes little to the conversation.

It represents the same position of mediocre acceptance that many espresso affectionadors will arrrive at after spending many months/years mucking about with expensive kit.

It’s the natural progression of most hobbies

Wait till you see my cookbook, "1-minute Meal Replacement Powders", the perfect complement to my self-help/self-sabotage title, "Better Living Through Lower Standards".

YOLO, and no one gets it right on the first try anyway...

Are you offering shares in your venture? I’d be mildly interested in investing on the expectation that I’d see returns that are slightly worse than inflation.

Not that interested though, so whatever.

You may be interested in my philosophy on uptime: nine nines is hard, how about eight eights.

Whereas I appreciated the unexpected spice, only to quickly be reminded by your comment that, yes, this is HackerNews.

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