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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Pareto principle. I bought a Gaggia but didn't do all of the extra stuff you mentioned, because I simply don't care enough for marginal returns. That's why a moka pot, which I had before, would still not be a good enough successor, because getting just the Gaggia is enough for most people who want to make espresso, the optimizations you talk about, while I have heard of all of them, are pretty much unnecessary if you are not trying to reach 100% of the output. I am content with 80% good enough results.

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Espresso is a weird animal. In my experience, there’s basically “good espresso” and “bad espresso”. The fancy equipment mostly helps you make the good kind more frequently.

Experts can critique your cup, but hitting the sweet spot of “good” feels more like 97% of the output. If anything, the Pareto principle applies instead to the frequency of “good” extraction.

That’s about right. Sometimes my machine makes a great cup and I have no idea what I did that day. Sometimes my cream froths almost instantly, others it barely froths. No discernible difference in steps. Maybe it’s related to horoscopes.

The advice though on the market is that if you want a good cup of coffee you need to do more than buy the machine. I agree that the gains are marginal. With a PC, I can upgrade my ram and the gains might be marginal, but I still have a world of free stuff I can install and tinker on it. Once the espresso machine is built/upgraded then that’s it really. You can only buy more things for it. There is no exploratory afterward to enjoy really.

I don’t agree that a moka pot wouldn’t be enough. Percolation through a moka pot tastes 10 times better than my Gaggia. My Gaggia has no determination when enough is enough, I have to count to 20-25 seconds each time I want a cup. I once accidentally percolated a cup with it by not refilling the resovoir enough. The little water the boiler was able to pump out was pure steam and it was my best cup of coffee I had with the machine, even if it was maybe detrimental to the machine itself.

> The advice though on the market is that if you want a good cup of coffee you need to do more than buy the machine.

The advice from anyone trying to sell you fancy tools and from anyone trying to justify to themselves that they bought fancy tools will always be that you need to buy fancy tools in order to enjoy the product. It is, of course, an obvious fabrication to anyone not inside this loop, and a form of cruelty against someone like you who got burned by it and wants out.

> I agree that the gains are marginal.

Not even marginal. It very very very quickly becomes so far below marginal that neutrinos and putting your left leg into your pants first instead of the right leg will make a more consistent difference, but people will continue to exaggerate differences and insist that you need to spritz the grounds with holy water and give them a back massage first before brewing to make anything halfway palatable.

> Percolation through a moka pot tastes 10 times better

And a moka costs $20 and lasts through a nuclear war.

> And a moka costs $20 and lasts through a nuclear war.

Good luck finding quality coffee beans after the war, unless your bunker has a coffee plantation attached.

Nuclear war is unlikely to hit anywhere beans are actually produced. Nobody out there with nukes is like "we gotta wipe out those fuckers in Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia!"

Brazil is a potential superpower. Indonesia is 4th most populous country in the world.

Who are their enemies?

> I don’t agree that a moka pot wouldn’t be enough

Sure, but a moka pot is not espresso, by the definition of espresso. It is like espresso, sure, but it does not achieve the required pressures to, well, press (hence, espresso) the water through the coffee. That is why I stopped using moka pots.

> The advice though on the market is that if you want a good cup of coffee you need to do more than buy the machine

That may just be your opinion because I honestly don't see any reason to spend more than necessary on espresso, as BugsJustFindMe says.

In short, I want espresso, but I do not want anything past that point, because the gains are marginal.

I didn’t know anything about coffee going in, I still don’t really. So it was easy to fool me. That isn’t my opinion about marginal gains, that was my observation.

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