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Comment by dreamfactory | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit ridiculous. Nespresso is best described as not bad and not good - it's drinkable in the same way as Starbucks. The technology is pretty rudimentary and the machines don't have sufficient boilers to get a consistent water temperature going through the coffee (tightly controlled water temperature and freshness of the coffee are the two main variables for flavour). The espresso they made in the test must have been pretty mediocre not to trounce Nespresso. (The author's coffee was never going to win any prizes - wrong beans, wrong grind, and 4 days old - a decent brew needs beans ground within minutes at worst).

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Nespresso is best described as not bad and not good

Per the article, in this blind taste test, the opposite appears to be true:

In distant last place came the ground coffee I had brought, a very good quality, single-estate bean, but not roasted for espresso and ground four days earlier, a little too coarsely for Bruno’s machine. The traditional house espresso scored 18 points, and was the favourite of one taster. But the clear winner with 22 points was the Nespresso, which both scored most consistently and was the favourite of two of the four tasters. Of course, these were just four people’s opinions. But their consensus fits the judgment of top chefs and Nespresso’s own extensive testing, which must have been conclusive enough for them to have the confidence to agree to my challenge in the first place.

If you have better data, cite it!

The point I was trying to make is that you could hardly assemble worse 'data' if you tried. It's blatantly absurd from the coffee he used to test, and if you have ever had both Nespresso and decent coffee (e.g. just about any coffee shop in Portland) your tastebuds would need to be blind to consider Nespresso as on a par.

My own informal testing (which would seem to have at least equal scientific validity to the article) is based on friends and family A/B-ing my own decent home machine, some excellent local coffee shops, Starbucks, and a Nespresso machine I bought for a relative so that I could bear to drink their coffee when I visited.

Not trying to grandstand here but the article has misleading info (and may well be astroturf), that's all.

The article basically compared Nespresso to an unknown, un-sighted, possibly stale, possibly ground month earlier coffee and a coffee that was roasted incorrectly for the brew method and ground days earlier. You wouldn't really call this a good baseline to compare to any data that anyone provides.

One of the major reasons for this is that these chefs get crazy good deals from Nespresso as part of it's marketing, ie, it's in the best restaurants, it's good for you.

That's not quite true. Most beans should be given at least 24 hours rest after roast. Many African varietals need 48. That's the time it takes for CO2 in the beans to degas.

I don't mean after roast (whole beans should be good for a couple of weeks). The author had ground his beans 4 days previous to the test.

I stopped reading the article after he admitted that part. What a waste of a setup to ruin the experiment with a completely pointless test.

Ah, you're right. I read too fast.

I usually try to use my beans within two weeks (and after around four days resting period) after roasting. But we have pretty bad humidity here so maybe you could keep it longer elsewhere.

As for after grinding - you can't really expect it to produce a decent extraction even _ten minutes_ after grinding.

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