Coffee machine question

[noddy]

Dearest wife nabbed a spanking new Breville Bambino coffee machine from work. Plan being to test it over the X while no one is in the office, maybe with an eye to purchasing one for herself, or laying clues to me and the kids for her next birthday present.

I tell her to use the Aeropress. And with good reason, I feel. This Breville thing makes extremely bitter/sour coffee.

She’s done the sensible things like going to a decent coffee shop and asking etc. But, still. Lousy coffee. I am sure any half-clever barista would, with a sneer, market the lip-gnarling muck this machine produces as some kind of aficionado's grail.

Anyway, I wondered if anyone recognizes the problem and have any clue what might be done? Thanks

 

[Fast but dim]

Its all in the grind size. I'm no expert, but I bought a new machine and a grinder.

The same bean and amount can produce wildly different tastes depending on the size of the grind, and less so the amount you tamp the "shot"

Google over or under extracted coffee.

Can't remember, but one is bitter, one has low taste.

 

[Templogin]

I agree with FbD. The grind is very important. The freshness of the coffee moreso. It sounds as though the grind you are using is too fine hence you are over extracting the coffee, making it bitter. I started enjoying the coffee more when I moved away from the dark roasts to medium roast and lighter roast. Best advice I can give is to see if any of your coffee vendors will sell you some recently roated beans that you can grind yourself. Grinders are a whole new ball game. I have a Niche Zero, which I wouldn't replace, but they are not cheap.

 

[Saint-Just]

I love coffee but I have become a heretic. With Mrs SJ we used to buy our coffee from a “brûlerie” in Paris, roasted to our taste, then grind it manually before making expresso with an entry level machine. That required learning the machine to make systematically good coffee.
Then we moved to Paris suburbs and it wasn’t convenient to go to our old place so we chose the best supermarket coffee we could find… and discovered that the one thing it didn’t guarantee was consistency: a great coffee for a few months became ordinary the following crop.
BiL got us to try Nespresso, we tasted the range and found a few that we found more than acceptable. But the revelation came when we realised that year on year they managed to achieve a very comparable coffee.
We are now using both the classic pods and the vertuo. Usually >5 expressos per day between us.

 

[MaC]

I think the same coffee all the time is boring.
We try a lot of different ones, and if later on I buy something that we liked again, it's a pleasure
Bitter, sweet, roasted, oily....they're all different, but it's really noticeable that the grind changes the taste.

We have a manual Japanese ceramic coffee grinder and one of the huge copper and brass coffee making things, but mostly I just use the cafetière, Himself uses one of the hot water filter machines. Used to use the Bodum double glass Pebo8 vacuum, then the one with the filter papers or the Moka pot.
The grind matters more than the machinery I reckon.

 

[noddy]

I use a bialettis, the aeropress, french press and a china drip thing for a paper filter. And am very fond of mud coffee. The machine is beyond me. If you want decent coffee go out and buy a cup is my thought, and a pastry while you are at it. Do the crossword too. Dearest wife’s case is that, at work, meetings are often held in cafes. Meaning that 5-7 $6 flat whites a day plus a danish or two quickly puts a drag on the domestic economy.

To be fair, I don‘t actively like coffee …. Just the buzz

 

[MaC]

I use a bialettis, the aeropress, french press and a china drip thing for a paper filter. And am very fond of mud coffee. The machine is beyond me. If you want decent coffee go out and buy a cup is my thought, and a pastry while you are at it. Do the crossword too. Dearest wife’s case is that, at work, meetings are often held in cafes. Meaning that 5-7 $6 flat whites a day plus a danish or two quickly puts a drag on the domestic economy.

There are some fairly decent instants out there. If you're having that much white coffee a day, I'd be looking into buying one of them instead.

It's hot, it's caffeine, it'll do, and it won't stretch any budget.

I bought a jar of the barleycup stuff last month.
Don't, just don't.
It is truly lacking.

Home made roasted and ground dandelion roots are better than this by a huge margin.

 

[noddy]

i have nescafe at work mainly with evap

I used to like Horlicks and Ovaltine a lot. Cant easily find it here, but have occasionally thought to experiment by mixing in a bit of nescafe

 

[Saint-Just]

I think the same coffee all the time is boring.
We try a lot of different ones, and if later on I buy something that we liked again, it's a pleasure
Bitter, sweet, roasted, oily....they're all different, but it's really noticeable that the grind changes the taste.

But that's also the point of Nespresso. I just checked and while we only have our 2 favourite classic pods (his and hers), we have 7 different vertuo capsules. Consistency means that when you want one type of coffee, you know that's the type you'll get.

 

[5teep]

Silly question maybe but is the coffee machine clean? old stale grinds/pipes etc can make bitter coffee.

 

[Templogin]

I use a bialettis, the aeropress, french press and a china drip thing for a paper filter. And am very fond of mud coffee. The machine is beyond me. If you want decent coffee go out and buy a cup is my thought, and a pastry while you are at it. Do the crossword too. Dearest wife’s case is that, at work, meetings are often held in cafes. Meaning that 5-7 $6 flat whites a day plus a danish or two quickly puts a drag on the domestic economy.

To be fair, I don‘t actively like coffee …. Just the buzz

I spent a fair chunk of cash (for me) on my machine, grinder, coffee beans and accessories. I joined a UK based coffee forum and after asking for instructions on how to make a coffee as good as I get in the coffee shop, I was told that I would soon be making better coffees than the coffee shops. I think mine is better because I have found the roasts that I like. I can't do latte art. The tremor causes it to look terrible. Having said that, my milk stretching/foaming could do with work.

 

[Andylaser]

At work we have a Jura E6. It is a brilliant machine. Makes coffee and espresso. No milk frother and no poncy drinks. Its simplicity is its strength. Makes a superb coffee. Simple push button caffeine lovliness. As there is no milk in the unit, theres no worries about sourness. I give the machine a strip and clean once a week. The water filter cartridges are good for a couple of months at a time. Definitely recommended.