Illy and FrancisFrancis have been working this cooperative deal for a few years now. The discount really isn’t — once you add in the price of the coffee subscription, you’re not exactly getting something for nothing. (Big surprise, eh? It’s the old “free razor, just pay for the blades” trick.) So if you decide to go that route, your choice should not be based on the economics of the deal; it should be based on whether it’s the right machine, the right coffee, and the right commitment level for you.

The FrancisFrancis machines are decent home machines. And Illy is stellar when it comes to their quality controls at selecting coffee, roasting evenly, and ridding the result of defects. The main problem with Illy, however, is that those beans have to come all the way from Trieste, Italy. And because roasted coffee is more like fresh baked bread than Lipton tea bags, it doesn’t matter how much nitrogen Illy pumps into their cans: none of us would willingly buy fresh bread imported from 6,000 miles away no matter how much care, packaging, and preservatives went into it.

If I were to approach it all over again from that angle, I would get a machine of my choice (the FrancisFrancis is fine), use locally roasted beans for much better freshness (and better crema, etc.), and spend some money on a good grinder. But that’s me.

If you love the Illy flavor, or if fresh roasted beans are relatively hard to come by, the Illy/FrancisFrancis deal may be worth it. (And by fresh roasted, I don’t mean someone who just claims they are fresh. I mean a place that roasts them only a few days before you buy them — which local roasters are almost always the only ones who can fit that bill.) But even if you do, get whole bean and a solid burr grinder. Anything less than, say, a $150-200 KitchenAid burr grinder will give you grounds that will make your FrancisFrancis perform like a $75 Krups machine. (Yeeeelch!)

Good luck hunting…