Consumer Delusion: ConsumerReports.org’s buyer’s guide to espresso makers
Posted by TheShot on 20 Mar 2007 | Tagged as: Beans, Home Brew, Machine
Consumer Reports published a home buyer’s guide to espresso makers this month: ConsumerReports.org - Buyer’s guide to espresso makers 3/07. As with a lot of things in Consumer Reports, they often lack sufficient knowledge or background to offer educated opinions beyond winging it with what’s on the surface. (Well, beyond that and Consumers Union’s usual internal arrogance of believing that all consumers are good and vendors evil. But that’s another story.)
I can look past the article talking about Starbucks as if it were just a recent fad. But trouble brews when they mention Bialetti among the espresso machine brands sold in the U.S., and yet four paragraphs later they clearly state “espresso is made by forcing hot water under pressure through tightly packed, or tamped, finely ground coffee”. (Bialetti moka pots use steam rather than water under pressure — and thus technically they do not make espresso.) The other brands in their list are makers of historically cheap, landfill-bound home appliances — with a shaver and a popcorn popper manufacturer thrown in for good measure.
It gets dicier, with the article emphasizing the the ever-popular-and-delusional cost savings benefits of these home espresso machines. And when it comes to the taste test, they treat espresso machines as if they were self-contained, standalone appliances that pump out uniform cups of espresso, regardless of the grinder and the beans used. As if we all plug our home espresso machines into a wall socket for a steady stream of freshly ground coffee that appears on our monthly PG&E bill.
As when SFist Jeremy Nisen skewered a Los Angeles Times article that attempted to comparatively review coffees last year (“Know Your Coffee Reviewers”), this oversimplified approach is disingenuous and counter-productive. How can you reasonably compare one machine that can use fresh coffee beans with a pod machine that must use the requesite packets of stale, pre-ground beans — without taking all these other factors into account?
And yet despite the world of difference between fresh coffee beans and not, Consumer Reports concluded with much love for the Nespresso. Not that it’s a bad espresso machine. But personally, I cannot make it past their required stale, pre-ground beans. Fortunately for Nespresso, many of their customers have been so conditioned by stale, pre-ground beans (the reviewers of Consumer Reports apparently included), they’ve come to expect — and believe there is — nothing more.
3 Comments »
on 30 Mar 2007 at 8:40 pm -05:00T 1.dustininsf said …
Hello, just discovered your ratings site and blog and am spending way too much time exploring it. I’m wondering if you have an opinion on the FrancisFrancis! espresso makers ~ particularly the X5 model. Illy features it, along with the X1 as an option in their Illy at home membership program, offering a nice discount (of course you also have to agree to purchase the coffee for a year).
on 30 Mar 2007 at 11:53 pm -05:00T 2.TheShot said …
Greetings, Dustin.
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…
on 09 Apr 2007 at 11:36 am -05:00T 3.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Why the overwhelming numbers of design flops? said …
[...] Given our recent comments here about the many new home espresso machines that are destined to be little more than landfill, this particular paragraph resonated with us: 2. Change for change’s sake. [...]