Posts Tagged ‘espresso machines’

Pod Coffee Machines: Are they worth it?

These days one can find all sorts of different coffee machines available. There are the old style drip and filter coffee makers. There are more expensive ones that are almost fully automatic. You just add some water into a tank, some beans in the top, place your cup under the nozzle and press a button. Out comes the choice of your coffee. And for real old-style coffee lovers there are also the stove-top varieties. Some are just old coffee pots that you use to brew up your coffee. Others are espresso machines that boil water and use steam to push it through the ground beans. Needless to say there is no shortage of choice.

Yet that choice has become even wider in the past couple of years with the introduction of pod coffee machines. These are quite amazing in that they take away most of the fuss and mess involved. The coffee comes in a small little aluminum container that is put in the machine. It does the rest. It boils the water, gets it up to a very high pressure, then pierces the coffee pod and pushes the water through. Out comes an almost perfect cup of coffee. I was a bit of a skeptic before I tried one of their cups of coffee but soon I was going back for more. The reason is that the coffee often comes out smelling much fresher and better than it would from many other sorts of automatic espresso machines.
There are some disadvantages though. The first is price. The pods are not especially cheap and you often end up paying about $0.5 for each cup of coffee. That may not be much compared with store-bought coffee but it is more than you might pay if you used beans and a grinder in an old fashioned machine. The pods are often protected by patents so only the manufacturer is allowed to make them. That also keeps prices high. Even so, if you love coffee you may think it worth every penny.