Hi there,

Scenario. I have two machines/grinders combos. At work I have a "gaggia classic/ascaso imini" and at home I have a "brewtus III/compak K10."

I did a roast last weekend that was awesome but I can only taste the gods nectar at home. The problem is that no matter how much I try (temp surf,etc), at work it comes out barely OK.

Same beans
Home: awesome
Work: weak OK

The question is: do people waste the money buying expensive coffee if they don't have a good machine/grinder? Could they really appreciate it?

Cheers

Our home roasted coffee from our Behmor whether used for espresso on our La Pavoni Pro or drip on a cheap DeLonghi, is still more economical and better tasting than most of what we can get locally. It is also more convenient. Our green beans are inexpensive per pound compared to most already roasted quality beans available. So, even with our meager equipment: it is worth it. Our coffee smells fantastic too.

I have a Vibiemme Double Domo / Macap MKX at work and Vibiemme Domobar Super PID / Macap MC4 at home. If I try to pull the same shot in both places, one often suffers. Try optimizing for each location, even if it means as much as 2 or 3 g dose delta.

If you can't tell the difference in the cup between $2/lb, $5/lb, $20/lb and $40/lb coffee, buy the $2/lb.

I can tell the difference, but I'm happy with the $5/lb most of the time.

Every once in a while, I splurge and go with some lovely $12/lb stuff.


Stale burnt coffee - whether $2/lb or $40/lb - is still stale burnt coffee, and still tastes like stale burnt coffee.

Well, getting some really good beans for my superauto is what got me into this.

My SAECO Spidem Villa is around the bottom of the range for Superauto machines. I was at a friends house who roasts his own and had the best coffee I had ever had out of his Spidem Villa. So I bought one. Then, I found some really great beans roasted by Biltmore Roasters in Asheville - and started regularly drinking the best coffee I had ever had.

So, I found this place and realized that there's a whole level I have never experienced, and now I continue to drink better and better than I ever imagined.

IMO, it really is about the beans. Then it's about what you do with the beans.

Where you want to make a decision on price point is a personal decision. At the prices for equipment and the lengths that many posters go to on this forum for coffee they think is great - I'm thinking that while bean prices matter, that's not where many people here are going to cut back.

Espin wrote:Stale burnt coffee - whether $2/lb or $40/lb - is still stale burnt coffee, and still tastes like stale burnt coffee.

Yep, and how much does Starbucks get to serve you something that tastes like the beans have been burned?

I did a rough calculation on costs of Counter Culture Toscano - IIRC, it came out to less than .50 per double. I drink three doubles a day. Unless you're drinking an awful lot more than 3 doubles a day, hard to see how cutting bean costs matters very much except when you are dialing in equipment.

Arpi wrote:Scenario. I have two machines/grinders combos. At work I have a "gaggia classic/ascaso imini" and at home I have a "brewtus III/compak K10."

Home: awesome
Work: weak OK

The question is: do people waste the money buying expensive coffee if they don't have a good machine/grinder?

1. Take the ascaso mini home, set it so it grinds the same dose, same flow as the K10 on the brewtus.
2. Take the ascaso back to work. leaving the grind setting be, work out the dose for the Gaggia that gets the right flow
3. Taste the shot
4. Answer your question.

To answer the question in the OP only...

Depends on what your definition of "good" equipment is. A Gaggia classic is capable of producing great shots. A Delonghi EC140B is not(my first machine).

I think it would be silly to buy COE winners for a Delonghi machine, but If my classic was my main machine, id buy any coffee i wanted. As as possibly similar example.. Counter Cultures Aficionado blend. I didnt buy this blend for a while, because of a couple people telling me it was a little more finicky to work with then say, Toscano or Rustico. But, after a couple orders from CC, I bought a pound to bring on vacation, to use with my Classic. I got great shots using the aficionado blend on my classic. Now, the Aficionado blend is not a very expensive coffee, but my point is, with a gaggia classic, you dont need to worry if the machine is up to the task. Sure, there are better machines out there, and the BIII is one of them.. but the Classic is still a plenty capable machine.

imnewuser wrote:Yep, and how much does Starbucks get to serve you something that tastes like the beans have been burned?

Well, they don't get my money, and they don't serve me...

If better coffee into the machine means better coffee in the cup, it's worth upgrading. Good coffee can only do so much to compensate for bad grind, bad machine and lousy skills... so that upgrade may be better focused on one of the other 3 M's.

Well, I am not trying to complain about the gaggia. It does well with overdosed blends. But give a good SO ('expensive coffee') and it butchers it. I think the pressure is set too high from the factory and the temp is also high (hit and miss with temp surfing). I have no trouble controlling the timing with the grinder.

But lets rephrase the question. If you had an unmodified gaggia classic or rancilio silvia (stock), do you think it would do well with single origins in general?

For many years I had a Solis SL-90, a machine of the same class.

IMO, an SO requires a different grind or dose or somewhere in the middle relative to a blend.
When those adjustments were made, the SL-90 did just fine.

I recently finished 5kg of Costa Rican Terrazu SO that required a two notch coarser grind, two gram updose relative to the Rocky Roaster Organic that preceded it and the Supreme Bean Del Norte that followed @ ~9.5g. YMMV