Nespresso Compatible Capsules

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I'm keeping this one until it dies.

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So our home nespresso U machine just died. $60 to get it fixed, or a fat discount on a new machine, which brought the cost to $75 (inissia). No, haven't tried any alterna-pods. If someone were making them locally, I'd be tempted. To me, one overpriced, mail order source is no different from any other.

Make your own pods. Allows you to grind up fresh coffee/espresso. I still use the pods that came with the machine. Haven't spent a dollar on new pods.

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Make your own pods. Allows you to grind up fresh coffee/espresso. I still use the pods that came with the machine. Haven't spent a dollar on new pods.

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I looked at that. It just looks like a little more trouble than I want to deal with at 5am. I suppose I could make them the night before. I wake up at 05:00 and try to be in the car for 05:20 to ride. My mornings are a blur.

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No, I'm agreeing. Rural life means no decent coffee nearby, and it's damn convenient to pop in a pod and dash out the door. If I had limitless cash, I'd invest in a superautomatic "real" machine, but $3K-$5K for such a machine makes the pods seem cheap.

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I have a saeco super auto in my office at work that was a refurb from Seattle Coffee Gear. I think I paid under $300 and it's been pretty reliable in the first 18 months of service. Whole beans in the top, spent pucks in the waste bin. I look forward to it every afternoon.

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I looked at that. It just looks like a little more trouble than I want to deal with at 5am. I suppose I could make them the night before. I wake up at 05:00 and try to be in the car for 05:20 to ride. My mornings are a blur.

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If you already have the coffee/espresso grinded it takes less than two minutes from start to finish.

Yeah, my FIL bought a refurb Jura I think. Still paid about $1k. The first one he got leaked, so they sent him another unit. He checked the usage and it had something ridiculously low like less than 100 uses.

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If you already have the coffee/espresso grinded it takes less than two minutes from start to finish.

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Assuming you can neatly fill the pod with no spilling (tricky for me with a hand tremor)...so factor in wiping up whatever I've scattered around the countertop. Times two, b/c I want a double-shot. Or four, if I'm nice enough to make the better half a double-shot while he makes my toast.

I have two dozen different ways to make coffee in my kitchen, and a ceramic burr grinder. I make nearly every damn thing I eat from scratch, buy grassfed beef on the hoof, bake my own wild-yeast sourdough, tend an herb garden....but on busy weekday mornings when I want an espresso, I'm not fiddling with a fill-your-own pod. It provides a decent-enough quality with unsurpassed convenience, which is exactly what I want at oh-dark-thirty before a longazz commute.

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I'd invest in a superautomatic "real" machine, but $3K-$5K for such a machine makes the pods seem cheap.

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Not to mention the $$$ to service it when it breaks.

I wanted to move away from Nespresso, but I haven't found anything that really works much better with limited time in the morning. I am not convinced that a superautoamtic will give you a drastically better espresso than the pods and the upfront cost combined with the reliability issues of those machiens makes me wary of testing that theory.