Yeah, all Illy is good and Illy Red is my go to coffee for general use.

Yup.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Lavazza is also good but it's not quite as good as Illy imo.

I bulk buy the lavazza gold when Tesco do it for silly prices.

Facewon wrote:

The advice I got was its actually ok to boil quick, what you don't want is to let it boil for ages after. I would actually boik water first. Poor in then quickly get on the hotplate. It'll perk almost immediately, turn off and away you go.

Makes sense. Will give that a go.

Excellent info there.

Frothing the milk with a press? Cool. My Nespresso has the milk frother and heater attachment though.

But I like my coffee black - however I'll give that a try too.

Got an electric bean grinder and beans from my fave Glasgow spot for my bday. Yay! But I'm not 100% with how stuff tastes from my French press. What's a good alternative? Mako? Aeropress?

Aeropress is the future

poprock wrote:

davyK wrote:

Frothing the milk with a press?

Witchcraft! I’m in.

I’ve got a milk frother which is basically an all-metal press, so you can heat it up on the stove, directly. It’s great for doing hot chocolate, too.

Aeropress is good, it doesn't have the added bitterness you get from a French press. I would recommend (it does use a bit more coffee per cup though)

I think (but have no idea if true) that French presses make more bitter coffee because the grinds sit in the water longer, and whatever causes that acidc/bitter taste has time to infuse. With an aeropress or espresso machine the coffee's made much quicker so the bitter flavour doesn't have time to develop.

Aeropress for me. I’m also partial to Waitrose coffee beans - they do French and Italian packs

Much success on the coffee front recently.

Started with a couple of minor setbacks:

Aeropress is sticky around the rubber bit that pushes through. Can't seem to lube it. Ooh err etc.

Got some coffee machine cleaner from local roasters. It didn't help that, and I nearly burned Ara with boiling water, but, I then cleaned my machine and my 2 stove top jobbies. They all came up a treat.

Did the milk frothing thing with a French press. It's OK. Handy in a pinch.

Speaking of my local roasters though.

Rumble coffee. In my hood (Kensington.) you can go direct to them and they grind it better than cafes do. And they're a little cheaper.

Their haymaker brand is awesome, but their other blends which they cycle through are all solid too.

(shabby hello.)

Having said all that, second success was discovering that Mocopan, which is an old Australian brand out of Preston, with a strong Italian heritage, appear to have some new ranges in small supermarkets. Trying to work out if it's iga only.

Anyhoo, picked up 200g on the weekend because we ran out and I was out and about and had to grab what I could find.

And it's freakin delicious.

Grabbed the Plenty Rd blend. Awesome coffee.

The biggest home coffee making problem I have is beans going stale. We don’t drink enough coffee, basically. I already buy the smallest bags of beans I can from local roasters, but we still only get a third of the way through a bag before they’re heading way past their best.

Not really sure I can do anything about it, other than accepting that we waste coffee beans and throw them away.

Drink more coffee

LivDiv wrote:

You can freeze coffee beans if you have an air tight container.

Yeah, but it’s hard to avoid condensation when defrosting, which can fuck with the beans. And after freezing and defrosting, beans go stale super-quickly. So you’d need to be planning ahead and defrosting slowly (in the fridge) one day (at most) before using … I dunno, it’s not an ideal solution when ‘planning ahead’ is not something we really do when it’s more about suddenly wanting a coffee.