Making nice coffee at home

[mtbc]

R. has provided and instructed me in a little espresso maker. One fills the lower chamber with water that one then heats. The water rises through pipes then a layer of coffee before appearing in the upper chamber. I have no idea what coffee aficionados think of it in comparison with, say, the AeroPress® or Breaking Bad's Gabe's thinking, but I rather like the coffee that this device makes me from the Sang Tao 5 from a local Vietnamese grocery store; next I shall try their number 1.

Comments

[emperor]

These are moka pots, and they're pretty trad :) I used to use them quite a bit, but I found particularly the smaller ones quite fiddly to get reliable results from.

[mtbc]

Aha, thank you, lots of interesting extra reading there. Mine seems to mostly be behaving, I'm just still puzzling over and investigating why it tends to be Vietnamese coffee in particular I am liking when it's still wholly Arabica or whatever.

[thewayne]

I get in to work yesterday and they replaced our Keurig with a later model that has a cold water tank for making cold coffee. Interestingly, it also has a de-scaling feature, though I have no idea if they bought any of the Keurig De-scaling Packets(tm).

The thing that immediately caught my eye was it has what appears to be a water pitcher out front. It's actually the water tank for the beastie. I thought that was cool, though a little confusing. What I thought was the tank was exclusively for the cold water.

But what irritates me is they threw away the instructions! I grabbed them from the tank and went over them to learn about the peculiarities of this thing, and I'm glad I did! While it's very, VERY rare that I use it, it does get used regularly by patrons and I need to know how it works to help them.

[thewayne]

I used our new machine yesterday. I don't know what volume our cups are, and did a 6 ounce dark chocolate and 6 ounce mocha frapp, both cold. It was pretty good! I also refilled the water reservoir and emptied the spill tray and rinsed it out.

It would appear that our better cups are probably 16 ounces.

[mtbc]

I'm glad it's working well for you! Also that you got to figure out at least the basics before helping a patron with it.

Goodness, yes, throwing away the instructions is a bad move! And all too common. I keep instructions even for simpler devices, it's easy enough to shove them into a file folders somewhere and sometimes one's very glad one did! Even if it's just for what to push to activate Bluetooth pairing or whatever. I have a couple of files exactly for this kind of thing, I split them into what I think of as electronics and appliances, broadly decided by to what extent it has moving parts.

At least these days, searching for a model number often brings a PDF but I typically find a paper leaflet more readable.

[maju]

S used to use a large moka pot to make mugs of coffee. She really liked it.