Food & Drink Tassimo vs Nespresso vs Dolce Gusto?

So?

pros and cons of each? Tesco have a delonghi dolce gusto for £26 atm..... but have heard the pods are expensive?

 

Best £50 I ever spent was on a rusted La Pavoni Europiccola on Ebay. A few days will some modding skills and a set of new O-rings and I had a beautiful espresso machine that it was oh so easy to make terrible coffee with. A couple of weeks after that I could pull a consistent shot.

Although an aside to your question I would suggest that coffee pods steal a little of your soul every time you use them.

 

Had a Nespresso for 5 years.

Couldn't live without it.

 

Of the pod machines only Nespresso does an acceptable coffee.

 

...

 

One of my christmas presents this year was an aeropress and I love it - not really helping you decide between those machines but I'd have one of these all day long over them

 

Personal experiences with them.

Tassimo was a bloody pain in the arse. Machine gave me troubles with pods and jamming up. (Should hasten to add not my machine) in addition pods were very expensive and wasn't impressed with the taste - its not bad coffee, just not great.

I have a senseo machine, and whilst the senseo pads arent good, the ones sold by lidl are good. You can also get an adapter to use ground coffee.

As a side note on aeropress, I liked the coffee, but it was a pita to use, I went with the inverted method (screwing cap and filter on last and then turning it right way on top the cup)

 

What he said. I've owned and extensively tested them all, I still have the Nespresso but it's been relegated to the back of the cupboard where all the infrequently used items stay as I've resorted to making proper coffee with a cafetière (French Press) or percolator instead.

To expand on that, the Tassimo was the least reliable of them, and mine also jammed occasionally and didn't dispense what you could call coffee all the time. We still have one in the office in work and it's rarely used; they'd rather drink instant than use it, despite there being a good supply of pods for it.

The Dolce Gusto was a fairly impressive machine for its time as it was the first one I owned. Again though, the refills/pods were so expensive and hard to get hold of that we ended up using it regularly for about a month and then not bothering with it after that. What the coffee tasted like I can't remember, we had it when they were first released and that's many years ago now. I think we eventually gave it to my brother...

The Nespresso was and is a good machine, the coffee it produces is nice and the pods are much easier to get your hands on than those for the aforementioned machines. I don't use it any more because like I said, cafetière or percolated coffee is much nicer, and I like my coffee strong which you can't achieve with pods.

 

Cheeper and nicer coffee even coffee per cup is cheeper

The only person I know that loves there Nespresso is my brother with the only reason being its easy for him to use with one arm.

 

Indeed, I only use the Nespresso as an espresso machine, until I have the money (and space) for this baby:



An Elektra Microcasa.

For regular coffee it's fresh ground beans in a cafetiere. For grinding we use a Hario/Skerton/Kyocera ceramic burr grinder:



Only £20,-- but a very capable hand grinder.

 

My sister asked for a box of Keurig K-cups for Christmas, it cost me 18$ for 24 cups of Van Houtte... genuine robbery. We are talking 75 cents per cup, sugar & cream not included. With our old coffee maker, I can make it for 25 cents per cup, sugar & cream included. Do yourself a favor and get a DeLonghi Esclusivo DC514T and do your coffee old school.

 

I use the same grinder as Nexxo and make the coffee with an Aeropress. Granted, it's a bit of work, but it makes a fine cup of coffee.

 

We get "Feral Trade" coffee. It is basically the ultimate in fair trade: a local two-woman band buys the coffee beans directly from farmers in South America. These are then flown to the UK by travellers using their spare luggage capacity recruited via the web. The beans are roasted locally by a small company, then sold by the half kilo at the local community centre/library via a food cooperative (which also sells locally baked bread, organic allotment/small farm veg, local honey etc.) once a week in the evening.

We kind of turn up at the community centre in the evening, ask someone if "they've got the stuff" and they hand us a big tinfoil bag of beans in exchange for cash. It's a bit like buying drugs. No, wait, it is buying drugs.

On the bag label is a simple breakdown of the price per Kg paid to the farmer, the price per Kg paid by the customer and in between a list of every added cost (transport, roasting, import duty, profit margin) that accounts in full for why you pay the price you pay.

It's awesome coffee. In all sorts of ways.

 

Aero press, pick n mix your coffee to your taste not what a panel think you might like coffee to taste like.

 

Ignoring the coffee snobbery going on, we have a Dolce Gusto Melody III and it does a good job. Pods are £3.49 for a box, making either 16 or 32 drinks depending if they are a single pod or double (milk base is stored separately to the main drink).

Is it as good as a "proper" espresso? The answer is obviously no. Does it let you make a coffee in approximately 15 seconds flat that tastes better than instant by far? Yes. The other benefit to Dolce Gusto is that the drink range goes beyond coffee - hot chocolate, chai tea etc are all available, along with things like mocha. My wife is an ex Caffe Nero manager, so knows exactly how to make proper coffee, and is perfectly happy with the machine. She only uses the fancy Italian machine after a sit down dinner with guests.

Also gave my parents our slightly older Melody II machine and it is in regular use. Again no complaints.

 

This.

I'm an espresso elitist and not only do I sometimes consume coffee from a nespresso, I even occasionally enjoy it. One of the primary reasons I've not purchased such a machine for myself is that I was concerned that I would get lazy and never make a "proper" espresso again.

The Dolce Gusto pods aren't terribly priced if you bulk buy, but the Nespresso is definitely superior IMO.

 

Pretentious? Moi?!?

Everything tastes better than instant. Instant is not coffee; it is pretend coffee.

 

This is true. The pods are a halfway house instead, but still with the speed benefit. Nespresso are slightly better in terms of 'coffee', but I prefer the Dolce Gusto system because it makes the other drinks, such as the mocha/hot chocolate etc.

So for the OP, it depends what you want. If you just want coffee, get a Nespresso machine. If you fancy a bit more variation in the drinks, Dolce Gusto. Just don't buy a Tassimo. I'd also say that none of the pod machines will produce a 'long' drink as there isn't enough in the pod to do so - they're all essentially shot based.

 

Thank you all - some of the suggestions here would cost more than a new cpu



both the wife and children are interested in using it - so it would need to be multi function , which does seem to be down to dolce gusto or tassimo