ottawa foodies

So I've seen a few posts lately about coffee... and well... my drip coffee maker sucks. To remedy the problem, I set out to find an affordable solution, maybe a combo coffee/espresso maker. Lo and behold, a serendipidous discovery! The AeroPress! I read a ton of reviews on it (thanks to the interweb), and I'm sold... it's engineered like a french press, but with a better filter system, and well, it brews a much more concentrated cuppa in under a minute! Whoa! So I've gone an ordered one, and I'll be posting a review on my AeroPress experience/experiment once it's in my grubby little caffeine deprived paws!

Hey, I have one of those. It's okay, better than "office building coffee", but not great.

In my experience, the coffee always seems to come out a bit watery, even using a fine grind and proper dosing. I'm looking forward to reading your impressions.

The little 1 cup drip machines work a lot better than a full-sized drip, I find. But lately I've been using a french press. Yeah, you get grits but I'm cool with that.

The biggest flavour improvement you'll find with your coffee is roasting your own!

I still find the best coffee is with a bialetti you can get all different sizes and if you want foam you can do a great job with a braun hand blender.

agree with bruce on the bialetti. great coffee, and so easy. they sell a wide range of bialettis at preston hardware.

I agree with bruce and hipfunkyfun.. My wife and I have a cappaccino every morning made with the tender nectar from one of these stovetop espresso makers. I find it uses less coffee grounds, to get more flavour. Yup, got mine at Preston Hardware as well. I recommend the stainless steel ones over the other cast (aluminum or zinc?) ones.

Hmmm, I'm going to have to pick up one of those. I used to have one in university and loved it. They are cheap, too.

Or if you've got the greenbacks, you could go for one of these: www.royalcoffeemaker.com It's a deluxe version of a vacuum coffee maker, with the additional functionality that when the coffee is brewing into the secondary container, it tips the balance of the mechanism, which puts out the heat source (flame), which causes the start of the vacuum process to bring the brewed 'fay' back into the decanter. A sweet piece of engineering if it works. (It better for $2000)

I'm intrigued at the AeroPress, and would love to hear the review. Between my Bodum and my Nespresso maker I'm pretty well-set, but this sounds neat.

Let me put in my two cents (for the second time? Dunno.) about Nespresso. My Essenza was worth every penny of the $300 I spent on it. It's fast as can be (I think it's no more than two minutes from power-on to your first cup) and makes a great little puddle of hell in a cup. Drawbacks? The coffee pods are a bit more expensive than grounds ($0.50–$0.65 per pod), and it doesn't come with a steamer nozzle. This means that you either have to spend twice as much on a machine that does (and a really nice machine at that), or you pay a hundred bucks and buy their ingenious little heated-kettle-with-whisk-magnetic-stir-bar dealie.

Have you tried the manual one cup cone from Melitta? Very convenient to use and the coffee comes out not bad at all.

www.ottawafoodies.com

You know, I grew up on manual drip coffee and I love it. Problem is, I can never find a manual drip maker in a store when it occurs to me to look for one. It seems as if retailers are doing away with these cheap apparatus to sell the automatic drip makers to increase profit margins? That's my theory and I'm sticking to it!!! LOL

Well if you know where I can get a manual drip maker, let me know so I can focus my search! ;)

You can buy it from Personal Edge, Bayshore Shopping Centre (close to Booster Juice). It took me a long time to find this.

While we're on the subject of brewing devices, does anyone know of a decent 1 or 2 cup automatic drip unit? I have a good press, but want something that brews without the sediment.

I was ready to buy the Starbucks Aroma Solo, but then read some reviews where it consistently leaked all over the place. :(

The Bay at the Rideau Center, and the Bay at Place D'Orleans usually have the Melitta manual drip makers in the large sizes available. We buy two at a time as we always seem to crack them on the kitchen tap when we wash them, and the Bay doesn't always have them in stock. We finally learned to keep a spare!

The Black and Decker 1 cup unit is very good

Canadian Tire, and Loblaws should both have plain drip coffee makers Chimi. I saw them in a big display at Loblaws in the last 2 weeks. Of course, they are big Xmas items, and you can get a bit of a better price if you wait till after Xmas to get on sale. I found it hard to find a $20 drip maker last year before Xmas (lots for $50, or even $100).. but found as cheap as $9.99 right after ( Boxing Week )

Ironically (since they *should* stock these manual coffee makers), neither Loblaws (College Square) nor Canadian Tire (Fairlawn Plaza) have them stocked regularly. BOO! Lots of auto-drip, but no manual! It's a conspiracy... ;)

My bad Chimi.. I had referred to the auto-drips, not the manual.

I've been using a french press for about a year now and all other coffee usually pales in comparison. I grind my own beans (of course) and have been thinking about splurging on a burr grinder so that I get a more consistent coarse grind.

For me drip coffee is only acceptable from coffee shops or if there is company over for dinner and I need like 12 cups. Otherwise it's no good.

/end snobby post

Ahh, well auto-drip vs. manual drip, there's a huge taste difference. Manual drip tastes way better, IMO, since you have more control over the temperature of the water and the saturation of the grounds.

Been there. Done That.
(Bialetti, French Press, drip (manual and auto)....etc)
What am I using now (with great satisfaction)?
A 30 year old stainless steel 8-cup Percolator (rescued from my mom's throw-aways this spring).

It's simple. Fast. Easy to clean. And packs a punch.

Kristl