DiyPresso: DIY Espresso Machine

I would recommend to look for a manual lever - either Flair or Cafelat Robot, or models with a boiler like La Pavoni or Olympia Cremina if milk is required.

It is easier to adjust flow and pressure in many cases than grind size. Also you will notice that a flat pressure profile is not that good - you will see and feel when puck start to degrade and you have to go down with pressure. People tend to make science out of everything these days, but you can perfectly go by feel if you have immediate feedback. As a plus, all these machines are incredibly simple, robust and serviceable. The Cremina I've got is from 96 and has all chances to outlive me.

The only thing I really would pay attention to is ratio - is can shift the taste a lot between sour and bitter.

> Or maybe they have tried it and don't like it.

The vast majority of people have not tried well brewed coffee. Of those who have tried well brewed coffee, the vast majority have not tried well brewed light roast. The main reason is similar to how most people have not tried well prepared food. The reason is not, as you seem to insinuate, because I am a coffee snob who is incapable of conceding that different people have different tastes. Another reason is because in most of the world people drink coffee with various inclusions like heaps of sugar (Italy) and heaps of milk (the rest of the world) and because, as a result, almost no cafe out there optimises for black coffee outside of countries like Italy.

Most people who drink coffee black (even in Italy) seem to do it either because they got used to how bad it tastes, or because of dietary reasons, or because they feel it makes them look more manly.

> Maybe it is your taste that is screwed up and that is why you like light roast espresso.

Again, you are assuming completely incorrectly and baselessly that I am claiming that light roast espresso is better than nespresso pods. I am not claiming this in the slightest. I am claiming that any good dark roast espresso is miles ahead of anything you can get out of a nespresso pod. Both in terms of not tasting like wood and in terms of not tasting like light roast.

Even petrol station cafes in Italy can produce much better results than a Nespresso machine and Italy continues to love drinking dark roasted Robusta/Arabica blends with heaps of sugar.

Likewise, any petrol station cafe in Italy can produce espresso which is so much better than what you can get in a Starbucks that it's difficult to conceive of why Starbucks even offers espresso any more. (And again, this is me talking about coffee in a country where people are used to drinking dark roast and would also likely be at least weirded out by the taste of light roast coffee.)

> But either way even if Nespresso isn't the best coffee it isn't horrible.

It's horrible in comparison to a high quality brew in the same way that McDonalds is horrible compared to anything you would get at a well respected high end restaurant.

You only think it's not horrible because you have limited experience. Yes, even in the realm of dark roast espresso.

Edit: I would also like you to consider the possibility that you personally (and maybe most people) simply do not have a sense of taste which is discerning enough to taste the difference between what someone with a more discerning taste would consider "good" coffee versus "horrible" coffee. This doesn't mean that we can't make quality judgements about coffees once they're above a certain level of awfully bitter/sour/astringent and unpleasant, but it does mean that maybe for you and for the vast majority of people, you shouldn't worry about "excellent" coffee and should instead just get on with your life.

I would like to just state that I am overjoyed to hear that you have found coffee you like to drink every day. There are lots of people out there whose experience of coffee has always been terrible (and it is my belief that most of them, with some help to explore, could probably find something they find inoffensive or even tasty). But rather than telling people who seem care more about coffee than you that they are snobs and their opinions of coffee are wrong, maybe you should also accept that not everyone has the same sense of taste as you.

I know the above sounds contradictory when I called Starbucks and Nespresso "horrible" but I would like to clarify things by saying that while I find Nespresso horrible in the grand scheme of things, if it makes you happy, you shouldn't listen to my opinion of it and instead enjoy it.

On the other hand, if you do find coffee to be generally unpleasant, horrible, or even sub-par, then I encourage you to explore and consider opening your mind to the possibility that there is a coffee out there that you would enjoy.

Every morning I make a coffee for someone I love, which I would personally not enjoy drinking very much, but which she enjoys immensely. I offer her to try the coffee I like, and on most occasions she is either indifferent about it or hates it and this is fine, I do not try to explain to her that she is wrong, I just try to cater to her particular tastes with a high quality coffee and preparation method that she likes.

I don't see a license in the Github repo, so currently the code for this machine is only source available and not open source.

https://github.com/diyPresso/diyPresso-One

I mean, Nespresso is also very popular in Italy despite it tasting strictly worse than anything you can get even at the worst cafes there but I think it's because drinking espresso with sugar is very popular in Italy and sugar goes an incredible way towards making a lot of mediocre espresso taste the same as good espresso (because the sugar is overpowering).

>We're all test subjects for a worldwide experiment to put microplastices everywhere and see what happens.

Honestly, I think if you think about it and look around, we are test subjects for a whole swathe of worldwide experiments of various kinds. At some point you have to just realise that it's the cost of progress.

I am not saying that microplastics are harmless, but statements like: "It seems incredibly unlikely that they don't disrupt various mechanisms in the environment and our bodies." are baseless. It's unlikely that it does nothing, but it's more than likely (all things considered) that it's potentially worth the cost.

I wish I had a better reply than "deal with it" but you live on a planet with lots of other people and that includes dealing with pollutants you have no control over. All we can do is demand research be done on these things so we can progress while mitigating the risks as they come up. It would truly be wrong to just ignore microplastics and assume they're safe. But it is also alarmist to assume they must have a significant negative impact without any evidence for such a negative impact.

Think of it this way, while we don't fully understand how microplastics affect us, if they were shortening our lifespan by a significant amount we would probably already know about it.