Coffee Please

Our fully automatic espresso coffee machine of 7 years had been quite sick for almost a year but when we swicthed it on and off a few times it came back to life again. However, it was in a kind of coma for the last few weeks. It made only 2 cups at a time and refused to do more. I tried to do the old trick but it did not quite work this time. It still made just 2 cups and went into a fit. I had to give it a rest overnight before it agreed to make any coffee at all. We started looking for a new machine, maybe not fully automatic as we do not drink much coffee as we used to (4 cups a day) anymore.

Our neighbour has bought her new espresso coffee machine a few months ago. It is nice and sleek but you can only use coffee pods with it. It is good with no mess, this coffee pod only machine. I somehow have this kind of strange streak in me that I do not like to be left with no other choice. I know ground coffee can be a bit messy but a freedom to get messy sometime sounds good to me. We own a burr coffee grinder so we can ground our own coffee freshly in a jiffy. We also have an old pump machine (as a back up) but it only takes ground coffee (for us, coffee pods were unheard of 8-9 yeras ago).



So when the old faithful died last Friday, we went out to buy another machine. We had done a bit of research and we took to the idea of pump machines that would take both ground coffee and pods. We decided on DeLonghi Icona in black. It cost us only a fraction of what we paid for our fully automatic machine ages ago.

Not too bad at this stage. I drink too many cups just to get to know the machine. We are experimenting on different coffee pods. We made a mistake by ordering Dutch coffee pads, thinking they were the same as pods. These coffee pads are made for Senseo (by Philips) coffee machine which is not an espresso machine as such. I understand that this Senseo is to replace the old dripping style one. Coffee pad is just like teabag with loose ground coffee inside while coffee pod is tightly packed, pre tamped. However, we have tried using these pads with our machine using the bigger filter (2-cup filter) and the coffee comes out OK.