In the muddy end of a Boulder winter, with the company bleeding and a second child on the way, I bought a capsule machine. What it actually does, what it costs, when it is the right answer, and what a shortcut tastes like.
It is the muddy end of a Boulder winter, when the snow along the paths has gone the grey of old chewing gum and the sky cannot decide between March and April, and there is a new box on the kitchen counter with a capsule machine inside it, which I bought on a Tuesday night after the boy was asleep, with the laptop open on one side to the company's bank balance and on the other to a shop, and I am not proud of the order in which I closed those two windows.
My wife found out a few weeks ago that she is pregnant with our second, due in November, and Plexflo, the company I run at night with a small team in Bengaluru, is bleeding money the way a cracked mug bleeds coffee, slowly and onto everything, and I, the man who wrote a whole note about extraction, who owns two scales and a notebook, have just bought a machine that makes every decision for me and asks only that I press one button and stand there for ninety seconds while it whirrs like a small drone taking off. In our house we have each taken up our part of what is coming, as we chose them together, and mine, as the father, is to hold the roof up, and this spring the roof is made of money and sleep in roughly equal and insufficient measure.
This note is about that machine, and about shortcuts, and about the honest fact that I needed one.
What I bought, and why
The machine is a Nespresso Vertuo, the newer of the company's two systems, the one with the big dome-shaped capsules that make a full mug rather than a thimble of espresso, and I bought it for three reasons, none of them about taste.
Time came first, because the mornings have got shorter at the front and the nights longer at the back, and there are days when the ten minutes I wrote about in the first note simply do not exist. Then noise, because the electric grinder sounds like a coin in a washing machine and a boy of three sleeps ten feet from the kitchen, and by November there will be another one. And last the eleven o'clock problem, because I was drinking bad coffee at my desk by eleven every morning, having made one good cup at five and unable to face another, and a bad second cup is worse than a consistent mediocre one.
It is a strange purchase for a man who believes, as I do, that coffee is for stopping, because what the machine sells is speed and the only thing I want to do with the speed is stand still. The ninety seconds it saves me could go to the laptop, and when they do the cup tastes of the laptop, and when I give them to the window instead, where the last snow is going grey on the flagstones and the boy is narrating his cereal to nobody, the cup tastes of the morning; so I have bought a faster coffee in order to drink it more slowly, which sounds like a contradiction until you try it, and this spring I have decided that a shortcut which buys back a pause is a shortcut worth taking.
A hand holding a coffee capsule beside a capsule machine. Photo by Thiago Japyassu on Unsplash.
What the machine actually does
Each capsule has a barcode printed around its rim, a ring of black and white bars like the ones on a tin of beans, and when you close the lid the machine reads it, the way the dabbawalas of Mumbai have read the painted marks on tiffin lids for more than a century and known from a few letters and colours whose lunch goes where. The barcode tells the machine how much water to use, and how hot, and how fast to spin, and how long to wet the grounds before it starts, and then it brews by spinning the capsule at several thousand revolutions a minute while hot water is injected into it, and the liquid is flung out through the rim by the spin, the way water flies off a salad spinner, and the company calls this centrifusion, which is a made-up word for a real thing.
Somewhere under the lid a few kilobytes of firmware turn that ring of bars into a temperature and a spin speed, code that lives right against the metal, with no cloud and no dashboard between it and the motor, and it is the most honest software I have touched this year. I spend my days among models of the grid that run to millions of lines and my nights among the slides of a company that runs mostly on hope, and I find I envy those few kilobytes, which make one promise every morning and keep it.
The older, smaller system pushes water through a capsule under pressure the way an espresso machine does, and every brewer I will sort through in the note on choosing one either steeps or drips, so the Vertuo stands in a third family of its own beside immersion and percolation, and the third family produces a cup with a thick, pale foam on top that looks, from across the room, like crema, and up close turns out to be another creature altogether.
Crema on an espresso is gas held in bubbles by the browning compounds and oils of the coffee, thin and tawny, and it tastes of something, whereas the foam on a Vertuo cup is air and gas whipped into the coffee by the spinning, the colour of a cappuccino and the texture of bath foam, and it tastes of very little. I have taken to calling it the wig, and the coffee underneath is the coffee, and I stir the wig in or spoon it off and feel bad about neither.
What you gain
Consistency, first and above everything, because every cup is the same as the last to a degree that no human being with a kettle can manage: the machine measures the water and the heat and the time and the dose, and the capsule fixes the grind, and the barcode fixes the recipe. I have made the same cup thirty mornings in a row now and it has tasted the same thirty times, which is a strange and slightly lonely experience for someone who keeps a notebook.
Then speed, which is the one gain you can put a number on, counted from wanting a cup to holding one.
How long each method takes at my counter, timed badly with a phone. The capsule wins on the clock and loses on nearly everything the clock cannot measure.
And cleanliness, which I underrated: no grounds on the counter and no filter in the bin and no bed of wet coffee to knock out of a portafilter into a box that the boy will find, only a used capsule dropping into a drawer with a click like a coin in a jar, and that is the end of it.
What you lose
The first loss is freshness, because the capsules are roasted in a factory months before I drink them and sealed with nitrogen so that they do not go stale the way an open bag goes stale, and they still taste to me like coffee that has been asleep; a later note on roast dates will explain why a bean is at its best in the second week after roasting, and no capsule has ever reached me in its second week.
Control goes next, because there is no dial, and you cannot grind finer for a sour cup or coarser for a bitter one, and you can choose a smaller cup size, which uses less water on the same capsule and makes a stronger drink, and that is the entire extent of your influence. After a year of learning what the three dials do, handing them to a barcode feels like handing the car keys to a teenager.
The oils are a complaint that is mine more than anyone's: the spinning whips the coffee into foam and the foam carries the aroma off and up, and what is left is clean and thin and a little tinny at the edges, like a good song through a phone speaker, and I love a cup with weight and a slick on it, which the Vertuo cannot make, though it can make a cup that is fine.
And there is the money, which the chart lays out for four ways of making one cup.
Rough cost of a cup by the way it is made, from my own receipts that spring. The capsule sits between good beans and the café, which is exactly where it sits in every other way too.
The capsule costs more than good beans and less than the café, which is where it sits in every other way too, and I have made my peace with the number by treating it as rent for the ninety seconds, though I would like you to see it before you buy.
The capsules I actually drink
I have tried most of the range, and my opinion, like most of my opinions about coffee, is dark. The dark roast capsules are the only ones that survive the process, because a dark roast has already given up its brightness in the roaster and has the oils and the weight to stand up to being spun into a wig, where a light roast comes out of the machine tasting like tea made in a hurry, all edge and no middle. The ones I keep ordering are the dark roast capsules that Starbucks makes for the Vertuo, which arrive from Amazon in boxes every few weeks and are, I admit, a Boulder man's idea of Seattle, and they fall short of a bag of beans a week out of a good roaster's drum and beat every other capsule I have tried, and they are the same on a bad morning as on a good one, and this spring that sameness is the quality I am paying for.
The aluminium
The capsules are aluminium, which recycles well and which the company will take back in a bag you fill and post, and I do this, though not always, and I tell you both halves because the second is the true one for most people, and a machine that makes a small metal cup of waste every morning is a thing to think about before you buy it rather than after.
When a capsule machine is the right answer
It is the right answer when:
There is a newborn in the house, or there is about to be, and the grinder wakes people.
It is a shared office, or a guest room, or a parent's house, where nobody will keep beans fresh or a grinder clean.
You are ill, or grieving, or working two jobs, and the choice is between a capsule and no coffee at all, or a capsule and a jar of instant.
You will otherwise buy a four-dollar latte every day at eleven.
It is the wrong answer when:
You have thirty seconds and a hand grinder: the hand grinder wins, and the note on grinders will say why.
You have three minutes: the AeroPress wins.
You care about the oils: nothing with a barcode will ever make you happy, and it is worth knowing that about yourself before you spend the money.
Getting the best cup out of one
A month in, since you may have one or be given one:
Run a shot of plain hot water through it into the mug first, and tip it out. Cold porcelain steals heat from a cup that was never very hot, as the water note explains for every brewer.
If the coffee tastes thin, choose the smaller cup size for the same capsule. It is the only dial you have.
Buy dark capsules.
Keep them in their sleeve in a cupboard, away from the sunny jar on the counter where they look nice and go flat.
Descale when the light tells you to, and once more when it does not. The water here is soft and yours may not be, and scale in a machine that measures its own water is a machine that quietly stops measuring.
Empty the capsule drawer and the drip tray every day. I have found things growing in a drip tray that I would not describe in a note about coffee.
What the machine taught me
With every variable fixed, the cup is identical every morning, which means that every bad cup I ever made with a kettle and a cone, every sour Tuesday and bitter Thursday from the extraction note, was me, since the beans were fine and the water, mostly, was fine, and the variable in the end was the man holding the kettle. A machine that takes the man out of the process turns out to be a mirror, and I have been looking into it for a month, and I do not entirely like what I see, and I am grateful for the view.
Colorado, March 2022
What I do not know
I do not know how long this machine will stay on the counter, though I suspect it will outlast the company, which is not saying much this spring, and I suspect that when I finally leave it behind, as I will, because I do not intend to be a capsule man for the rest of my life, I will be sad and a little ashamed, and both of those will be correct.
For now it hums at eleven every morning, a small drone taking off beside my laptop, and the boy comes to watch the capsule drop, and the cup is the same as yesterday's, and some mornings that is all a person can ask.
If you do one thing this morning, and you already own a capsule machine:
Run hot water through it first.
Choose the smaller cup.
Taste the difference.
Then read the note on the grinder, which is where I go next, and where the shortcut ends.
Questions this note answers
Is a Nespresso Vertuo worth buying?
If you need a consistent cup in ninety seconds with no noise and no mess, for a season of your life when attention is scarce, yes. If you have thirty seconds and a hand grinder, no. The capsule costs more than good beans, tastes flatter, and takes every decision away from you, which is both its gift and its price.
How does the Vertuo machine work?
It reads a barcode printed on the rim of each capsule, then spins the capsule at high speed while injecting hot water, and the barcode sets the water volume, the temperature, the spin and the pre-wetting. The thick foam on top is mostly gas whipped into the coffee by the spinning, not the oils of an espresso.
Which capsules taste best?
The dark ones. Capsules are roasted months before you drink them, and dark roasts survive that wait and the whipping far better than light ones, which come out thin. I drank the dark Starbucks capsules for the Vertuo for two years, ordered in boxes every few weeks.
