When I was a child I remember waking up and walking into the kitchen to see my father pushing a button on a coffee machine. A few minutes later dad would pour the resulting brown liquid into two mugs and he and my mother would start their day with a nice cup of coffee. Now with the popularity of cappuccino and designer coffee and advances in technology things are no longer so simple. Now machines have to make several types of coffee and under the guise of making things easier companies have produced machines that are so automated they are actually more complicated than the older machines. I speak from experience, recently when I needed a new cappuccino machine I tried out theSaeco Minuto but after having two that didn't work I got a Krups XP5280 that requires more work on my part but actually works.
For about a year and half I had the earlier incarnation of the Krups XP5280 a nice small and efficient machine and I was very happy with it. It is not "automated" so I had to put ground beans in it the filter and froth the milk on my own which meant it took about five minutes to make a cappuccino. It was a good cappuccino and I started my day satiated. However all good things must come to an end and the machine broke. As a result this Christmas my parents decided to upgrade my coffee machine and bought me the fully automated Saeco Minuto. This made cappuccino & coffee as well, was much bigger than the Krups taking up a lot of my limited counter space and with a price tag of close $1,000.00 I expected great things. It came with a fully digital display, grinder and automatic steamer so all you had to do was insert coffee beans and put some milk in a container press a few buttons and voila you had your cappuccino. Of course nothing is that simple.
In reality this thing was even more complicated than the Krups. To ensure you were using the machine properly Saeco suggested you watch instructional videos, really what happened to just relying on the printed instructions? Before you even used the machine you had to spend about an hour priming the thing. Once that was complete you had to press several buttons to make one cup of coffee, adjusting for both the strength and the amount. To steam the milk you needed two containers one to hold the milk and one for the steamed milk to go into. The result was a cappuccino that tasted like it came from a pod not beans and watery milk. After the coffee is made the cleanup process is complicated and when I rinsed out the container the used beans wound up all over my counter. Once a week you had to go through an even more complicated cleaning process where you had to take the machine apart. I longed for the simplicity and the taste of my Krups.
To make matters worse the first machine I had was defective. For whatever reason the beans were not getting into the grinder so instead of coffee what I got was a cup of hot water. I took the machine back to Williams Sonoma in New York City. However the store did not have another machine in stock and claimed they could not find the transaction in their computer, in spite of the presence of the receipt, so they suggested I return the machine to the store it was purchased at in Connecticut. Furious I dragged the defective machine home in a snow storm and called Williams Sonoma's customer service. The women I spoke to was very helpful and sent me another machine and arranged to collect the defective one. Once I received the new one I went through the priming process once again and the machine appeared to work fine for a couple of days. After that I tried to steam the milk and the steaming mechanism came flying off. I had enough, this was just not worth it. Once again I spoke to Williams Sonoma who took the machine back and issued me a refund this time. After returning my second defective unit I logged onto Whole Latte Love and ordered the Krups XP5280, which I received a couple days later and I am now once again enjoying my tasty morning cappuccino with minimal hassle.
What did I discover in all of this? Technology has it limits. Sometimes the simpler more primitive machines are the best way to go. With a computer generally speaking a more powerful machine is better but the same is not true of coffee machines. Why do we need coffee machines that are more complicated to use and clean when the simpler machines work fine and make great coffee as well? The more complicated the machine, the more parts there are to break as evidenced by the two machines I went through. In the end coffee is simple so the machines that make it should be simple as well.
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