Showerthought: That $60 French press was way better than my $400 espresso machine

I dropped $400 on a fancy espresso machine last year thinking it would change my mornings, but after 6 months of fiddling with grind settings and descaling it sat collecting dust. Picked up a $60 steel French press from the local hardware store on a whim and now I get better coffee in 4 minutes flat. Why do we keep convincing ourselves that expensive gear equals better results when simple stuff works just fine?

2 comments

2 Comments

patriciah5124d ago

@robert_lopez64 You're spot on about the hobby side of things taking over. Do you ever wonder if part of the appeal of the expensive gear is just the ritual and the gear itself, not the actual coffee?

robert_lopez6425d ago

yeah thats the thing with espresso machines, you have to be willing to basically become a part time barista just to get a decent shot out of it. i had a similar situation with a cheap moka pot i got for like 20 bucks, it makes coffee thats close enough to espresso for me and i dont have to spend 20 minutes dialing in the grind every morning. the whole expensive gear thing is just marketing making us think we need all this fancy stuff to enjoy something simple. french press is basically foolproof, you just need hot water and coarse grounds and you get a clean cup with no plastic parts to break or descaling to worry about. its like people who spend 500 bucks on a cast iron skillet when a 30 dollar lodge does the same thing for decades. we get caught up in the hobby side of things and forget that the actual goal is just drinking good coffee, not running a lab experiment every morning.