Feeding My Addiction

If you’ve been reading here long, you know that I love coffee.  I’ve had all kinds of coffee pots over the years.  I’ve tried cheap ones.  I’ve tried expensive ones (to me, any coffee pot that costs over $100 is expensive).  I’ve bought green coffee beans and had them roasted to order.  I jumped up and down when Caribou Coffee opened, only to become…disillusioned.

Over time, my taste has changed.  I used to love Gevalia, for example.  I bought Kenya by the box.  Then I got sick of it and I can’t stand how it tastes now, even from other companies.  There’s a honey-cured bean (with some of the coffee fruit still on the bean) that we adored from Costa Rica, but we haven’t been able to order it for over a year.  Nothing else compares.  Even my old standby – Mahogany from Caribou – loses its taste if that’s all I drink.  It helps if I trade in other coffees, like Living After Midnight from Classic Rock, a local roastery, but…

Now I’m having problems with my coffee pot.

I’m hard on pots, I know that.  I make 2-4 pots a day.  By “pot” I don’t mean a full pot.  I make just enough at once to fill my favorite white mug, which takes about 4 cups of water on the measuring line.  I use a ridiculous amount of beans to get it as strong as I like, even with the 1-4 cup/Bold setting on this pot.  Yet it still doesn’t have that TASTE I want.

It’s hard to describe.  It’s like when you steal the first 1/2 cup or so out of the pot, when it’s really really strong and rich.  That’s what I like.  I’ve been making my coffee stronger and stronger over time, and cutting back on how much I make as a result, but this pot just isn’t making the coffee as strong as I like, even when I only make 1 cup at a time.  Plus it’s ridiculously expensive to waste so many beans.

Then this pot started leaking.  And it’s less than 6 months old!  I thought a KitchenAid would last longer than that.

Anyway, I’ve been eying an espresso machine as a result.  I wanted that rich strong taste that I crave, even if I get a much smaller cup at once.  (If I drank my white mug full of espresso I think I’d have a heart attack.)

We went to Everything Kitchen to try out some different pots (they were nice enough to demo them for me, which makes shopping so much easier).  I tasted espresso both from a Nepresso Pixie and a gorgeous stainless steel Saeco, fully automated.  I admit, I loved that Saeco.  The coffee was incredible.

So was the sticker price at over $1200.  Gulp!!!

Needless to say, I didn’t spend that much.  But I did spend more than I’ve ever spent on a coffee pot before and bought the Pixie.  I was reluctant because I don’t want to chain myself to a pod-only system, but since I’m fairly tired of the beans I typically buy, it’s a risk I was willing to take.  Plus my other pot still works — it just leaks.  When I need to change things up, I can always make a traditional pot of coffee.

So here’s my cute little lime-green Pixie.  (My colors are black or red, but this was a demo model and I got a really good price on it.)  My only complaint so far:  I ran out of the sample pods way too quickly!  I was desperate enough that I drank the decaf ones today until my order arrived.

I’m not addicted or anything….