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Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
It's about coffee, food, life and what other randomness I feel that'll be helpful to the common coffee drinker or to anyone who likes to be entertained by a stranger, briefly.
Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
Moccamaster Review: $300 Coffee Reality Check
In this episode, I dive deep into my hands-on experience with the Moccamaster automatic drip coffee machine after putting it through its paces. I share my initial impressions of this $300 device, from the surprising weight and build quality to the rich, delicious cup it produces with hints of grape-like notes. I discuss how the coffee came out at the perfect drinking temperature and delivered exceptional flavor that caught me off guard. However, I also explore the reality that no coffee equipment is perfect, and I analyze the pros and cons I've discovered after several days of daily use.
I take you through my engineering mindset as I examine the limiting factors of the Moccamaster, particularly focusing on the showerhead design and water distribution. I share my philosophy about modifying coffee equipment to better suit our preferences, drawing parallels to how I've modified other devices like my AeroPress and pellet grill. Listeners will learn about the practical considerations of automatic drip machines, the manual steps still required even with automation, and techniques for optimizing extraction like adjusting flow rates and treating the brewer as an immersion device. I also discuss the broader perspective of accepting imperfections in our coffee gear while finding ways to make improvements that enhance our daily brewing experience.
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[00:00:00] Okay, here we go.
[00:00:11] It's been long enough. I was telling myself a couple days ago, I've been prepping for this day for the longest. There's nothing else I could have done. She was going to see the new coffee gadget, no matter what. I know she's seen it before, but whatever. It was time.
[00:00:37] So, plugged everything in. I was going to do another video. And I started the video. I've already done an unboxing of this actual device.
[00:00:52] And from first glance, it was a big deal. I still wondered about a couple of things here and there with it. But no more guessing or thinking if I was going to like it or not. It didn't matter. I was going to put it through its paces, no matter what. I wanted to see what this whole Moka Master revolution was or is or whatever it may be. I don't know if it still is. So I put in my coffee.
[00:01:27] I already knew the tasting profile. I kind of guessed what the grind size should be. And I turned it on. And I just looked at it. And just as most automatic drip machines, I instantly started to get excited. Did it warm up quickly? Oh, yeah, I really did. I was really surprised because the weight of the whole Moka Master surprised the hell out of me just by the looks and by the way people talk about it.
[00:03:15] With your pour over, it's you, the coffee grounds, and gravity. And your own recipe and what you think that this coffee will taste best at. But once that cup came out, I tasted it.
[00:03:30] I was really surprised how rich, how delicious it was and what a hint of little bit of grapes. Because grapes are fruit. I did taste. I was really surprised. I sat there drinking this hot cup of coffee. It was ready for me to drink, too. I didn't have to wait for it to get any cooler. It was the perfect temperature.
[00:03:59] And I sat there drinking that cup of coffee wondering what other things I can do with it. That was my first introduction to the Moka Master. But one thing that I've noticed the past couple days after using the Moka Master is that there's pros and cons to everything. Meaning that it may seem like it's perfect. It may seem like you don't really have to do anything. But there's pros and cons to anything and everything that we do. Me being a geek and an engineer, I started to analyze and started to think about this whole thing.
[00:04:37] I started to look at some of the limiting factors of the Moka Master. I looked at the wand, the actual way that the brew comes out and the reason why I was fiddling with it. It's a showerhead, right? Of course, that's the thing that's going to be limiting.
[00:04:53] I don't want to mess with it. I really don't. But as I think about it and I joke with my wife a couple days ago as I was smoking some dino ribs on my grill. I call it the old man's pellet grill and I looked at it and it's just humming and doing its thing and it's perfect and there's little to nothing that I need to do with it. Then I started to think about that actual smoker. I modified it.
[00:06:08] Now it's perfect to me. I have more room in order to actually smoke more meat. The bottom rack is kind of pointless. I guess really what I'm saying here is that there's pros and cons to everything that we do in life and especially in coffee.
[00:06:26] So as I look at this actual device, this Moka Master, this device, if you bought it on a regular day any other day, $300. It's kind of crazy that I'm fiddling trying to modify, make better a $300 device. I'm not crazy, right?
[00:06:52] It kind of annoys you a little bit if you're going to think, if you're really thinking about it. But truthfully, we always think about things trying to make them better, trying to make them more to our style, more tailored to our makeup, more to the things that we like to do. And in this case, in coffee.
[00:07:10] And as I was thinking about things that I can do in order to modify it, look at different things online, probably buy a different shower head whatnot. I have thought about that. But when you think about it, there's not that much you can really do with a V60. You can change the filter, you can change up your recipe, swirl, don't swirl, grind size, different coffees. And for the most part, you're going to have to deal with the cons as they present themselves. Same thing with all the other brewers.
[00:08:05] And if something has a little bit more cons than pros, then you simply just stop using it. You use it the least amount of times. So you just sit it down. You don't really worry about it. You don't really get mad about it. But that little modification that I made to the AeroPress is in my monthly, daily, weekly ritual of coffee making just because of that device. And there's been many people telling me you created a problem that didn't need a solution. That may be true.
[00:09:01] But at the end of the day, we're here to make coffee as simple as that sounds. And if we can't make the coffee that we want to, we're just simply going to stop doing it. That's just the way that we're going to be doing it.
[00:09:17] And as I sit here thinking about the Moka Master, I'm like, I do need to make it better, even though I spent all this money. Thank God for Prime Day. But still modifying the $200 machine. That's something that everybody loves and craves and just deals with the little imperfections that it does have because it's not perfect. It's plasticky. It is underwhelming when you actually get close to it and think about the time and effort that you've seen this machine before.
[00:10:02] But then you look past some of those imperfections because some of those things that you can't really change unless I want to go into the coffee brewer maker type of realm, which I really don't. And then you start to look at the machine for what it really is.
[00:10:20] You start to wonder, wow, there's a lot of gadgets that I already have that work really well with it. I really did get lucky with this single cup brewer because I can put an April brewer. I can put a Hario V60. I can put a Chemex on it. I can put all the brewers that I have right now on this device. I can put like a Tricolate on it. I can not do as much as I think that I need to in order to make a cup of coffee.
[00:10:50] I just deal with imperfections from there and kind of make it better in my own way as I go about this whole journey. So yeah, I am going to modify this machine hopefully in the realm of just getting a different shower head or some type of mechanism in order for me to replicate the making of coffee as easy as possible because something is very appealing about this whole automatic turn it on and it does its job.
[00:11:25] I do like that aspect of coffee making to an extent. Sometimes you just want to just turn on the machine. It makes a coffee for you and you're good to go. But even as I was thinking about that, even though it's an automatic drip machine, there's still a lot of manual things that you have to do. You have to grind the coffee. You have to weigh the coffee either in teaspoons or tablespoons. I think most people use tablespoons or grams and you weigh out the water or you just put how many water levels that you want.
[00:12:11] And then once your cup of coffee is done and you're done drinking it, you can do halfway to where it slows it down so it has more contact time, or you can even treat it like an immersion brewer, where you can turn it completely off with the water buildup, and then once that is done, you can go ahead and drain the water.
[00:12:59] Those are some of the things that you can do with it. I haven't really delved into all of it, and I know there's going to be limitations to all of it. But I guess really what I'm saying is that when we think about our coffee gear, I think it's also good that we think about all the things that we do have that we do play around with each and every day.
[00:13:21] Our cars, our pencil sharpeners as I'm thinking about that because of my kids. I think about the computers that I use, think about all the gadgets that I use in order to do these videos, make these talks and do all this stuff. It's not going to be perfect. There's pros and cons to all of it. And as we sit here and think about all of this and kind of go about it in this way, we have to realize that we want to be on the side of things where we're just going to be using it. And that's really where I'm at. That's hopefully where you're at as we talk about all of this.
[00:13:59] So this is just me talking, riffing. Not really getting so much mad and bitter about the situation because I should be because no matter what, if you put your money into something. But for the most part after reading and analyzing and seeing things for what it is, you don't want to do too much to it. But if you want to use it, sometimes you do just have to modify it. So do you think about that a lot? Do you think about modifying your stuff? Has it been better for you? Let's talk about it. I'll talk to you later. This is Coffee Every Day being signing off. Talk to you later. Bye.