Almost every Italian household has a 'moka' coffee pot. These are little silver pots in which you place your coffee grains, add water to the compartment below and then place on the cooker top to boil.
It's a great substitute for espresso at home - from which you can obviously add milk, if you wish, for a variation of your own favourite drink.
But, there's a long-standing issue with these pots. Coffee is best when it's not over-extracted & scalded. It quickly develops a burnt, more bitter flavour.
Capsule machines - whilst they make acceptable coffee - are, in my opinion, wasteful & expensive. That said, if you're used to paying a fortune for your coffee, you may think them a decent saver!
But no. These are not the solution. The answer has been around quite some time now and I've been using it exclusively at home for the best part of 6 months. I can't believe I didn't discover it sooner:
Aeropress
It's a such a simple, but well thought-out gadget which makes amazing coffee. Simply add your coffee, screw on the filter cap, and add your 'hot' but not 'boiling' water. Give it a little stir and wait a couple of minutes. Then plunge it to extract the coffee into a waiting mug or a small jug.
It costs around $35 and is an absolute steal. For that price you get the Aeropress, a scoop, a funnel, a stirrer and enough filters for most people, for a year. You can buy more of those for less than a cent each. I'm pretty sure that when I last looked around, you could buy the Aeropress on its own for $10 less if you don't need the extras.
When I travel, I throw it in a bag together with a little zip-lock bag of coffee grinds. Since I can always find a kettle in a hotel room, I guarantee a great coffee to get me on my way in the morning - if there's no decent coffee bar near by.
It's become such a big deal in the coffee world, that there are competitions at shows for the best Aeropress coffees made. I even came across it on a menu in a very 'cool' cafe in Bangkok. Imagine my surprise amongst the cafe lattes & espressos on offer, to see 'Aeropress'!
YouTube is your friend, if you're curious. There are videos galore teaching ways to make even better coffee with Aeropress - measuring the water temperature used, making it upside down (the machine, not yourself!) and so on. It's cheap, fun, super simple to clean (10 seconds!) and amazing value. If you like coffee - you should have one of these in your cupboard.
Here's one of Aeropress' own videos. It looks old to me, but shows the method perfectly.
