Making Great Coffee at Home
March 6th, 2010 | Posted by Pauline
This is a followup blog post to a post from our 2007 trip to Switzerland – The Coffee in Switzerland is Great!
Steve and I love coffee. I drink 2 – 3 cups a day and I want them to be perfect. At home we have Jura Capresso Impressa E8, an older model similar to the Jura Capresso F50, and we love it. It was expensive, around $800.
You put water into one side of the machine, whole coffee beans into the other and you are ready to go. Select the strength and the amount of water, then press the button. The beans are ground and it makes an excellent cup of coffee, topped with a foamy layer called the “crema”.
We use Starbucks Organic Yukon Blend, $11.95 for one pound. It probably last 2 weeks, so that would be about 70 cups (5 cups a day) – $0.17 per cup.
Another option for great coffee at home is the Nespresso. We used one in July 2007 when we rented a chalet apartment in Leysin, Switzerland – Chalet Chimere.
You purchase coffee “capsules” (pre-packaged one serving ground coffee), put one in the machine, set the water level, press the button and you get a coffee. The photo shows Steve putting one of the coffee capsules into the machine.
And the capsules are both the upside and downside of these coffee makers. The capsules are great, but they are expensive. You can only buy them from Nespresso (you join the “Nespresso Club”) and they are about $0.55 each. So, 55 cents for a cup of good coffee – compared to about 17 cents for the Capresso. But the price of the Capresso is $800, while the Nespresso is less than $249.
Purchase from Amazon (list price $249) – Nespresso C100/T1 Essenza Automatic Machine, Titan Gray
Read more about the Nespresso from Girasoli – Shave Ice and Gelato – My Christmas Present to Myself.
My serious coffee drinking friends have real espresso machines, where you grind the coffee, put it in the holder, tamp it down, put it in the machine, put in the water, pull some mysterious lever, and produce a perfect espresso – but that always seemed like too much work for me. Plus it looks like those machines are about to blow up.
Coffee by Country
- Coffee in Boulder (where we live) is fantastic. There are many independently owned coffee shops all over town – The Cup, Laughing Goat, Logan’s (in my North Boulder neighborhood), Vic’s (a local chain), Trident – plus a Peet’s and several Starbucks.
- Coffee in the US in general is better than it was a decade ago. Starbucks has spread through the country. Even the chain restaurants like Wendy’s and MacDonalds, have good coffee now.
- Coffee in England is good. Those Tea Rooms don’t just do tea, they usually make a good cup of coffee too. You will find Costa Coffee shops all over England and there are Starbucks too.
- Coffee in France, Switzerland and Italy is great.

















