gaggia no more

A couple of weeks ago I lost my coffee machine. It was a wedding present from Scally and Max and it served me faithfully for something in the order of 4,800 coffees over the last eight years.  That seems to be par for the course I think, and coupled with the hardness of the water in London it finally made its last coffee.  It died and I took it to the manufacturers to be repaired.  They came back to me a last week and said that it could be fixed, but it was going to be very expensive and it would need further repair again in the future. So I decided to retire it and get a new one.  It is a Saeco Odea Giro Plus in a special edition copper colour.  It is a bean to cup machine which means that all I have to do is push a button with a cup under the spout and espresso comes out.  No grinding of beans, no measuring of coffee, no tamping it into the outlet.  Just push a button folks, and it grinds the beans to your specified granularity, filters water through them at the right temperature and then disposes of the used grounds into a hopper.  Its awesome, and it actually makes wonderful wonderful coffee.  To put that in perspective, I had two choices of machine I could get.  One was just under two thousand Euros, and one was this one for three hundred and fifty.  The espresso from both machines tastes exactly the same.  The only difference is that this one doesn’t actually froth the milk for you and dispense it – you have to froth your own milk!  That isn’t as bad as it sounds actually.  With my old Gaggia the milk frothing for cappuccino took a few boring minutes in a jug.  The Odea milk frothing wand is way faster, easier to clean and makes better froth anyway.  Much better froth actually.  The bubbles are denser and smaller than the Gaggia made bubbles.  All in all its a dream to use.

Now, if I was going to have quibbles about it then it would probably be about the size of the machine.  It is very small, which means that the water container only holds about litre, and the outlet water container needs to be emptied every day.  I think I can live with that though ;-)  It also comes with a build-in Brita filter in the water reservoir so it will automatically soften the water for me which is pretty cool.  It also has dosage and quantity controls on it, so I can specify a) the amount of coffee that gets dispensed and b) the strength of the coffee.

The Gaggia is dead :-( Long live the Saeco!