I've a history of not coping well with the funny coffee pods that have appeared in hotels in the past few years. And now we have a Dolce Gusto machine in the office. I went on their site to try and find sensible ways to mitigate the environmental impact of every cup of coffee having two to four little plastic pods thrown away (I got a bag) and also got £20 worth of pods to share with the team.
I don't really use much dairy these days (clotted cream on scones and a dash of milk in tea is about it!) so I picked up one of the lovely vegan varieties and some twists on my new favourite the Latte Macchiato.
Flat White is the 'might as well drink instant' of the filter coffees for me so I decided to only try one. I'm sure that for those that love the smoothness all three are worth a shot. I didn't want to get 36 pods if I wasn't a fan though!
I genuinely don't know if this is good.
Ah - the little plastic beasts. All mixed up with the different kinds of plastic.
Good job I set up a recycling station! Draining the pods is a pain (I put extra holes in the lids) but the plastic tub for before going in the bag really helps get the extra 'juice' out.
The real strength of these machines is that it makes the coffee smell so good - with the almond smell too it's amazing. But... This one doesn't taste great! Like a lot of the milk substitutes the technology is taking a while to catch up. The cartons of almond milk are fab and happily on my cereal every day. Powdered almond milk really didn't hit the spot - although oddly some in the office preferred this to the regular flat white (which we already had).
Not one I'll personally buy again then - but if the office uses them all maybe I'll get coconut?!
This however was pretty awesome. Lovely fluffy white steamed milk, and really intense Guatemalan Coffee.
Frothy milk first - then spike the shot of coffee through it - one notch on the pod means in theory you only use the coffee for 10 seconds before binning it. That doesn't seem ecological!
Still - as long as we fill the bag and send it back then we might be ok?
The powerful aroma from this one always perks the office up (i've had a couple since) and as you only get 6 small cups worth this would be the first to run out.
That is if I didn't have an office with two people obsessed by the chocolate ones.
Chococino is a little sophisticated luxury for them (they usually buy the Nesquik version!) so all 8 drinks of this went in the first week. I managed to bag one.
Other than being a pretty convenient way to make hot chocolate I don't think this is what the machine is for - do they put ground cocoa beans in the pod? I doubt it! I'll have to hack one open and see.
Overall though it's a pretty expensive hobby, and not something I can justify keeping in stock (each box is basically £4 so 50p for the HoCho, 30p for the Flat White, & 67p for the Guatemalan).
It definitely saves money & time vs a walk to the hospital Costa, but realistically for a drink of any real size you need to use twice the directed pods and double the above prices and suddenly you might as well have someone else make it for you too.
I'm sure a second order will be placed (and I still have two varieties of Macchiato to try!).
2 comments:
Mate, do you know how BAD for the environment almonds are?!
Yup - which is why my default is pea milk where it's available - but unfortunately most places only do almond/oat/soy. In fairness there are a lot of ways to make almonds slightly better (reuse of rain water etc.) but anything at scale takes ages to get perfect.
So I use dairy milk for tea, and almond for cereal each morning.
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