Espresso Cups Sets Ebay
A common college money saving tip is to avoid buying your coffee. Make it instead.
This just makes a whole heap of sense. Why spend money every morning on a grande (that's a medium for those of you who need a Starbucks lingo refresher) when you can make it for next to nothing at home?
Grocery stores have all manner of house-blended-(insert foreign sounding nut here)-roasted varieties that taste just as delicious as anything the chain stores offer, but this only really works if your drink of choice is a standard cup of java. Things become a little more difficult if you get used to drinking beverages that either start or end with words like “mocha,” “chino” or “latte.”
So, short of buying a specialty machine, what can a money-conscious, college student do to drink great coffee and stay fiscally responsible?
Ah, ou et magnifique!: The answer lies in the subtleties of the French press.
At its heart, the French press is a glorified tea pot with a mesh plunger that runs through the top, down the entire length of the device. They even look like tall, cylindrical tea kettles. They are usually made of glass and you don't heat them on the stove. Instead, you scoop in ground coffee and fill the container with hot water. The measurements can vary to your desired strength. After a few minutes of soaking, you push the plunger down–which forces all of the loose, floating bits to stay at the bottom–and viola: You have fresh, drinkable coffee. Its super simple and takes only four minutes to make.
The fact that you have direct control of the water-to-grounds mixture means you can make a drink to suit your situation. Tired? Lots of grounds with little water gives you an immediate espresso. Just in the mood for a pick me up? Do the reverse.
Target.com sells a Bodum Chambord 3-cup press for $29.99 and Walmart.com has a Mr. Coffee 5-piece “indulgence” press kit for $29.98. Both prices compare to your average coffee maker which can also be purchased at either store. The difference between the press and the run-of-the-mill coffee maker lies in the level of control the user has over the outcome of the drink. With the French press, you can control the strength of your drink, but what about the consistency?
A good companion piece to any press is another item of equipment called a milk frother. The company Bonjour makes a very good one; Target sells the “Froth Maximus” for $29.99 and while Walmart doesn't have the item listed on its online site, Sears has the exact product at the same price.
It looks just like a mini-press and in essence, operates like one — except instead of coffee, you guessed it, you use milk. The plunger in the frother acts more like a flat whisk, which causes the liquid to foam with repeated pumping. Instead of just lightening your coffee, some of the foamed milk will sit on top of the drink, which helps to give it a thicker, creamier quality.
The outcome of using heated milk in this way is very similar to what steaming machines will do and once added, tastes very similar. And again, messing with the ratio of coffee to milk can change your espresso into something much more resembling a latte or cappuccino.
It's time to crunch some numbers. A standard medium cup of coffee costs around $2.25 at Starbucks, $1.99 At Caribou Coffee and $1.69 at Dunkin' Donuts. For the sake of argument, let's average the price to $2. Now this is just a cup of black coffee (without tax). The prices will obviously increase depending on the amount of prefixes and suffixes in the drink's name. A cup every weekday morning will run $10. The total, one-time price of a French press and frother runs about $55. After only five and a half weeks (and less than 60 cups later), you've already broken even.
It'll be even faster if you're an avid drinker and require more than one cup a day to function. This may sound like it takes quite a while to pay off, but if you think about the situation long term, you only have to buy the press once and then everything after that is money saved.
The only real expense is purchasing various ground coffee from your local grocery store. A massive tub of Folgers only costs $7.46 and guarantees 240 cups per container — it's the same as the price of just under four cups from Starbucks — and milk, which you'll probably have on hand anyway.
So there you have it: After less than three months of owning these two items, you'll already be saving money. And when you get bored with the drink you're making, change it. Buy a different kind of coffee from the store, add a sweetening syrup, heat the milk.
If saving money alone isn't enough to convince you, the press also makes some really good loose-leaf tea. With all of that in mind, why waste cash on something you can do for much less … and waste time waiting in line that you can better spend sleeping? Fancy additives and steamed liquids can only improve a drink so much; the sweetest improvements are free.
Since moving to New York in 2007, I have been following with somewhat obsessive interest the spread of good coffee across the city. By good coffee I suppose I mainly mean good espresso, made on a manual machine by people who care. Naturally, this rules out Starbucks, whose turn toward mediocrity became clear with the switch to automatic espresso machines in the early 2000s. I had worked at a Starbucks briefly in 2001, when the company still used high-quality manual machines made by La Marzocco, and was dismayed by this change, which seemed to convey the company's lack of faith in its baristas to do anything subtler than press buttons. Of course, the result was distinctly inferior coffee. Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO generally described these days as “embattled,” appears keen to reverse this trend–which is nice, since he was responsible for it in the first place. I hope he succeeds, as finding a good cappuccino would then be as simple as finding a Senegalese umbrella-peddler in a rainstorm.
But for now, finding the good stuff can still require a little effort. This is especially true if you live in the outer reaches of caffeinated civilization: for example, the far east 80s, where I live. Here on the Upper East Side, we inhabit a virtual coffee desert, the only oases being the expensive and table-service-only (but great) Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, and the expensive and self-satisfied (but at least very Italian) Sant'Ambroeus and Via Quadronno, both in the east 70s.
To the true coffee lover, however, distance is no barrier. For a long time it was enough for me to hear of a good place in some wildly inconvenient neighborhood, and I'd be there. Balzac was apparently the same way, traveling from one corner of Paris to another to get his coffee beans–Mocha Java in this arrondissement, Bourbon (the coffee varietal, not the spirit) in that; he spent hours on these errands. I first got to know certain New York streets and neighborhoods from my espresso-scouting missions: West 20th Street, for example (Café Grumpy), or Alphabet City (the immortal Ninth Street Espresso). A mental map started to emerge, illuminated as if by a caffeinated glow in each of these spots.
Many of the places tended to be downtown. Good espresso bars, like good restaurants, have in recent years congregated below 14th Street, that frontier which seems to separate the hip from the humdrum. The reasons for this clustering effect are fairly clear: downtown one finds more young people, more students, more artists–in short, more people with hours during the day when they don't have to be somewhere. A place like Doma on Perry Street can get so crowded on, say, a Wednesday morning at 11, that one simply can't find a seat. The same goes for places with superior coffee, such as Ninth Street Espresso, or Joe: The Art of Coffee, in its original Waverly Place location, or Jack's Stir-Brew Coffee, around the corner from Joe, on West 10th Street.
There are those from even more caffeinated societies than this one–the Pacific Northwest, or Italy for that matter–who might say New York still has a ways to go in terms of espresso-bar saturation. But it has been cheering to see good coffee make its way up Manhattan island, even in the relatively short time I've lived here. The excellent Joe, run by Jonathan Rubinstein, expanded to Chelsea, then Grand Central (an original and savvy choice), then the Upper West Side, keeping to its high standards in each. There was also the exciting arrival of Stumptown, the outstanding Portland, OR, roaster, in a beautifully appointed space at the Ace Hotel on 29th Street. Perhaps slightly less exalted, but still excellent alternatives to Starbucks, are the midtown espresso bars Zibetto and Fika, and the quality Israeli chain Aroma, on the Upper West Side (there is also a Soho branch). I could go on.
In short, New York, which seldom contents itself with being second-best, has entered a golden period for coffee, one which keeps getting better. Indeed, it seems my own neighborhood, the Upper East Side, may be the only place not getting its fix of good espresso. Is café society doomed to fail in this neighborhood of busy bankers and Pilates-hardened wives? Well, I will continue to take the subway to wherever I need to go for the one true beverage. But would it be too much to hope that some espresso entrepreneur will take pity on our neighborhood in 2010? There might just be a line around the block.
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