My Spinn on Coffee

I don’t know about you, but I need to start my day with caffeine kicking in before reality does. 

When I retired, I lost access to super-good coffee at work.  That left me experimenting to find an alternative, and to musing about coffee in general.

I know what you’re thinking.  Coffee is bad for you, right? Well, I know you can find articles that say that, but there are articles that say a couple of cups before noon are actually good for you.  You can have your articles, and I can have mine.  That seems to be a thing in the today’s world of made-up facts, but at least mine are sourced in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 

Anyway, back to coffee.  Most of coffee is grown in third world countries, often by people who are underpaid and under-appreciated.  They grow the coffee plants, pick the beans, dry them, and pack them for shipping.  The beans arrive by boat to the US and are shipped to a roaster.  In the case of my local roaster, the beans are largely from Central America.  But they are also something called “fair trade.”   Fair Trade is a global movement made up of producers, distributors, consumers, and other organizations.  Fair Trade certified products are produced with an assurance of safe working conditions; environmental protections; sustainable livelihoods; and community development funding. If you see something with the Fair Trade Certificate, you should consider purchasing it even if it is more expensive.  Fair Trade Certified products treat the produces fairly and in a sustainable, livable manner.

Anyway, I get my coffee from a local roaster who sells Fair Trade Certified beans.  I have them roasted and delivered to my home as I need them, so they are fresh from the roaster.  I grind the beans as I need them to make coffee, continuing the idea that “fresh is best.”  

When I retired, I had a Keurig coffee maker that my spouse Gene used and that I used on weekends.  The coffee had caffeine in it, but that was about all it had going for it.  Plus, it generated all those plastic cups, and I’m not sure of their fate in the recycle bin.  In any case, after a couple of months of yucky coffee, I decided to try something different.

My first experiment was Nespresso.  It used a new technology to “spin” the ground coffee to brew a cup, and gave a pretty good crema, just like the super-expensive coffee maker at work.  They even gave you a post-paid bag to send the spent plastic cartridges back to them for recycling.  I was pretty happy with this machine, except that it got to be expensive.  For one thing, I couldn’t use my local roaster: you had to use these little cup things and, unlike Keurig, there was no third party aftermarket.  So I was stuck with guessing which coffee was best for me—you couldn’t even get “Italian Roast” or any other conventional grind.

Eventually I tired of sending $60 a month to Nespresso for coffee, so I tried some other things.  French press lasted less than a week—the last thing I wanted was grounds in my coffee and the mess the press made.  Then I tried Chemex.  Slow.  I mean really slow, waiting for it to drip through.  And I could taste the filter.  Yuck.  Next, I tried something called Aeropress.  It worked pretty well, although it was pretty tedious to make that first cup of coffee.  In the morning I just can’t wait!

Further, the Nespresso had spoiled me.  I wanted crema on top of my coffee.  It’s an indication that the brewing method has extracted the maximum flavor from the beans, and Chemex, French press, and Aeropress just didn’t do it.  After some research, I learned that the crema arises from the pressure used to force the water through the grounds.  The spin method that Nespresso used got the pressure via spinning as opposed to mechanically pressing the water through the ground coffee.

More research, and I learned that Nespresso had licensed the spin technology and that the inventor had a kick-started that would produce his own version, called Spinn.  Whoopee!  I went to the kick-starter site, invested in the product, and waited to get my new Spinn coffee maker.

And waited.

And then waited some more.

After over two years of waiting, I decided the kick-starter had probably failed, as most do.  I was sick of messing around with the Aeropress, so I sprung for a Phillips Espresso machine that was on sale from Seattle Coffee.  I’ve been using it for about a year, and I’ve been more or less been happy with it.  It makes good coffee from my own beans, produces (some) crema, and requires only a little weekly

But then two weeks ago, out of the blue, I got my Spinn coffee maker.  That’s the one I’d given up on.  I figured I’d give it a try even though the Phillips machine was okay.  I’m so glad I did.

For starters, it’s smaller and more compact than the Phillips. That’s good, since counter space is always at a premium in my kitchen.  But the real improvement is in the coffee.  It’s absolutely awesome.  It produces reasonable crema, but the taste is by far the best of the various methods I’ve tried. As you can see, I’ve tried just about all the various coffee-brewing methods.  The taste from the Spinn is even better than the expensive Jura machine we had a work.  It’s better than the local Starbucks.

The coffee maker comes with nine basic recipes, and you can tweak each of these in several ways. I’ve settled on a double espresso, to which I add foamed milk.  My Nespresso milk-foamer doesn’t produce the right consistency for cappuccino art, but it does heat the milk to the right temperature to release the sugars, adding sweetness to the coffee. 

The Spinn machine requires minimal maintenance, unlike the tedious weekly maintenance for the Phillips and Jura machines.  It’s well-engineered, and you can control it from an app on your phone if you are so inclined.  It even senses when you’re running low on coffee and orders from your local roaster. 

But it’s not the engineering that makes this machine so good.  It’s the awesome coffee.

I’m glad I got in the bargain-basement price by being part of the kick-starter campaign, as I’m not sure I would have spent the retail price of $900 for this machine.  But for sure I’m glad I’ve got it.