I fired Howard Schultz
I have been irritated for some time now by how much money Michelle and I were spending at Starbucks. Every morning on the way to work we'd stop and drop $8 or so on two coffee drinks. In addition, this ritual usually involved waiting in line. I hate to wait in line. Once I started doing a little research, I realized that the coffee we were getting for our money and time probably wasn't even that good.
Enter the system you see in the picture. On the right, a La Pavoni lever espresso machine. On the left, a Macap M4 grinder. The platinum colored grinder to the right of the Macap is a Kitchenaid burr grinder that I use for French press coffee. This is an obscenely expensive espresso setup, which set us back pretty much $2000. That sounds like a lot (OK, it's more than a lot, it's ridiculous), but we haven't set foot in a Starbucks for over a month, so we've already saved the $250 that we'd have spent there in that month. So even this excessive collection of geek toys will pay for itself in about 8 months, and none of it is likely to wear out in our lifetime. What you don't see here is the roaster (it was only about $100). The advantage of this system is that we can make our own espresso drinks, with fresh beans (roasted 12 hours before in our roaster), and the proper handling. Green coffee beans to roast cost $4/lb. for great beans, as opposed to $10+/lb. for beans roasted 2 months ago by some large coffee company, that have been laying around oxidizing ever since. I'm a rank amateur, and I bought the hardest machine to learn how to use, and despite all that I can *still* taste the much improved quality over what I was getting at Starbucks. Quite a bit of this is down to the fresh beans, some is the more consistent grind of those beans, and the rest is extra care in preparation.
The equipment here also allows my plain old coffee to be much better. I've been using a French press system from Bodum, and the evenness of the grind produced by our hideously expensive burr grinder means that the quality of the coffee has improved noticeably. I am looking forward to trying out a Sunbeam vacuum coffee system that my dad is bringing up here for Thanksgiving.