I tend to use Nespresso, especially now that the cups are simply available in the shop (and cheap aftermarket options), it's pretty perfect.
I know the manual process is more environmentally friendly but when I wake up in the morning I have no headspace for fussing with coffee grinds. I just need good coffee right away. And I don't even own a car or anything nor have kids so my footprint is pretty low.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/k-cup-creator-john-sylvan-r...
Or is this different?
I'm in Switzerland where recycling Nespresso pods couldn't be easier, and we barely reach a 2/3 recycling rate. US and global rates are much lower.
If Nestlé hadn't crippled their machines on purpose, I'd think third party plastic capsules might be a better option in Europe at least, since they end up in waste co-processing.
Nestle invented an entirely new way to brew coffee AGAIN just to extra lock down their pod system from independent competition.
The built all this wankery about spinning the pods at like 30k rpm to "force the water through the coffee like an espresso machine" but it _doesn't_. As Mr Hoffman discussed, the foam it creates is just aerated coffee, which is substantially different than the foam you get from actually putting water through coffee at high pressure. All this to get a patent on a physical process so that competitors cannot drive the price of their pods down.
And the coffee still tastes like shit. And the machine takes a long time. And it makes a stupid and annoying noise. The system is demonstrably worse than any other pod based system because it was more important to Nestle that they get their pod profit margins than you get acceptable coffee.
Like seriously this should be a crime, not a civil infraction, a crime to artificially lock out competition like this.
On the other hand there are plenty of cheap original Nespresso machines pretty much everywhere in Switzerland. In some countries Nestlé was virtually giving them away around 2010~2015. Shortly after, some patents expired and third party brands started selling plastic capsules, and Nestlé had to fight back and make their machines work poorly with these!
As far as I know all patents have expired now, and a few third party brands sell 100% compatible aluminium capsules.
Even the integrated gasket patent?
There's still the proprietary secret of how they grind the coffee. Which nobody has successfully replicated meaning that all else being equal you still don't get exactly the same result.
That being said, from my experience with genuine nespresso pods in genuine nespresso machines, they taste nothing like espresso and nothing like a good coffee.
Over extracted, pressurized espresso with capsules or even most semi-autos is disappointing.
I don't like it, I think Original Nespresso tastes way better. Of course nothing compared to a good espresso extraction, but for a quick sip it is good enough.
But the main point of it is that they were able to create new patents and milk them for their duration.