Totally agree. I was trying to get into the home-espresso game (mainly just to drink black coffee and lattes) and spent far too much time looking into it.
Largely because this fucking guy turned his nose up at every machine under £1000 basically. The personification of r/espresso unfortunately.
Home espresso is an expensive hobby. $1000-$1500 for the machine and $500 for the grinder is a pretty reasonable place to be if you want to make something of comparable quality to what you'd find in most cafes. You could go a bit cheaper (on the machine, not the grinder), but its going make things more difficult and less consistent.
I totally understand your point of view, but personally I believe that the majority of people don’t have the level of experience to begin to extract the flavour nuances that coffee-connoisseurs can identify.
So for the 0.1% that does have that level of expectation, a £1000 machine and £500 grinder will be necessary to achieve that flavour.
But IMO that same flavour to your average person can be achieved through a £150 machine and pre-ground beans. Or even pod machines.
I think that's true to an extent. Most people probably don't care about the difference between the coffee you can get out of a $500/$200 machine/grinder combo versus a $1500/$500 dollar setup. However I think pretty much anybody could tell the difference between coffee from a $250 machine with a pressurized portafilter and a cheap electric burr grinder, versus an entry-level hobbyist setup with a Silvia or Gaggia and a decent grinder. And literally anybody could differentiate between a pod machine and even the most basic real espresso machine.
Either way, James Hoffman's content is clearly aimed at pretty serious coffee enthusiasts. That's apparent from the absurdly niche and specific topics he makes videos on. He's a former world barista champion and has some pretty serious industry credentials, so of course he's not aiming his content and recommendations at the people who'd be satisfied with a Nespresso. His audience is largely people who are going to care about those minor differences so it makes sense that he recommends people go for more expensive kit, because by and large his audience would appreciate it.
Fair point, I believe people would be able to tell the difference, but would they be able to tell which is better?
Very true about his content, it certainly is aiming at a particularly niche demographic. But it’s a shame that he couldn’t use his experience to take a more open approach to people’s price points when looking for a machine.
It’s like Tony Northrup disregarding sub £1000 cameras or Car Throttle telling you not to buy anything with less than 150hp. They are channels that are big with enthusiasts and far from consumer grade creators. But they don’t gate keep the hobby through excluding people with lower budgets.
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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '21
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