I was about to add this coffee maker (excuse me: espresso maker) to the Luddite gift guide but instead I felt it deserved special mention. As a fan of pod-based coffee-makers, I love almost everything about the EA82 – except its price.

This thing is a dense block of coffee-creation goodness. Operation is simple – add some water, whole beans, and a cup. You select the type of coffee – espresso or regular – and press a button. The machine does everything from grinding the beans, heating the the milk and water, and blowing out delicious coffee with just the right top of frothy crema.

The kit also includes a milk steamer and separate milk container for making endless cappuccinos and lattes.

The entire thing is self-cleaning and all you have to do is dump the grounds and some excess water. It comes in red and black, so you can buy one of each to match each of your kitchens.

Now for the bad news: this thing costs $795 on a good day and has an MSRP of $1,200, which is just about as nutso as it gets. However, I assure you that the coffee this thing pumps out is just about the best stuff that I’ve tasted in a long while and it will definitely steer you away from those $6-a-cup joints down in the building lobby.

There is, obviously, no way the average person would invest this much in a coffee maker, but if you’re running a small office this may save you quite a bit of cash in the long run. The system is solid, handsome, and easy-to-use and it definitely saves on the $1.25-per-cup price of many pod makers. For personal use a French press would probably produce equally good coffee, but the clean-up time and simplicity of this system is too nice to ignore.

Hopefully this coffee monster falls in price over the next few months and allows everyone to enjoy her freshly brewed goodness. Until then, I’ll drink cup after cup of coffee out of this loaner unit they sent me and cry, my lamentations rattling the heavens, when it’s time for it to go back.

Product Page

What is it? A laser cutter? A mod photo enlarger? A microscope? A tattoo remover? Nope, it’s a coffee maker, but an extremely svelte coffee maker. In fact, I imagine this little Nespresso-friendly caffeine inducer would look pretty sweet in your typical “ice hotel” or ad agency lobby.

Clearly, we’ve come a long way since days of yore when a Cuisinart was enough you get you by in the couture circuit.

To answer whether or not industrial design student Tali Shilo’s lovely little coffee machine actually exists yet is another question. Looking in the Yanko online store I don’t see it — though unlike many concepts from Yanko, this one actually seems like a practical design for the real world.

That said, I’m not sure why it’s being billed as a “minimalist” machine, when it’s electrically powered and requires fancy coffee packets. These low-tech coffee solutions are probably a little more minimalist, but this one is definitely cool.

[via Trendhunter]

I’d heard that you have to be careful with your grind, since it was designed to work with a rather specific kind, and people complained about overly chewy coffee and some sludge at the bottom. Kone hears your prayers. They re-engineered the perforation pattern to be a bit finer, and now this should be less of a problem.

Some also received cuts from the top of the Kone, which is indeed very thin metal — so thin, in fact, that it also occasionally dented when the grounds were tapped out. So Coava got a more robust material to make the thing out of, and added a little removable silicone ring you can put on that dangerous top part.

Price is still $50 — a lot for a filter, but for coffee lovers partial to the pourover method, it’s an investment, and a better investment than it was last week. I think I may actually check one of these things out now.

[via Gizmodo]

At €36.50 it’s rather more than its Bialetti equivalent, and replacement parts might be hard to come by, but as the Emperor might say, that’s the price you pay for power.

What are you waiting for? Ajouter au panier!

It’s a stainless steel bean, as you can see, and sealed in the middle are five ounces of a special material that melts at 140. Put a Joulie in your coffee, and it’ll absorb the excess heat and bring it down to drinkable temperature — and then as it drops below 140, the material releases its heat energy again, keeping your drink hot longer.

So it’s a fancy rock, basically. That’s not a bad thing — they’re customized to maintain the perfect temperature and you can use more than one if you want to cool it down faster.

The immediate concerns I have are safety, taste, and my teeth. Safety is taken care of: they assure us that not only is the material non-toxic, but it’s totally sealed within the stainless steel shell. Taste is a little harder to say — will stainless steel affect the taste? Maybe not by any large amount, but I’m guessing (even if it’s psychosomatic) that some coffee snobs will say they can tell. And as for my teeth — well, it’s a big piece of stainless steel in my cup, what if it comes crashing down on my face?

Reservations aside, this seems like a cool idea. Check out their Kickstarter page for more info and drop a few bucks in the jar if you want to see these things made a reality.

[via Uncrate]

Starbucks, the coffee giant, has just launched an electronic gift card program called Starbucks Card eGifts. There’s two primary ways to top-up your (or your friends’) gift cards. The first is simplest, and that’s by going to the Starbucks Web site and telling it which e-mail address to send the funds to. Nothing too complicated there, and you can specify whether to send a predetermined amount ($5, $10, $15, or $20), or you can send however much you like. And what kind of retail program would be relevant in 2011 without Facebook integration?

Facebook users are able to connect their account to the eGifts program, and doing so will open up a few different opportunities. You can, of course, more easily add funds to your own account, but then you’re able to send eGifts to any of your Facebook friends without necessarily knowing their e-mail address.

The program starts today.

Starbucks says that people put some $1.5 billion on its gift cards last year, which just so happens to be a 21 percent increase over the previous year.

Just in time for all those Trenta ice coffees, right?

When you go into a coffee shop anymore, isn’t it just full of iPads, others tabs, and coffee labs? These days, many of us aren’t looking to newspaper as a source of breaking and premium content; instead we’d rather know what conflict @kanyewest or @michaelarrington have gotten into.

The Box coffee shop in Split, Croatia is no different, except that they will be providing free iPads instead of free newspapers. The move away from newspaper is said to be “greener,” since the shop won’t have to throw away the papers every day. As a anti-theft method, the cafe fitted the iPads with a security tag that alerts baristas if the tablet has moved far from the table.

Let’s be honest here, tech people have got to be the biggest consumers of coffee; it’s impossible to machine-out otherwise. By appealing to techies, The Box will bring in all the caffeine addicted Twitter heads.

Bread and circuses, friends. Bread and circuses.

Designed as a reusable sleve for a coffee cup, RuMe added a useful zippered pocket so the cuff also functions as a safe, secure armband cash wallet. Now you can walk, jog, rollerbalde to the coffee shop with cash, cards & keys tucked safely inside! Every year more than a billion disposable coffee sleeves are discarded, and the sturdy, tight-fitting elastic not only makes a better sleeve for that hot latte, but is an incredibly easy way to reduce waste. Choose: Fuchsia, Grass, Indigo, Black, Tangerine or Lemon.

Insult to injury? It costs $10.

Product Page via Deletyourself

It’s all very pie-in-the-sky right now with little information as to how the RFID tags will be used. However, it is an interesting move in the SSC world. For example, employees could get certain coffee types out of the machine with an RFID tag or the pods themselves could communicate with certain machines. You could also automate the pod process, creating an all-knowing coffee robot. It could happen.

via SingleServeCoffee

There’s actually a sketch at the bottom of the concept’s page that shows some sort of handle — but it looks a little bit wishful, you know what I’m saying? And to be fair, picking it up is also the hard part if you take your Moka Express camping.

It is a promising idea, though, and if they manage to get the logistics straight (another problem: it would make a tiny amount of coffee) I might even buy one. The tripod thing just does it for me, couldn’t say why.

[via Gizmodo]

One “make something easier” device that few people forgo is the coffee maker. The familiar drip machine is found in a huge amount of homes out there, and for many, that is the only coffee they’ll make at home. Outside of Starbucks, it’s strictly machine drip. It’s so familiar that a lot of people forget that coffee makers are relative newcomers to the coffee scene, and for a fraction of the price, you can buy beautiful, authentic gear that is not only dead simple, but makes fantastic coffee.

These three devices may be obvious to some, but they’re all so cheap and worth while that I think they’re worth mentioning anyway. The fact that none have any moving parts other than those you move yourself is, I think, a virtue I do not need to explain at length: Here they are, in order of simplicity:

The thing I don’t understand is why people go for a drip machine when it’s just an automated version of this. Sure, there’s something to be said for convenience, but there’s something to be said for the coffee too! And by using a plain Melitta filter and decanter, it’s very nearly as simple but you get better coffee.

All you do is pop the filter in, put in a few scoops of fine-ground coffee, and pour in the hot water. Because the water doesn’t come down from a limited little spout like in a regular coffee maker, you can knock the accumulated coffee off the sides of the filter and get it back into the mix. This leads to stronger coffee and less waste.

The small pour-over pictured at right is actually a single-cup one I bought at Daiso Japan for $1.50. It’s just as high quality as any of my plates, and makes great coffee. You can get much larger ones, obviously.

Melitta 10-cup coffee cone

French press has been gaining traction lately, especially here in Seattle, where drip coffee is looked down on. French press can offer a much richer coffee experience, though occasionally I find it too thick.

For French press you want to splurge a little bit. You can get a cheap one for $15, but you want as much glass and metal as possible, and this $30 Chambord, from French press masters Bodum, seems like the best way to go. It’s not for people in a hurry, or really for filling a lot of people with coffee, but there’s a nice ritual that goes along with it and you get to choose how long you steep the coffee for.

The result is a thick and very flavorful coffee, perhaps too flavorful for some. You also have to be careful how fine you grind your beans: too fine and you’ll have a lot of sludge at the bottom. I moved away from French press because of this, but lots of people swear by it, and it is of course very portable.

Bodum Chambord 8-cup French press

This thing is my baby. If I had to pick one coffee method to use for the rest of my life, it’d be this. There aren’t very many places in Seattle that can fire up some espresso so good that I have to tell somebody about it, but a lot of times when I take a sip of the bittersweet nectar my stovetop puts out, I have to email someone, or put it on Facebook. It’s that good.

What happens is this: there are three parts, the reservoir, the basket, and the spout. You fill the reservoir with water, fill the basket with semi-fine-ground coffee, screw it together, and put it on your stove at medium heat. Somewhere between four and seven minutes later, the most delicious coffee substance you’ve ever had will come streaming out of the spout, and it’s worth every second of waiting — and every minute of cleaning later on (don’t use soap!).

The stovetop actually takes some skill to operate, which not everyone is into. It comes down to getting the grind and the heat right, and the timing as well, but since you’ll be standing over it smelling its amazing coffee fumes, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. You’ll mess up a bunch of times (I still do, being extremely absent-minded), but this chunk of metal has brewed me the best coffee of my life. The one I have is the $30 Bialetti 6-cup, which I recommend for one person, but they have bigger and smaller capacities if you find it’s not the right size.

Bialetti Moka Express stovetop espresso pot (image: Wikipedia)

There are other low-tech coffee accessories out there, too: hand-cranked burr grinders, weirdo vacuum-driven drip things, and variations on the stuff shown above. Spend a little time in your local kitchen store and you’ll probably find something really cool.

Crowdsourcing. It’s so hot right now. Case in point, this crowdsourced spoon. It’s called the MugStir and you can pre-order three for $7.50. Developed by the Quirky community, it’s the 28th product from the crowdsourcing site.

The main idea is “to replace those nasty communal spoons, or to avoid wasting a new plastic spoon every time you need to stir a beverage.” If you’ve ever worked for a medium- to large-sized company, you’ve probably had a run-in with the communal spoon drawer.

The spoon itself features a rubber coated handle to prevent burns and is contorted to hang on your favorite coffee mug. Pre-order three for $7.50 or pay $12.99 later.

MugStir [Quirky]

When I first saw this, I thought to myself, “Wow, that is wonderfully stupid.” But then after remembering my days working in an actual office, it doesn’t seem quite as insane. I mean, you’ve got a computer right there in your cube. And, what, you’re going to lug a big espresso machine into the office? No! Make this DIY latte foamer with $4 worth of parts.

You’ll need the following, according to Instructables:

• Cheap foamer
• USB cable
• Pliers (or a sharp knife)
• Soldering gun
• Drill

Then it’s basically some snipping, soldering, and drilling. It doesn’t sound like rocket science but, of course, let’s all be careful as we’re putting together our foamers this weekend. Of course, you could just by the “cheap foamer” piece and run it on batteries as it’s intended. That takes care of the extra work and the espresso-machine lugging.

$4 Usb Latte Foamer [Instructables]

Go ahead and file this deal under “aggressive” as Woot.com is selling the Gevalia G90 coffee maker for just $10 plus $5 shipping. This is a pod-style coffee maker – easy cleanup, quick brew time – that normally sells elsewhere for $35 and up.

The G90 holds up to two coffee pods, features a 40-ounce water reservoir, and brews 6-, 8-, and 12-ounce cups. This deal is good today only and is for a new (not refurbished) coffee maker.

Gevalia Pod Coffee Maker [Woot.com]

Thankfully Hammacher Schlemmer is selling “The Only Voice Interactive Coffee Maker” for $100.

Space-age stuff, to be sure. According to the product description:

This is the first voice-interactive coffee maker that asks, “Would you like to set the clock or set the coffee brewing time?” and operates in response to your verbal commands. Simply saying, “Set the coffee brewing time,” or “Set the clock,” will prompt the machine to reply, “Please say the time, including AM or PM.” It uses an advanced voice recognition system to identify any time of day you speak, eliminating the hassle of fussing with buttons.

I’m almost certain that this product is positioned at the aging baby boomer crowd but if there’s one thing baby boomers hate more than trying to set digital clocks and timers, it’s talking to machines. In that case, this coffee maker can be operated the old-fashioned way, too.

The Only Voice Interactive Coffee Maker [Hammacher Schlemmer]

If you find yourself in the overlapping section of the Venn diagram containing people who like camping and people who like coffee, you may very well begin figuring out how you’re going to find $45 to buy Brunton’s Flip N’ Drip Coffee Maker when it comes out next February.

It’s pretty much exactly like it sounds: boiling water goes in one chamber, coffee grounds in the other, then you flip the apparatus so that the hot water percolates down through the coffee grounds. When all is said and done, you’ve got a “double-walled, insulated mug” full of coffee — the most wonderful and plentiful liquefied upper in the history of human civilization.

Of course if you’re really hard-up for the comforts of home, Brunton’s got a $160 coffee maker that runs on propane or butane too.

Flip N’ Drip Coffee Maker [Brunton via OhGizmo!]

The insides are pretty much what you expect: a boiler, pump to move water to the spout or steamer, and some common-looking wiring making sure power and signals go to the right doodads.

I’d dissect my stovetop espresso machine, but it only has five parts. I think I like that better.

Ah the Golfers Mug: such a simple idea. Drink your coffee and then lay the mug on the floor flat-side down for a little putting practice before you tackle the day ahead.

I might suggest putting with a new golf ball to avoid potential pesticide ingestion. That, or cleaning the mug and/or your balls on a somewhat regular basis.

The Golfers Mug costs £8 ($13). Looks like it’s only available in the UK at the moment.

Golfers Mug [Red5 via Nerd Approved]

The Kaffeevollautomat TK76K572 (!) does all kinds of scenes, from plain espresso to macchiato to plain drip. It has its own water and milk supply, grinds its own beans, and even cleans itself to a degree. And since it’s actually part of the wall (why not part of a fridge?), it won’t take up valuable counter space. Sounds like a winning proposition to me — better than scrubbing out my stovetop every day, anyway. Of course, mine cost $30 (and is delicious) and this one costs €1500.

[via BBG and Appliancist]

I looove your fashionable wrist cuff! Thanks, it doubles as a coffee sleeve! Wow, that’s incredibly weird! Thanks, I know!

If you really love coffee and you really love the environment (though not enough to bring your own mug to Starbucks) might I suggest this handmade $65 black walnut veneer wrist cuff that serves double duty as hand-protecting coffee sleeve?

It’s available at Veer.com – the product description is as follows:

Answer the siren call of the coffee shop in style. When your drink is called, the Coffee Cuff slips off your wrist and onto your cup, taking the place of a cardboard sleeve. Your hand stays cool and so does your environmental footprint – Coffee Cuffs are shaped by hand from reclaimed black walnut veneer.

Will you buy one? Hell, buy two or three!

Coffee Cuff [Veer.com via TreeHugger]