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Best coffee substitute 2018 – [Buyer’s Guide]
Last Updated October 1, 2023
Hi! My name is Roger Barnett. After 40 hours of research including speaking with consultants and experts, and plenty of parents and 17 hours spent testing 10 coffee substitute, I believe that I found the best coffee substitute of 2018.
I have been writing about technology and entertainment since the early 90s from my secluded home in West Virginia. We take a close look at some of the best coffee substitute to help you get ripped.
Best coffee substitute of 2018
I make the search easier for you, by reviewing the best coffee substitute on the market. The rating is based on multiple factors: The 3 metrics ‐ Design, Materials, Performance, and other indicators such as: Popularity, Opinions, Brand, Reputation and more.
If you’re reading this, it is very likely that you’re scouting for the best coffee substitute. Simply review and buy them.
Test Results and Ratings
| Rank | №1 | №2 | №3 |
| Product |  |
 |
 |
| Total | 4.8 | 4.5 | 4.3 |
| Ease of use |
5 points
|
5 points
|
4 points
|
| Materials |
5 points
|
5 points
|
4 points
|
| Performance |
5 points
|
4 points
|
4 points
|
| Quality |
4 points
|
4 points
|
5 points
|
| Awards |  |
||
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
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№1 – Teeccino Raspberry Mocha Chicory Herbal Coffee Alternative / Substitute
| Total: |
4.8
|
Why did this coffee substitute win the first place?
I don’t know anything about other models from this brand, but I am fully satisfied with this product. I really enjoy the design. It is compact, comfortable and reliable. And it looks amazing! The product is very strong. Its material is stable and doesn’t crack. I was completely satisfied with the price. Its counterparts in this price range are way worse.
5
|
5
|
5
|
4
|
№2 – Capomo
| Total: |
4.5
|
Why did this coffee substitute come in second place?
The material is pretty strong and easy to wash if needed. This is a pretty decent product that perfectly fitted the interior of our office. I recommend you to consider buying this model, it definitely worth its money. Managers explained me all the details about the product range, price, and delivery.
5
|
5
|
4
|
4
|
№3 – Capomo 12 oz. [2 Pack] – Coffee Substitute Superfood
| Total: |
4.3
|
Why did this coffee substitute take third place?
I liked the design. We’ve been using it for 2 months and it still looks like brand new. It is inconvenient to use due to the size. I am going to get something different next time. It doesn’t squeaks nor bents. Looks great in my apartment. A very convenient model. It is affordable and made of high-quality materials.
4
|
4
|
4
|
5
|
coffee substitute Buyer’s Guide
Filmmakers ‘Food Matters’ & ‘Hungry For Change’
PS: If you’re in Australia, UK or NZ we’re sorry about the expensive shipping! It costs quite a bit to ship this from our partner warehouse in the US and it works out more economical if you buy or more bags to bring the price down.
The coffee makers
NerdWallet’s scoring of the best coffee makers is based on our analysis of the opinions of experts and shoppers like you.
Whether you prefer decaf or regular, single-serve or 12-cup, you need a coffee maker that will brew just right. That’s where we come in. We analyzed the most popular coffee makers on the market to help you get that ideal cup of joe.
To narrow down the field, we looked at expert opinions from review sites such as The Sweethome, CNET and Good Housekeeping. We then analyzed user reviews to get their opinions on each coffee maker’s high and low points.
We recognize that consumers look for different qualities in coffee makers, so we created scores based on these user observations of a handful of features, including ease of use, coffee quality, cleaning and more.
Social Media
In this blog post I will talk about one of the possible ways to answer these questions, by utilizing and engaging customers in social media.
Let’s think of some reasons
Secondly, you may think you have reached out to all potential local consumers, but the truth is that customers need incentives to come back and substitute their coffeemaker at home or office with better alternatives like freshly brewed in-store coffee. Competition is everywhere, and quality of product and environment alone cannot expand your consumer segment.
By virtually connecting everybody to a social network, there is an incredible potential for the spread of your product and brand. Engagement with clients outside your store is difficult as a coffee shop because consumers don’t have that many reasons to connect online, unless you use incentives. Just being present online is not sufficient for anyone because everyone can be.
That’s why you need to implement the right tools to attract and engage customers to your network! Why not make it a social one? Interact with customers, spread ideas, advertise promotions and explain how they benefit from being connected to your network.
Pay Attention to Responses and Provide Feedback
It’s obviously not enough to just ask questions, you need to analyze and utilize your feedback. Having a high response rate on requests and questions will have the same effect as good customer service in your store. When you post updates and promotions, pay attention to what people like and reply. You may think that you know everything about your clients, but you will be surprised to see how many new ideas and suggestions you can learn directly from just observing followers on your social media page.
Implementing a Pull Strategy
The danger of annoying through pressure selling is as (or possibly more) present in social media than other marketing channels.
Overloading news feeds with new products is not the way to gain the right kind of attention. It’s a thin line between annoyance and appreciation, so be sure to always be on the right side, not pushing your limits. Implementing a pull strategy can help you to ensure that you are not just selling your product but you are making it compelling to buy.
Through customer engagement you can see what clients are showing greater interest for. Take use of suggestions from followers and raise ideas online before you implement them. Promote various products at a lower level of frequency and when greater response is received on certain items, you know what to invest in. Your social media platform is not your store. It is therefore essential that updates and promotions are there to inform and not sell. Is the patio open for the summer? Inform with pictures and updates, and make it seem appealing to buy your new summer specials. Don’t throw sales items and promotions out in feeds as an auctioneer. Pick your updates wisely. Just like in your email inbox, nobody likes spam.
Social Contests and Promotions
Wishpond provides social media marketing tools (like its awesome Facebook Contest App) to help you easily create and run contests and promotions on Facebook, Twitter and websites. Regardless if you are a small business owner or a global retailer, you can benefit and run these contests successfully, either independently or with help from the Wishpond team.
Below, we’ll focus on the following three types of contests to promote your coffee shops. For more ideas, check out 2Creative Facebook Contest Ideas You Can Use Today.
Photo Contests
Of course, this requires actual effort from participants, so the turnout will undoubtedly be relatively lower, but those that do will have a stronger attachment with your company. To select a winner, you can manually choose the contest winner or allow followers to vote on their favorite entry.
Vote Contests
Vote Contests are one of the most versatile and effective contests that Wishpond has to offer. It works for virtually any industry, has very low barriers to entry, and can even empower your followers. Quite simply, participants submit their email addresses and are then allowed to vote between any number of options.
Vote contests are especially powerful as they give your audience a chance to voice their opinion on a variety of topics. If you think about it, voting is practically asking you users for their opinion, so why not gather it through a Voting contest.
Exclusive Offers
One way to help temporarily boost demand for your business is to have a limited time (or quantity) offer. In such a competitive industry, followers are often very price sensitive and whether or not they decide to go to one business over another can wholly depend on the price of the product.
Who needs a single-cup coffee maker
By eliminating bean scooping and paper filters, these machines also take away the chore of making coffee and cleaning out the machine. No need to guess on the water-to-coffee ratio and no need to measure either. Just pop in the pod, hit the button, drink your coffee, and toss out the pod.
Brewing one cup at a time also ensures the mug you’re drinking is fresh. It cuts down on time and waste too. If the first person to get into the office at a.m. makes a full pot of coffee, but the boss doesn’t roll in until after nine, his coffee will be stale, taste burned, and probably end up going in the microwave.
Features
The features that are important to you will primarily be determined by the type of coffee you intend to make on a daily basis. If espresso-based coffee drinks get you going in the morning, you should look at the Nespresso Citiz Espresso Maker.
If you’re looking to continue to make drip coffee from freshly ground beans, and you want to manipulate the strength and water-to-coffee ratios yourself, you probably don’t need a Keurig. But, if you’re attracted to the convenience and variety of the K-Cup system, then choosing which one is right for you will require looking at some additional factors.
These machines vary significantly in terms of size. The Keurig appliances are large and can take up quite a bit of counter space. Their height, in particular, makes them hard to store out of the way and off of the counter, in a cabinet or on a shelf. The size of your kitchen and your needs for clear counter space will lead to considering some options over others.
Aesthetics
In addition to varying dimensions, the machines all have distinct design qualities that make them more or less visually appealing. Some models are sleek, sharp, and impressive. Others look bulky, antiquated, or cheap.
Objectivity is difficult to achieve when evaluating what looks good aesthetically, but for something that will end up most likely living in view on your kitchen counter, it would be nice to like the way your coffee maker looks.
Your Best Digs is primarily motivated by the quest to find and recommend the very best products. While value is important to us, we do all of our testing and evaluation without weighing price too heavily. We aim to give our readers a complete understanding of what it’s like to own and use these products. Armed with that information, it is then ultimately for you to decide on the cost-benefit analysis that fits your needs and your budget.
It’s important to remember, however, that it’s not just the cost of these machines that varies so greatly; so does the cost of operating them. As discussed above, the price per cup of using the Keurig or Nespresso pod system is much higher than using a traditional grind and drip. The convenience vs. affordability evaluation will differ depending on what you value.
Measurements
Our first task was to gather accurate data for the height, length, and depth of each machine to determine their footprint on your countertop. We also noted the different volumes that each machine pours in order to determine the size of cup that it can accommodate. Not every single-cup coffee maker will be able to brew directly into your 16-ounce travel mug, so this statistic is more important that it may seem.
One common complaint of people using Keurig machines is that the coffee isn’t quite as hot at they would like it to be. Most coffee is recommended to be brewed between 19and 20degrees, and served between 15and 17degrees, but personal preference of coffee temperature varies widely.
We used our go-to digital thermometer, the Lavatools Javelin Pro, to determine the temperature of an eight-ounce cup of coffee immediately after the brewing process concluded. For the Nespresso Citiz Espresso Maker, we used the larger 3.7-ounce setting since it lacks an eight-ounce option. If you know you tend to enjoy your coffee at a certain temperature, the data we found during this test will be particularly helpful.
One of the main attractions of the single-cup coffee maker is the speed. Most people hope for a quick process with a minimal wait time as they’re trying to get out the door in the morning. We ran the clock on both the time it took for each machine to heat the water and how long it took to brew an eight-ounce drink (a 3.7-ounce pour with the Nespresso).
Accessories
The machines we tested come with a variety of different accessories to suit any taste. Some come with charcoal filters, which attach to a wand sitting in the water tank to purify the water before brewing. Some Keurig systems come with a K-Cup reusable coffee filter that allows you to use your own ground coffee, while you might need to buy this piece separately with other machines.
User Experience
After coming down from the buzz of testing the best French presses earlier in the year, our coffee-testing team was excited to get familiar with the user experience of the single-cup machines. We lived with the coffee makers for two weeks and used them often, toggling through features, observing sounds, deciphering cleaning directions, and of course, drinking copious amounts of coffee.
We recorded our thoughts, feelings, and emotions throughout the whole process and reflected back on them, in conjunction with all of our data, to determine our favorite single-cup coffee makers.
Keurig 2.0 K57Series Coffee Maker
Best overall, including speed, temperature, and general usability.
In our testing, the Keurig 2.0 outperformed the competition in terms of speed, heat, and usability. The one-minute, 47-second heat cycle was the fastest of the K-Cup-based systems we tested, and the 41-second brew time was just two seconds slower than the fastest K-Cup machine, the Cuisinart SS-700 Single Serve Brewing System.
It also gets bonus points for its charcoal-based water filtration wand, which purifies water before brewing coffee, and its push-button hot water dispenser, which can be used for tea or instant noodles.
Nespresso Citiz
Ideal for those who would rather have espresso instead of coffee in the morning.
The Nespresso company markets about 30 pod varieties with exotic names based in Italian and Turkish. Independent companies market additional options as well as reusable pods that can be filled with your own ground coffee at home.
The pods, or capsules, as Nespresso calls them, are primarily made of aluminum which can be recycled. Because the used grounds must be separated from the aluminum, it’s pretty difficult to do at home. However, Nespresso will send you a free recycle bag that you can fill with up to 200 capsules and then drop off at any UPS location to shipped backed to Nespresso free of charge.
In our testing, the Nespresso machine was the fastest to produce a finished product from turning the machine on to taking the first sip of coffee. While the espresso was just outside the top three in terms of temperature, at 17degrees, it didn’t seem to be a deal-breaker because the small shots are meant to be enjoyed quickly or mixed with another hot beverage like steamed milk.
MokaBees
This video features a quick how-to guide with instructions on how to easily make Moka Pot coffee at home. Moka pot coffee is known for its dark, complex flavor, which works great as a substitute for espresso when making lattes and other coffee drinks at home.
Troubleshooting
Coffee Sputters from the Top: This is a good sign that your heat is too high. Use a low to medium-low heat.
Coffee is Bitter: Use a lower heat and use preheated water, if possible. Also try a coarser grind and pull the unit off the heat early.
Products used in this video
Notes: The tiny size I use in this video. It’s perfect for a single shot of coffee.
Notes: Perfect for one bag of coffee.
We’ve all heard the stories of Nespresso’s contribution to the landfill problem, where a whole lot of aluminum pods are not being recycled, rather deposed of.
Capsul’in Refillable Nespresso Capsules.
Although Nespresso has take a step forward with it’s own recycling program, you can can take help reduce this waste further reusing your coffee pods.
There are several options available. Some refillable Nespresso pods have a lid mechanism, while others use resealable seals.
My go-to milk alternative in coffee is soya milk because I love the creamy flavour that it offers and its low fat content. According to Cancer Research UK, some studies have found that the high levels of soy products eaten by Asian people could help to reduce the risk of some cancers, but the smaller amounts eaten by Western population are unlikely to have any major benefits. Commercial soya milk is available in both sweetened and unsweetened varieties, so always opt for the sugar-free carton where you can, so to avoid the extra calories.
Rice milk
Commercial rice milk is typically made up of about 14% rice, with the rest being a little oil, salt and water. I find rice milk too watery to add to tea or coffee, but I do like it straight up as it is naturally sweet and low in fat at just 1%.
Hemp milk
Milk made from hemp seeds is also becoming more commercially available now. What’s brilliant about that is that a 250ml serving provides 50% of our recommended daily intake for omega-3. Omega is important to maintain a healthy heart and reduce the risk of heart disease when eaten as part of a healthy diet, but there is evidence to suggest that such vegetarian sources of omega may not have these same health benefits as those in oily fish. As ever, this supports the idea that a healthy balanced diet eating from all the food groups in the right quantities is the best diet to follow to ensure that you’re not missing out on any nutrients.
Almond milk
Almond milk is really tasty, with a subtle nuttiness and a light texture. Even though different types of milk are widely commercially available now in supermarkets and health food shops, they are often still quite expensive. Almond milk in particular is often over £a litre, but luckily, it’s really easy to make your own at home.
Basic almond milk recipe
Simply soak a cup of almonds in water overnight, then peel, rinse and drain them.
Blitz in a food processor with four cups of water and a few stoned dried dates or a little agave nectar or honey if you would like a little sweetness.
Drape a muslin cloth over a wide jug or bowl and pour the mixture through.
Once it’s all in the muslin, squeeze the milk out of the bag carefully and keep back the leftover pulp, which can be dried and pulsed even more in a food processor and made into almond flour to use in baking.
It’s then ready to use! The milk will keep in the fridge for a few days, but stir just before each serving, as it will naturally separate over time.
You can also see Danielle making almond milk on Drinks Tube below.
Make sure to check out our other awesome special diets-related stuff here.
Coffee and Diabetes
In the 1980s and 1990s several prospective cohort studies were done to investigate the correlation between coffee and diabetes. Many of those studies reported that there is an inverse dose-dependent association with the risk of Type diabetes. This means that for reasons still unclear, all those research studies found that the more coffee people with normal blood sugar drank, the less risk appeared for developing Type diabetes. Several constituents in coffee might be responsible for these consistent findings.
Chlorogenic acid in coffee might inhibit glucose-6-phosphatase, an enzyme that regulates blood sugar metabolism in the liver. It could also be due to the indisputably-high levels of antioxidants, which have a benign effect on insulin sensitivity.
Not surprisingly, the news channels then sounded the bell that coffee was protective, and we all enjoyed our cup of joe without any remorse.
How to Avoid Withdrawal Symptoms
Those who consume the most caffeine, alcohol and sugar, and those who have the highest toxic load, tend to have the most difficulty initially. In any event, symptoms of withdrawal usually disappear after three or four days. It is best to slowly reduce your intake of caffeine and coffee.
Take a sauna or heat therapy in a bath.
I know this is a difficult goal, but I assure you that your body and mind will thank you. The sense of calm, clarity and restful sleep will reward you with the simple pleasures of innate health and an energy that is rightfully yours.
Healthy Coffee Alternatives
In the Hungry For Change Book we discuss the addictive nature of caffeine and when consumed in large quantities, can lead to adrenal fatigue. Coffee is also a diuretic, meaning it purges water from your body. That said, if you want to function at a high level and remain well hydrated, then it would be a better choice to replace coffee with a natural alternative. The list below provides some great tasting substitutes.
Teeccino Caffeine-free Herbal Coffee
This coffee alternative is popular among those who have removed regular coffee from their diets because it tastes very similar to coffee but is caffeine free. A mix of carob, barley, chicory nuts and other flavors (there are all kinds of varieties) it is truly tasty, can be brewed like coffee (in a French press, via tea bags or in an espresso machine), and mixes nicely with milk, soy milk or just plain honey if you’re more of a black coffee/milk-free person.
Yerbe Mate
Licorice tea is actually caffeine-free, but supports overburdened adrenal glands, which are organs that respond to stress. “Licorice is an adrenal tonic and increases energy. It adds a pleasant taste to tea blends and can also be taken in tincture form,” explain Dr. Linda B. White and Steven Foster, authors of TheHerbal Drugstore.
Wheatgrass Juice
This natural energizer is known as a liquid shot of essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. Some people don’t mind the taste and others do, but all agree that wheatgrass is one of the most nourishing juices. “Because of its easy digestibility and rapid assimilation, it’s a natural energy supplement, whether alone or added to a protein-type supplement drink,” says Gloria Gilbère, doctor of natural health.
Reishi Mushroom Tea
If you’re looking for a unique coffee alternative, try mushrooms in the form of tea. A staple in traditionalChinese medicine, the soft, flat reishi mushroom makes for one invigorating (and healthy) libation. White and Foster recommend combining 1/ounce of chopped or powdered reishi mushroom with cups of water, then bringing the tea to a boil and simmering for 30 minutes before drinking in doses.
Not quite as forgiving, but arguably healthier, we have almond milk.
Hardware
Once you ship your cable box back to its Machiavellian overlords, you’ll need a way to funnel streaming content directly to your TV. The good news is that this process is both easy and inexpensive, and you may even own the necessary components already.
HD Antenna
The first thing you may want to consider is an HD antenna. This doesn’t provide a way to watch streaming videos, but if you want to watch live TV, it’s the cheapest and simplest solution. You may remember having rabbit ears on your hand-me-down TV as a kid — an HD antenna is basically the modern-day version of that. You hook the device into your TV, put it somewhere near a window and watch as the free channels roll in.
Foreign TV
While foreign-TV streams make for a huge topic on their own, it’s worth pointing out that cutting the cord opens the door to a whole world of TV from other countries. Offering entire cable channels for individual linguistic niches would be unthinkable, but there are a ton of streaming channels dedicated to just that.
For starters, anime fans should check out Crunchyroll. DramaFever brings Korean dramas and sitcoms to Western audiences, while YuppTV broadcasts a variety of news, sports, music and serials in Hindi. Those who prefer programs in English can check out Acorn TV, which streams British TV to expats and Anglophiles all around the world.
These channels are available on most streaming devices, but not every service is available on every device. Your best bet is to check the manufacturer’s website for your streaming device and see if the channel is supported before dropping the money on a subscription to it.
Other Services
There are thousands of niche channels, from local live news stations to camera feeds that show nothing but goats. (Really.) Two services worth checking out are Plex and Crackle.
Crackle is not the only free streaming-video service out there, but it is one of the only ones that don’t rely on public domain or cheap content. Sony owns Crackle, and as such, you can find tons of cool movies, newish anime, beloved sitcoms (Seinfeld, All in the Family, Mad About You) and even a few funny original shows (Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, SuperMansion, Sports Jeopardy!). If you remember the days of mid-’90s afternoon cable, Crackle is like coming home after school and binging on TV that’s so bad it’s good.
Beyond that, there’s a whole world of streaming content to explore. No, you can’t cut the cord and continue to watch every single one of your favorite shows in real time — at least not yet. But you’ll never again be shackled to an expensive service that broadcasts mostly junk, and that’s worth the price of a few prime-time dramas.
I’ll explain why in a minute.
For example, every now and then when I have a big deadline I might brew one of my butter, coconut oil, protein powder super coffees. And I will love it and wonder why I ever tuned my back on my preciooous.
You see, now that my gut is healed it can handle this occasional use. Perhaps what I like most about this occasional use is that it feels like a real treat and the benefits of the caffeine surge are immense.
Here’s the plan I used to easily do it…
After your month without, you can reintroduce coffee and see how you react. But that’s only if you now feel in good health and haven’t had any issues over the last weeks. Ie if you are pretty much healed.
So I waited roughly months to try coffee again. I found it sat fine with me by this time.
But I realized it wasn’t a habit I wanted to get back into for fear it would inflame my intestines again, however minor, and tip my gut back onto the leaky side.
At this month mark I also added Yerba mate tea back into my life. This I kept. It is my new morning routine and a wonderful provider of smooth and light energy. It gives a certain clarity and focus to my work that coffee rarely did.
Of course I do dip into the coffee jar now and then. In the last month I’ve had one ‘Bulletproof’ style coffee and it was great. But that’s just about my monthly quota. And this setup works perfect. I hope it does for you too.
Who this is for
If you consider your morning (or afternoon, or anytime) coffee a serious matter, you’ve likely already heard that the most important item in your brewing setup is a quality burr grinder. Unevenly ground coffee will brew unevenly, yielding a muddied or overly bitter cup. So a good grinder is integral to keeping the most essential part of your brewing technique—the coffee itself—at its most flavorful, and it will ensure the consistency required to produce, and reproduce, that flavor.
A good grinder will turn an alright coffee routine into a great coffee routine. If you’re currently brewing pre-ground coffee (which is quickly going stale from the minute it’s ground), or using a subpar grinder (especially a budget, blade-style grinder), switching to a reliable burr grinder will significantly improve the flavor of your cup. Drinking coffee brewed from fresh, properly ground coffee, you’ll quickly detect the difference in aromatics, flavor, sweetness, acidity, and dimension and body.
Pull Quote
A good grinder will turn an alright coffee routine into a great coffee routine.
A burr grinder also allows for a broad choice of brewing devices and types of coffee: It can grind coarsely enough for a good French press or cold-brew batch, but also nails a medium grind for drip. Whether you make coffee at home once a day or once an hour, whether you brew with a Hario V60 and a precision scale or just dump it all into a French press carafe or an automatic drip basket, and whether you buy your whole beans at the grocery store or order them direct from Norway, how well your grinder performs will have a tremendous effect on the end brew.
How we picked
We tested the grinders in a rigorous setting (with access to professional palates and a suite of brewing and analytical equipment), taking over the Counter Culture Coffee lab in Manhattan. Counter Culture pros Matt Banbury and Ryan Ludwig helped us grind, brew, and taste one of their staple coffees, the Fast Forward blend, and measured how well the coffee extracted from the grounds using professional tools.
To find the right grind setting on each machine for brewing, and to test for grind-size consistency, we used Kruve coffee sieves, specially invented to help coffee professionals eliminate under-ground “boulder” coffee particles and over-ground “fines.” The Kruve is a set of stacked screens that separate coffee pieces at the target grind size (in our case, the ideal size for the drip coffee machine we used) from any irregular particles. When we arrived at the grind setting that had the most target-sized particles and least overs and unders, we stayed on that setting for our brew test.
During the grinding process, we timed how fast each grinder performed at different settings, as well as how easy it was to use and clean. We also paid attention to ancillary issues like whether the machines were noisy or made a huge mess on the countertop, and we kept an eye out for potential durability issues or weaknesses in workmanship as well.
Then we brewed coffee from each grinder on an 8-cup Bonavita BV1900TS brewer (the runner-up in our guide to coffee makers). After tasting each coffee for a balanced, delicious brew that fell in line with what the Counter Culture team expected of Fast Forward, we used a refractometer to measure the extraction percentage (essentially, how much coffee you get from the coffee grounds). This measurement let us know how much of the coffee was dissolved into the water, and thus how successful the extraction of the grinds was. A well-extracted cup of coffee should measure at between 1to 2percent extraction on a refractometer, says Counter Culture’s Matt Banbury. For their Fast Forward coffee, the team found it tasted best when results measured between 19.and 20.percent.
All of this underscores how impressed we were with this grinder for making it supremely easy to produce a great cup of coffee. Absent the bells and whistles of nearly all the competitors we tested—like the built-in scale on the OXO Barista Brain or the precision of the Breville SmartGrinder Pro—the Encore boasts only a modest on/off (actually it’s on/off/on/off!) toggle dial on the side and push-down pulse button on the front of the machine. But we don’t see its simplicity as a real drawback. Other machines we tested, like the Breville SmartGrinder Pro, were confusing, with dials and digital settings that were unintuitive or overly detailed (the Breville has 60 different grind settings and a timer that measures fractions of second). The Encore, on the other hand, is easy to use and more than sufficient for the average home coffee drinker.
You can adjust the grind size easily on the Encore by turning the hopper to the preferred tick mark (measured in numbered intervals from 0 to 40, 40 being the coarsest) on its base, allowing you to quickly move from setting to setting and remember your preferences—generally a common feature among the grinders we tested, except the Krups whose intervals between grind settings were inconsistently sized. It took us 30 seconds to grind 6grams of medium-grind coffee appropriate for filter brewing—enough to make several servings, depending on your coffee machine’s interpretation of the word “cup.” This speed fell about in the middle of the other grinders we tested at this setting.
Baratza Virtuoso Coffee Grinder
If you’re willing to pay more, the Baratza Virtuoso is a nearly identical grinder to the Encore, but it has a slightly speedier burr set, a timer-switch on the side, and a heavier base that helps the grinder stay in calibration. In a previous version of this guide, the Virtuoso was our top pick, but in more recent testing, we found the grind consistency comparable to that of the Encore. So, since you’re paying more for the features rather than the performance, we think it’s only worth the investment for serious coffee lovers.
The Virtuoso is also a little better-looking than the Encore, with a cast zinc body that may complement modern decor better than the simple matte black Encore. But none of its extra features was enough to convince our team to recommend a nearly hundred-dollar-higher spend over the Encore. While it’s a little more convenient for repeatability to have a timer switch instead of one you flip on and off, that timer is still somewhat vague: there are no numbers or time increments indicated, just different thicknesses of lines (the Capresso Infinity’s timer is very similar). Absent the (theoretical) precision of actual countdown timers like on the OXO On grinder or Breville SmartGrinder Pro, this added feature on the Virtuoso is good but not great.
Sources
Saigon Coffee Roastery is exactly what it sounds like, with a catalogue of small-batch, mostly Vietnamese coffee on offer. Vo Phap founded the company in response to the ubiquity of low-quality Phin coffee in his city, the worst of which is made up partly by fillers like soy and cornmeal—lax government regulation and low consumer standards allows for this noncoffee to pass, provided it’s served with enough sugar. Phap was influenced by the design of Italian espresso bars, and in little less than a year has carved out his own interpretation from a space above what was once an arcade and market. He doesn’t see the other new roasteries popping up in HCMC as competition, but as evidence that real Vietnamese coffee is on its way toward a decade of positive growth.
Saigon Coffee Roastery is located at 151/Đồng Khởi, Bến Nghé. Follow them on Facebook and Instagram.
How to save up to 86%? Here is little trick.
You must visit the page of sales. Here is the link. If you don’t care about which brand is better, then you can choose the coffee substitute by the price and buy from the one who will offer the greatest discount.
Final Word
First of all thanks for reading my article to the end! I hope you find my reviews listed here useful and that it allows you to make a proper comparison of what is best to fit your needs and budget. Don’t be afraid to try more than one product if your first pick doesn’t do the trick.
Most important, have fun and choose your coffee substitute wisely! Good luck!
So, TOP3 of coffee substitute
- №1 — Teeccino Raspberry Mocha Chicory Herbal Coffee Alternative / Substitute
- №2 — Capomo
- №3 — Capomo 12 oz. [2 Pack] – Coffee Substitute Superfood
Questions? Leave a comment below!
Chatting about coffee substitute is my passion! Leave me a question in the comments, I answer each and every one and would love to get to know you better!
