Built in coffee machine when buying a new house - vendors want to take it

Greymug

Awww it's cute when british people talk about how to make good coffee.

coffeehound

There's been a coffee house operating on the same site in Oxford since 1654.  You'd have thought we'd have learnt to make it by now

68ComebackSpecial

coffeehound said:

There's been a coffee house operating on the same site in Oxford since 1654.  You'd have thought we'd have learnt to make it by now

My parents have a 250 year old Worcester coffee pot and cups, though you wouldn't dare to try pouring hot liquid into them now.

coffeehound

68ComebackSpecial said:

My parents have a 250 year old Worcester coffee pot and cups, though you wouldn't dare to try pouring hot liquid into them now.

That's great, a real piece of coffee history.  It seems GB lost its way around WWII . .

GaleSF63

Greymug said:

Awww it's cute when british people talk about how to make good coffee.

What exactly is "good" coffee?  To some extent it's a matter of taste, isn't it? 

On my very few visits to the continent, I have loved the coffee - particularly in Amsterdam, but I have never been able to make anything like it and never had it like that anywhere else in Britain, either in a coffee shop or private home. Why the difference? We presumably use the same equipment and the same ingredients. 

I gave up and conceded that I just don't like "real" coffee.

coffeehound

GaleSF63 said:
On my very few visits to the continent, I have loved the coffee - particularly in Amsterdam, but I have never been able to make anything like it and never had it like that anywhere else in Britain, either in a coffee shop or private home. Why the difference? We presumably use the same equipment and the same ingredients. 

I gave up and conceded that I just don't like "real" coffee.

The single biggest factor is, I suspect, supermarket coffee.  It is usually technically stale at point-of-sale and the grind is often wrong for the intended use.  

Then there is the various methods of making it, and getting the individual aspects right.  Virtually all home filter machines and percolators were pretty terrible up until recently.  Filter machines never brewed hot enough, and percolators went the other way and circulated boiling water through the grounds.

Making coffee manually, there are other things to get wrong: grind, dose, water temperature, technique.  So when a British person spends out on a bag of coffee, and ends up with something in their mug that is worse than instant, it's no surprise that, like you say, they conclude that they don't like 'real' coffee.