- Today, we're gonna talk about this.
It's a coffee ball.
Look, if you just need to pause the video now
and get the jokes out of your system,
I completely understand.
But if you don't know what a coffee ball is, it's this.
It is the kind of new 'no pod' pod.
A Swiss retailer called Migros launched this
at the start of September
and I managed to get my hands on some.
They're not really launching it outside
of, I think, Switzerland and maybe France
and eventually Germany next year.
So, this took a little wrangling
and I'm sort of happy for the help.
I did buy this, by the way.
I didn't get a freebie, don't worry.
This is gonna be an honest kind of first impression
of an interesting new idea.
Now these things kind of look like they should come
in like the little Lindt wrapper
and they should be like a little treat
that you might eat when you need something sweet.
I don't think you necessarily should eat this.
Look, it's basically a pod.
And if you go to their website,
you can see how the technology works.
You load this thing into their custom machines,
it takes it inside, adds a bit of water to it, squishes it,
pushes sort of water through it,
and thusly you have espresso.
Now, while I've opened this box,
I've yet to brew one of these.
So I'm gonna open a fresh box for you
and we'll brew a shot with one of them
and see what we think
and then explore a little bit more
about how they're doing this
and whether it's genuinely an interesting thing.
All of their marketing leans very heavily
into the whole sustainability piece.
You know, I think personal responsibility
for sustainability is a thing - to a point.
And I don't think, you know, the kind of narrative
around "you recycling a little bit better
is what's gonna prevent climate change" really flies with me
but we should not be wasteful,
I'm certainly down with that.
It's quite a nice experience to open these.
Little tear tab there.
And then inside, it's a little carton of,
it feels like Mini Eggs almost.
Ah, on one of these that I opened
it said sort of carbon dark side
kind of flushed environment,
so in theory, once you peel open this packaging,
you're gonna introduce some oxygen
and you might start the staling process.
I have gone with the espresso kind of capsules here.
You get nine in a box.
And in terms of taste characteristics, we have caramel,
citrus, and shortbread.
Peel open the inside.
That wasn't perfect.
That first smell was quite caramelly. I was quite excited.
You get a little bit closer and it's a bit more pungent
in a slightly more savory, brothy, heavy kind of way.
Interestingly, each one has been sort of stamped
with the product name on the shell of the coffee ball.
So I can just drop my ball in.
Good luck.
I have to cock the mechanism like so,
and then we're gonna ask for an espresso.
(machine hums)
(machine clicks)
They're very pleased with the fact
that this goes back up to the start.
This is giving me a container emptying light on here,
but I guess we actually wanna open the container
and see what it's done to that little coffee ball.
Ooh, now.
So you can see what's happened here
in that it's been punctured in a variety of ways.
It's hot to touch, obviously,
but this is now a squishy, softer ball.
Now they'll tell you
that you can just straight compost these.
Couple of weeks, it'll be completely gone
because this outer wrapper
is made of a sort of seaweed derivative.
A bit ashy on the nose.
Pretty developed roast.
Really pretty dark,
I would say a comparable taste experience to Nespresso,
a kind of typical Nespresso capsule.
Not that I wish to relive
that cereal-derived nightmare again.
I will say the texture's quite nice,
but it looks and tastes like it brewed
at too low of a temperature.
So I'm just gonna brew one more really quick.
What I should do, actually,
is show you the hopper that comes with this
'cause I'm also quite charmed by this.
And what they sort of want you to do
is put all your balls in,
and then you put in your sort of top piece,
and then they all live in a little compartment.
And that's very nice. They're all separated.
They're not gonna be airtight
or anything like that in there,
but they are neatly divided because then,
when it's time to brew again,
it's like a roulette wheel of death for these little guys.
And then who's next?
Ooh, ooh.
Bye!
It's a weird thing to have to do every time.
(machine hums)
Definitely a hotter brew.
For what is probably one of the lighter roasts here,
I would say that's still a very developed taste.
And I would say that there is a little bit
of pre-ground flavor if you want.
It doesn't taste super fresh and vibrant.
It tastes, you know, it is pre-ground.
I'm pretty confident that these little sort of seaweed wraps
around the coffee are not, necessarily,
gonna be completely airtight.
Let's just have a look inside one, shall we?
Little gentle cut.
Right.
Little.
That's still a pretty dark roast. Whoops.
It's quite neatly packed in here.
I dunno if I can tap it out.
Ooh, there we go.
So it's a pretty fragile looking
papery seaweed membrane on these.
I don't think they're gonna be fully airtight
and so you have to keep them in the gas flushed environment,
which means when they go in here,
you're certainly accelerating a staling process.
And even if it was at peak freshness and, you know,
nothing bad had happened,
by the time you've gotten through all nine of these,
if you have one a day,
they'll be tasting pretty stale at that point,
which is sort of a shame.
You know, you're up against
the kind of classic Nespresso pod
which has a bunch of technology inside it that's clever,
but, a big part of that is it's gas flushed, it's nitrogen,
and it's a fully sealed environment.
Anyway, the grounds inside here feel quite fine
but I wouldn't say espresso fine.
Finer than I expected.
Perhaps finer than a Nespresso, but not by much.
I think the first thing I wanna do, actually,
is just see what happens if I just drop a capsule
in a glass of water.
Will coffee begin to leak from the inside
through that kind of seaweed membrane to the outside?
Will something weird happen or will it stay pretty intact?
I'm impressed.
That is still
(ball thuds)
pretty, (ball thuds)
pretty solid.
It wouldn't easily deform.
Oh, it does a little bit.
You can sort of squeeze them.
And then it tears. Interesting.
More mess.
Yeah, it's getting very soft on the outside now.
Now, I wanna brew again and kind of go through
some of the things that they're doing,
I think, inside the machine.
I'm gonna brew a different pod,
I'm gonna go for a ristretto
and see what the sort of stronger experience is like.
These balls look a little darker.
(sniffs) Yeah.
And look, just look how sweet it is
to see 'ristretto' on your balls.
So, in we go.
Cock the mechanism.
Let's close the trap door.
Let's push the button.
Got a little heating sort of flashing moment going on,
it's coming up to temperature.
And then, there'll probably be a little purge.
(machine hums)
Little purge.
(machine hums)
And then, that's probably like the rinse over the ball.
(machine hums)
Okay. That's enough.
So from the taste of the espresso,
this temperature in the glass,
I would say this is brewing substantially below 90, 95.
I would say this is brewing at like 80, 85 (°Celcius)
in terms of water temp.
It has that kind of texture and reduced bitterness
of brewing at those lower temperatures.
It's weird, it has a kind of creaminess
while also being quite watery, ultimately.
It definitely reminds me of a classic pod profile
of like much stronger than filter coffee,
not nearly as strong as espresso,
but with a weird kind of texture
and this kind of halfway house drink
that I do find kind of strange.
But that's me, some people really enjoy this
and we just have different preferences, that's all.
That's all.
But one thing I will note
if you watch the video with the mechanism inside,
you'll see that once coffee starts to brew,
after it passes through the coffee ball,
it has to push a spring away from it
to open the sort of exit chute and get out to the cup.
Now, this is a really common practice
in loads of pod machines because what it does,
that spring, it creates artificial back pressure.
And it means that the pump can get up to higher pressures
than it could if it was just pushing against the coffee
'cause the coffee's a bit too coarsely ground.
And so, yes this will say it's a 19 bar machine
or some other nonsense.
The spring might open at eight,
nine, 10 bars, something like that,
and it will have to maintain
that kind of pressure through the brew.
Now doing this helps create more crema.
At high pressures,
water can become super saturated with CO2,
you get more crema, but in addition to that,
I think there is some aeration going on here,
and I'll show you what I mean by that
if I just purge some water through it.
(machine hums)
So this is interesting.
This water looks really cloudy
because there's an aerator, I think,
in here that's mixed in loads of bubbles
and you can see it's starting to clear up, right?
The bubbles are dissipating.
Now, water can't capture a bubble.
It's got no surfactant and it's got no foaming agent in it.
It's just water.
But coffee does.
And so when you mix in a lot of bubbles into coffee,
into an espresso type drink,
you will turn that into foam basically.
So that will enhance the kind of crema
alongside the spring inside.
I don't think this is cheating.
I don't think this is a bad thing, if I'm honest.
I think it's a nice use of technology
to improve the kind of texture of the finished drink
for a coffee drinker.
Anything that makes a coffee drink more enjoyable,
ultimately, is probably good in my book.
These things cost around 55 US cents a ball.
I suspect comparably priced
with a bunch of other kind of capsules
out there in the market.
I'm curious how much they weigh.
A ristretto weighs
6.1 grams.
Let's try the lungo bio.
6.1,
6.2.
So whether it's a ristretto or a lungo,
it seems to be you're working with a fixed amount of coffee.
Actually, we haven't made a lungo yet.
Let's make a lungo.
(James throws a coffee ball)
(James rejoices)
(machine hums)
(slurp)
I don't think this is sort of bad coffee,
it's definitely just not the kind of coffee
that I would enjoy.
If you like a sort of like classic pod taste profile,
then I think that they're certainly delivering that.
I don't taste, in any of the beverages,
massive issues with extraction.
Nothing tastes really uneven.
It tastes like the sort of technology basically works okay.
Obviously, you know, your coffee cake,
there's nothing really we can analyze
or see from the inside of this that's gonna be insightful.
But from a technical perspective,
I don't think it's doing a bad job
in terms of extraction or any of that kind of stuff.
I would say this is gonna be
extracting pretty effectively the coffee in there
and whether you like the cup or not
is gonna be down to is it good water in there
and do you like the taste
of this kind of coffee roasted this way?
The machine, it's 150 Swiss francs,
which is about 150 US dollars these days.
It looks fine.
It's noisy and vibrate-y.
I don't know if that's all of them.
I will say it is the single most delightful way
to load a coffee machine I think I've ever experienced.
The little - let me just open it up one more time.
The little [clunk] that's great.
That's just great.
I really like that.
Whoever designed that,
whoever's idea that was deserves a promotion,
deserves a raise.
I think that's wonderful.
The coffee balls are ridiculously named, but I respect it
in that they really committed to this thing
and there is no better name
and I don't think anyone would forget
the name coffee balls in a hurry.
So I guess brand building from the get go.
I'm really interested in what they wanna do with this.
Because if the real mission is to reduce waste,
then surely, at some point in the very near future,
they would wanna open this system up
to other roasters to allow as much coffee as possible
to be consumed with less waste.
All of your branding, all of your messaging
is leading with this out of the gate.
Then, will it be an open system in the future
or are they just looking for a fresh way
to lock in a consumer to a product,
have a little walled garden,
have them go nowhere else
and to make as much money as possible?
I do, you know, feel a little bit skeptical
when a company that turns over 3 billion euros
is preaching a message like this
if you don't see a kind of wider action behind it.
I think if you were looking at this or a Nespresso system,
I think it would be easy to be sort of swayed towards this
because the coffee isn't far away from that.
There's maybe not the range of choices,
but you'd probably feel better about yourself using these
even if you were doing the recycling
of the aluminum capsules from Nespresso.
I like this kind of experimental approach.
I think it's good that people are innovating
in strange and wonderful ways.
I told myself at the start
that I had to know what it would be like
to eat one.
I don't know why I felt I had to do that.
But I look at them and I think,
could you - could you resist the temptation?
But maybe you could resist the temptation
if you'd seen someone else go through it.
'Cause this is just ground coffee and seaweed stuff,
but it looks
edible.
It looks
tempting.
I'm curious if the seaweed has a taste, actually,
that would be interesting to find out.
That, at least... Maybe I won't chew.
We'll find out.
Okay.
(Sighs deeply)
There's something wrong with me.
Mmm.
Okay.
Not bad.
Quite sweet.
Mmm. Little salty too.
Interesting.
They're - oh, no.
Mmm-mm.
I've chewed.
Oh, no.
Mmm-mm. Mmm-mm, mmm-mm, mmm-mm.
Urgh.
I know that was mostly just ridiculous
but genuinely interesting that the outside did taste sweet
and slightly salty as well,
which is probably a good thing for the end beverage.
I think it's probably not a bad addition of flavor.
That's interesting.
I'm curious if any of you in Switzerland
or I think France who have this at home,
they've reported tremendous response to this.
They kind of sold out everywhere at the start.
So it's gone well.
Have you got this? Have you tried it?
Do you like it?
I do wanna know what specialty coffee
would taste like inside this system.
I'm genuinely curious about that and how that would be.
But yeah, coffee balls.
Thanks so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.
Sorry (laughs).
Can I end it there?