- Today we're gonna talk about this, the Nespresso pod.
One of coffee technology's greatest success stories.
Nestle was able to build a multi-billion dollar business
turning espresso into a microwave meal.
It was more convenient, it was very easy to make,
but it was much more expensive,
and you could probably make something
better yourself, from scratch, if you had the inclination.
But many people love the convenience of them
and they were suddenly everywhere.
But in 2014, Nespresso lost a patent case against Dualit
and then suddenly, anyone could put their coffee
in an Nespresso compatible capsule.
And that should level the playing field.
I mean, sure, not every independent roaster
can afford a George Clooney, but they can afford
to buy and roast a much higher quality of coffee
than what Nespresso were putting inside the capsules.
But it wasn't a level playing field.
There's more technology in these things
that no one really talks about
and I want to get into it today
because we can learn from it
and it's just super interesting.
We'll break this down into three parts.
Firstly, we'll talk about the capsule itself,
then we're gonna talk about the coffee inside it
that does things that really don't make any sense.
And then finally, we're gonna talk about what we can learn
and apply from these things into potentially,
refillable Nespresso pods if you want to use those
or just think about our coffee brewing day to day.
So for comparison, this is a independent Nespresso capsule.
You know, it looks very similar.
You would use them in a machine like this one here.
This is a classic of the genre.
This is the Magimix Inissia.
I think they must have made
probably millions of these things.
They're cheap, they're everywhere.
I find them in hotels, still, fun places like that.
They're very cheap to make. They're very easy to use.
You put water in the back, you turn'em on,
you load a capsule, you push your button,
you get coffee about 30 seconds later,
from it being cold and off.
So incredibly quick to use,
but there's aspects to this
that I think are really interesting.
Before we get into it,
we should look just quickly at the capsules themselves.
Now you'll see that these are both aluminum bodied capsules.
They are a similar shape.
They both have a foil lining across the top.
If you look really closely though,
you'll see one very small difference on the underside
and that's here underneath the capsule, sort of rim.
On the Nespresso capsule you can see
a kind of silicon gasket there.
You can't see that gasket on this independent pod.
Why would that matter?
Well, Nespresso still have the patent
on this little gasket piece here,
and that turns out to be quite necessary
to have a good experience with a bunch of machines
out there on the market.
Now if we open this thing up, it will make more sense.
That's what this is.
I've took a broken one of these and I've dismantled it
so we can understand a bit more about what's going on.
Now, when you lift the handle,
move it backwards and forwards,
you're moving this piece around inside.
But if I take this piece off,
things start to make more sense.
When you load a capsule into this machine,
it drops down and then you push it in here.
And as you push it back like that,
the machine pierces the back in three places,
three little holes in the back of the capsule.
That's where it's gonna pump water in from.
Now, in order to have a good seal,
this capsule here must fit very snugly
against this piece here.
Otherwise, water could leak
from around the sides of the capsules.
Now this is an issue for independent pods
'cause they don't have the little silicon gasket.
And then to make life even harder for independent capsules,
well the bid that they sit against on this machine
is not a smooth piece.
It's actually got little tiny ridges
almost as if it's designed to leak
if there isn't a silicon capsule there.
Not saying that it is, I'm just saying
it's an interesting choice
to make it a kind of jagged toothed edge there.
This would give a strong competitive advantage
to a Nespresso capsule in a machine like this
because lots of independent capsules would just leak
and a leaky pod, well that's not a good experience.
That doesn't encourage you to go back
and buy the same independent capsules again.
It encourages you to stick with Nespresso
and keep using those over and over again.
Now the rest of the technology in these machines
is really incredibly simple.
You can sort of see what's going on here a little bit more.
This is at the base of your water tank
and water's gonna get drawn in here
through a little flow meter.
This piece here is your pump.
It's your vibration pump that makes a lot of noise.
There's a little board on the back
and then the last piece of tech
really is this little water boiler.
And the real win for Nespresso as an experience
is the fact that this thing gets very hot, very quickly
and that the actual precision of the temperature,
well, it doesn't matter that much.
With really high quality, specialty coffee
you want a pretty narrow band of brewing temperature.
If your coffee is much darker in roast,
having it be 80, 85, 90 Celsius
isn't gonna massively impact the taste experience.
You're not gonna get really sort of variable acidity
or anything like that.
You're gonna have a a surprisingly consistent experience
for a massive variable in your brew temp.
The upside for the user is, well, within 30 seconds
of thinking about wanting an espresso,
they have one in their cup.
And that is a kind of magical experience.
Going back here, if you look down the barrel of this thing,
you can see the little prongs that pierce the capsule.
So water gets pumped in there.
And then the other part of the capsule
sits against this thing here, this kind of waffley piece.
Now this is important.
It's common to all independent capsules and Nespresso,
but the water will pump into the back of this thing here.
But this foil initially will be sealed.
So there'll be a period of kind of pre-infusion
until the pressure builds so much
that the foil is pressed against
the kind of waffley material,
it breaks and espresso is able to flow out.
And there's nothing very clever after this.
There's just a a hole to a little spout
that will then drip outta the front here.
So there's no kind of pressure control devices
or anything like that.
They're really very simple.
Now, in response to this issue
with the sealing of the capsules,
well, independent businesses took an interesting approach.
They started to make their own kind of
independent Nespresso machines
that didn't have the same issue.
If you open up this machine
and you can look and feel inside where the capsule sits,
there's actually a sort of silicon gasket
that the capsule sits against
so that it isn't going to leak.
That is very clever, it's very simple,
but that's why there's suddenly this push
for independent, non Nespresso branded,
Nespresso compatible machines.
This one's a little bit slower to use
in terms of getting hot, which I don't think is a bad thing
because I'd rather have some more precision
and higher temperatures but it's a good example
of kind of fixing a weird problem
that most people didn't know existed.
But it isn't the only tech in these little capsules.
Let's open one up.
As we look into the bottom
of these little Nespresso capsules,
we'll see one fundamental difference.
You'll see in the bottom of the Nespresso sort of capsule,
it looks like there's a bunch of coffee collected
and stuck to something.
That is basically a little piece of paper
that isn't present in this.
You'll have seen people using things like puck screens
on espresso makers or even putting a filter paper
on top of their espresso puck to help distribute the water
more evenly across the coffee.
That's basically one more little patent
that Nespresso have that no one else does.
That means they can do a better job
of distributing the water coming in at those three points
With this capsule, the water will come in
at those three points and sort of shoot like three jets
of pressurized water through the coffee.
Here, that paper will buffer that, help the spread,
help the evenness of the extraction
and it will help make better tasting coffee.
We should get into brewing some coffee
because that's where things get really interesting
and kind of counterintuitive
and shocking to my little brain.
I'll start with this.
It's the little festive edition
Nespresso have out right now.
I do enjoy the truthfulness of their taste descriptor.
It has one, it's not cereal, surprisingly,
it's woody, which for the rest of the coffee industry
is a straight up sort of defect word
when coffee, raw coffee gets very old,
it tends to taste a bit woody.
So that's a weird thing to promise,
but I'm sure they'll deliver.
The thing I want you to pay attention to
is how quickly it brews.
(machine whirring)
(machine beeping)
So fast, so quick.
Let's put in an independent capsule
from a specialty roaster and compare and contrast.
(machine whirring)
(machine beeping)
So let's talk grind size.
This fast brewing shot, you would think,
okay, it's a darker roast, they're gonna grind it coarser,
it'll extract pretty well and they'll have a fast
but reasonably extracted shot.
Specialty coffee needs a finer grind.
It's gonna be a lighter roast.
We've gotta grind it much finer
and that's why this shot is slower.
Turns out you're dead wrong.
Completely wrong, shockingly wrong.
Now we now have a fancy particle size analyzer
here in the studio so we can actually look
at the particle size inside capsules.
And what I found was astonishing to me.
This capsule is ground notably finer than this one here.
On average, I think the particle size moves
between one and 200 microns finer.
This is close to a kind of normal espresso grind.
This is actually quite a bit coarser.
In some cases, people might be grinding independent capsules
because if they don't have a good seal,
the more pressure that gets built inside the capsule,
the more likely it is to leak.
But ultimately, if you go finer with specialty coffee,
with most grinding tech, you just can't have a pod
that doesn't choke.
You know, it would take a minute to two minutes
at a grind setting like this
because no one has the same grinder tech as Nespresso.
That's kind of it. That's the interesting piece to me.
Now we can look in the particle size analyzer
and try and see differences in shape
and you might look at this initially and think,
Ooh, the Nespresso pod has more fines.
It's not only finer in grind, but it's got more fines.
How is that happening?
But if you dive a little deeper,
you'll see that it has less fines under 30 microns,
which are really fine, fines.
And so that seems to be really key
in the way that these things brew and extract.
And to be honest, I still look at that distribution
and I look at the way that they brew
and my brain can't quite match the two things up.
This is so much coarser as a grind setting.
It would feel coarser, look coarser, it is coarser,
but it brews so much slower.
Nestle's grinding tech
is the best in the world, potentially.
They're able to do a combination of shape,
size, distribution, whatever it needs to be
to have this thing brew incredibly fast
but also brew with a good extraction.
Now I spoke to one roaster who said,
okay, but this is just a function of darker roasts
and you just, you know, even Nespresso couldn't put
lighter roasts in there and make it work.
This is a light roast challenge.
They're always gonna brew slower.
But then Nespresso just dropped this ridiculous pod.
Look at that fanciness. So very fancy.
Oh look, this even get the tasting card specialty.
There's nothing they can't steal from us.
Inside here are five pods.
'cause it's just, you just want five
because they're two pounds 15 each.
If you wanna back solve that,
the coffee in here costs roast and ground 389 pounds a kilo,
that's what, just under $500 a kilo and it's from Nestle.
Anyway, this was interesting
because we analyzed the color of this thing.
Something else we can do here.
We can look at roast color
on something like an Agtron scale.
And while most Nespresso is much darker than specialty,
this was within one Agtron point of a specialty roaster.
And yet they were grinding it so much finer.
It's just their tech is just better.
It's just they're better at grinding coffee
than anyone else, putting coffee in these little capsules
and that feels unfair but it is the truth.
We should have a little taste of this, shouldn't we?
Now that is a little bit slower than the rest of the pods,
but it's still pretty quick in comparison to independents.
Let's have a little taste.
First up, Woody Winter.
You know, yeah, it's woody.
It's just not that much of anything, quite surprisingly.
Let's try an independent specialty pod.
Flavor, sweetness, texture, much better, much more complex.
Clearly you can taste a sort of high quality
raw material in there.
Let's compare it to the very expensive, Nestle version.
Hmm, it's sort of a halfway house.
It's not as good as this,
but it's better than I thought it would be.
Independent roasters are comfortably out-competing them
in the format when it comes to flavor, but on tech,
not even close.
Now from all that we've learned,
I'm interested in what we can apply
to things like reusable Nespresso capsules.
Those are really popular amongst lots of people
and I think there are things we can definitely
kind of patch across in our understanding
So let's talk about how we apply what we've learned
to the world of reusable and Nespresso pods.
Now, I did two things to prepare for this.
Firstly, get my grind right.
I use the particle size analyzer to match my grinder
to the Nespresso sort of particle size.
Granted, I have a very fancy grinder in the studio,
a Weber EG-1 but I wanted to set myself up for success here
and as you'll see, as I show you a comparison
between the two, it's pretty close, but it's not identical.
I don't have the fancy roller mill grinders
that Nespresso do.
I've got a fancy flat burr grinder. Let's see what happens.
And then I bought three different kinds
of reusable capsules.
I'll walk you through them.
Firstly, there's these ones here.
It's a metal bodied sort of capsule.
It does come with a bunch of these
little silicon gaskets for the back here.
These fall off sometimes, which is a bit annoying
and I assume you lose them so that's where you get extra.
These, when you seal them, you do so
with a little kind of sticker foil lid.
Then you've got the kind of cheapest option,
which is just a kind of plastic capsule.
It has a little mesh piece that folds over, clips in,
and you'd brew it like that.
And then thirdly, interesting approach here,
these ones were metal capsules and metal lids.
It's a kind of a sort of straining mesh here.
And then kind of a little spout piece on the other side.
And that came quite bizarrely, with a little tamper,
a surprisingly heavy tamper.
Anyway, let's brew them and see what happens.
Now when it comes to sticking, two things to note,
one, it's quite hard to both stick
and potentially peel off afterwards.
I've had some issues with that.
And two, it's not a reusable piece.
These are a consumable.
This is one and done.
So good news for the manufacturer,
less good news for you who's trying to cut down on waste
or you know, non reusable things.
Anyway, we've got a seal on it now
and that, I think is important.
Let's listen carefully as it brews.
(machine whirring)
Now you may not have known what to listen for,
but you can actually hear the sound
of the foil breaking from the pressure built inside.
That means that this capsule does have
a kind of pre-infusion moment before the rest of the brew,
unlike potentially, the other capsules
that don't have a sealed end.
So there's no opportunity to build the pressure up.
Will that be an advantage?
Obviously the downside of these things
is I will later need to retrieve the sort of hot, wet,
dirty capsule from the capsule bin to clean it
and that's annoying but that's all of these.
So let's try this one.
(machine whirring)
(machine beeping)
Let's go with our metal top and bottom.
And the instructions are not hugely clear or detailed,
they say fill the capsule and gently tamp.
It doesn't even fit.
That's another annoyance.
I dunno why you'd make it so small.
(machine whirring)
(machine beeping)
This had the kind of finest filter
on the exit from the capsule,
which might be a bit of a sort of a crema generating device
in a funny sort of way 'cause this one is a little foamier
than I might have anticipated.
But let's start at the beginning.
Give them a taste.
To the foil lid.
Your brain assumes it'll be under extracted,
but the ratio of an espresso pod is such
that your five, six grams of coffee
are brewed with 25, 30 grams of water.
That's a really long longo style ratio
and so, it is well extracted, it's just kind of weak.
I wouldn't say it's as good
as the independent Nespresso pod.
Let's try the cheapest option.
Now that is under extracted still,
that tastes very channely and even not enjoyable.
I could imagine with a very dark roast,
you'd maybe get away with it, but anything specialty
definitely doesn't work for me.
Let's try our little tamped friend here.
It's better than this but it's not as good as this.
It's okay, it's a little sour.
It doesn't taste as evenly extracted as this one here.
It's an interesting world out there.
And if you think about the sort of tech involved,
none of them have the advantage
of that bit of paper at the start
evening out the flow of water through the coffee.
Could you put that in yourself?
I'm not sure you should, but you could.
But that foil seal, I think is a real strong advantage
when it comes to better brewing.
And I think that's a real place
that most of the independent
sort of reusable pods fall down.
And I think for most people considering
reusable Nespresso pods at home,
they definitely won't have a grinder
as capable as this one
and I think you're really gonna struggle with the results.
Don't take this as a kind of endorsement of Nespresso.
I am fascinated and interested
by the technologies that they have.
I don't really understand how they're grinding coffee
the way that they are, but it's super interesting.
But when it comes to drinking coffee,
I want people to support local roasters,
buy incredible coffees, and be able to turn them
easily and inexpensively into delicious coffee drinks.
I think espresso is a great way to enjoy coffee,
but it's also a little bit of a hobby
that has, you know, a bit of a hurdle to get into it.
You've gotta spend the money on the equipment
and have the time.
There are other ways to make coffee
that are incredibly inexpensive, hugely fun,
and yield you very delicious drinks
and that's kind of what this channel is all about.
But now I wanna hear from you down in the comments below.
I wanna hear from you if you are using reusable systems
and you had any joy in ways that I haven't,
are there any tips or tricks that you wanna share with me
and the rest of the audience?
And then if you just watched this to learn more
about the technology inside there,
well, was that interesting?
Is there some other patent that we should have talked about?
Is there other tech that we've missed
that we should look at in the future?
I'd love to hear from you down in those comments below.
But for now I will say thank you so much for watching