this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
84 points (96.7% liked)
Technology
59135 readers
2532 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm from Australia, and visit Germany regularly.
Australian coffee is sublime. Made manually, it's a profession of pride for many, and in all my travels to many countries, the coffee of Australia has never been bested.
German coffee is made through exact, automated machines, and it's crap. It's some of the worst coffee I've experienced.
Machine after machine, I've tried them all, and I've given up.
I don't know what the human does, but whatever they do that the machine is not doing, makes av huge difference, and no manufacturer has cracked the magic formula yet.
I can't help but feel like your sampling might be skewed.
Vollautomaten (I. E. Fully automated coffee machines that brew espressos and cappuccinos etc) tend to make worse coffee, I agree. That's why I don't use the one in the office.
Having an experienced barista grind you an exactly measured dose fresh for your coffee at a good Café is quite nice, on the other hand.
But that's nothing to do with Germany or Australia.
Experienced humans know all the variables - roast levels, grind size, water temperature, slight differences in timing depending on exact coffee in question... And more importantly they can apply them intuitively without mentally processing each variable separately.
Machines could do all that but such a machine would need good programming (expensive) and a lot of sensors (expensive).
So you're saying there's a chance? How far away do you estimate this threshold is reached? My personal guess would be within 15-20 years.
It already happened 15-20 years ago for 90% of people.
Coffee snobs (myself included) sometimes forget that the vast majority of people just want a cup of brown that makes them feel slightly less like shit.
I've had the opposite experience, my regular coffee shop uses an automatic machine. They have the best espresso in the area, it might help that they roast their own beans.