and one of these...

And some decent beans. Job done.

put in coffee, put in boiling water, wait a bit, sorted

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bodum-Columbia-Cofee-Press-stainless/dp/B00005YY...

I think you'll find it hard to get decent coffee on your budget, and would look to up your spending if you're really keen to make a quality drink and you can afford it. Points to ponder:

1. To get decent coffee you should be using beans, and they should be freshly ground. Most cheap grinders use blades, which burn the beans, and to avoid this you'll need a burr grinder. This will use up much of your current budget, while a decent burr grinder might exceed it.

2. You mention temperature, and the coffee not being hot enough, but most cheap machines actually run boiling water through the grind, which you don't want: again it burns the granules, giving you a much bitterer drink than is desired. The temperature of the water should be 92-94°, which will release the flavours without burning the granules. Being this precise is difficult at the cheaper end of the market, and isn't easy with many expensive machines.

3. It's all about diminishing returns: you can end up paying lots of money for incremental improvements to your drink that many people may not even appreciate.

4. It's not just the machine: the quality and origin of the beans, the size of your granules, the amount you tamp the puck, and the rate with which water passes through the basket all affect the taste. It's a juggling act even with the very best equipment, and it's why decent barista courses can be a year long.

Having said all that, I'm sure you can get a reasonable all-rounder for the price you mention, but I'm not the man to offer advice on that, apart from to say not to expect miracles.

Mmm, yes, the Krups GVX2 is about £80; a small Bialetti about £20, so just about within budget.

Then you can go to the Algerian Coffee Shop on Old Compton St and get some decent beans.

http://www.algcoffee.co.uk/scripts/default.asp

....which does away with the blending and grinding as they do it for you and put the grinds into a sealed capsule. The capsule goes into a KRUPPS machine and 30 seconds later I have a perfect double espresso.

My machine was £130 and I got £30 cashback. The downside for you is that it only makes espresso and lungo. I actually don't even know what lungo is as I only ever drink espresso.

I think a double espresso costs me about 60p.

But I much prefer coffee brewed through a percolator rather than via a cafetiere or one of these fancy machines. A Bialetti is great but I have this one which I've always found to be reliable and produce a very good cup of coffee:
http://www.johnlewis.com/230872022/Product.aspx

Our was got new from an ebay site for about £30, and has beavered away for 5 years. I see a second hand one of ours (sorry no serial no) is on at £10..so with £50 you should be able to land one

Lavazza rosso if you don't want (as we don't) to get involved with beans and grinding. Our taste test versus almost every restaurant we go to leads to the Krupps still coming out on top.

recommended a second hand Baby Gaggia. They cost between £50 and £70.

Coffee makes you thirsty.
Which is a weird thing for a drink to do.
It's cloy.
I like coffee, but always have to have a cup of tea afterwards.

I want a percol;ator for an induction hob. Any recommendations.

BTW - I just eBayed an as new Krups coffee maker that did filter, espresso, cappuccino and got 20 quid for it!

How To Drink is, I think, fairly sensible on coffee at home. I can't recommend the book enough - its excellent.

Coffee: how to make it

We live in an age of baristas and world coffee-making championships, in a country with about 3,000 branded coffee outlets in which we spend millions every year, yet it's unusual to buy a cup of coffee that meets even fairly low expectations.

Skinny lattes are too milky or too bitter; espressos lack the proper crema (the creamy-textured top that shows the espresso is both fresh and properly made). There's not enough balance, not enough punch, an earthy edge that reminds you of dish­water. At home, it is often just as bad.

Most of us drink coffee, but I have still to find more than a dozen people who make it well and do so without hesitation or apology. With a filter machine or cafetiere no one is ever sure how much coffee to use. With a cafetiere there is also the plunging dilemma: how long ought one to wait? Will it be done yet? Should I give it a quick stir?

The smell of freshly ground, fresh-roasted coffee beans is one of the most intoxicating I know, yet the gulf between that and the dead taste when it hits your mouth can sometimes feel as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Once opened, a vacuum-pack of ground coffee will keep only about two weeks before it loses its brightness and edge, and that's if you look after it by storing it in an air-tight jar, then put the jar in the fridge. The other major mistake most of us make is that we don't use enough coffee. To get freshness and punch without mud and flatness, you need quite a lot of it.

The domestic espresso machine A friend once texted me from the kitchen of Gordon Ramsay's family house to say someone was trying to make her drink instant coffee because Gordon had no idea how to work his shiny new espresso contraption. These hulking, gurgling machines have become de rigueur in middle-class homes over the past few years, but owe more to engine appreciation than they do to a desire
for gourmandism.

The feeling among coffee experts is that while an espresso is a delicious drink, the coffee-making method has more impact on the flavour than the beans. That is, an espresso reveals the nuances of an espresso more than it allows your finest Java, Colombian or Kenyan coffee to express itself.

AJ Kinnell, a buyer for the Monmouth Coffee Company, goes further. A rigorous New Zealander, she has been hooked since she began visiting coffee shops at the age of 14, ordering espressos and asking questions, intent on finding that holy grail,
'a coffee that might taste as good as it smelt'. She says, "I tell everyone not to buy an espresso machine, because unless you can afford to buy one made to commercial standards, which would probably cost you about £3,000, then it's going to produce inferior espresso. Frankly, even if an espresso was what I wanted, I'd rather drink coffee made a different way than have a bad one."

Filters The electric filter machine is the Antichrist of coffee-making.

It is almost painful to watch the liquid dripping lethargically through as the already-made coffee sits on the scalding metal plate, stewing to dullness, or, even worse, to see the jug languishing on the heat in restaurants, waiting for someone to order a cup, while the coffee rapidly loses whatever vestige of decent flavour it might once have had. A child equipped only with a bag of chicory, hot water and a sieve could not make a worse drink. The hot metal plate and the hanging-around time destroy the freshness. And because water is passed for several minutes through the same grounds, muddier flavours are extracted.

Both these issues are avoided if you make coffee directly into the mug using individual filters. The Monmouth Coffee Company imports individual ceramic filters from Japan (which you can also buy in their shops), and makes all the non-espresso-based coffee it sells in this way.

You simply rest the ceramic filter, with a filter paper inside, on top of a mug, put about 25g of coffee in the paper, dampen the coffee with near-boiling water so that it blooms up slightly, then fill the filter to the top with hot water so that it gushes through. The coffee made in this manner tastes very similar to that made in a cafetiere, but a little cleaner because the filtration process removes some of the solids in suspension in the water.

Then all you have to do is chuck the filter paper and its grounds in the bin.

Cafetiere There is a school of coffee hoity-toitiness that sneers at the cafetiere. I do not subscribe to this. Along with individual cup-filters, this is to my mind one of the two coffee-making methods that shows the beans off to the full. It just requires
a little care. First, you need to warm the cafetiere up, by filling it with hot water from the kettle and leaving it to sit while the kettle reboils.

Mike Riley, a buyer for Taylors of Harrogate, introduced me to another tweak. "If there are any small grains of old coffee caught in the cafetiere mesh, they will dull the taste," he said fastidiously. "So when I'm warming the cafetiere I clean it at the same time, by giving it a few vigorous plunges before I throw the warming water away."

Most people don't use enough coffee in a cafetiere. Unlike tea, coffee tastes sharper and brighter if it doesn't have much steeping time. This means you need to put enough coffee in the pot to give instant flavour. Leaving it to sit in the water will only extract all the earthy, dull flavours you don't want. There should be at least a couple of fingers of coffee in the bottom of your cafetiere when the water – just off the boil or boiling, it makes no difference – goes in. Now either leave the coffee for 30 seconds before plunging, or give it a stir with a spoon and then begin to plunge, slowly, straight away.

Moka This is the Italian stove-top device that comes in three metal parts.

You put cold water in the bottom and the grindings in a perforated metal cup above it; steam from the water as it boils passes through the coffee, gathering flavour, before condensing and gurgling through into a jug screwed on the top.

A bad moka makes coffee that tastes tinny and uninspired, as if the bag has been open for several weeks. A good one makes glossy, strong, black coffee that always tastes a little baked – sometimes reminiscent of cocoa nibs, and has less fruitiness than the same coffee when brewed in a cafetiere or individual filter system. Thanks to the slight burnt taste it gives, a moka will never do justice to an expensive bean.

But I happen to like it, not to mention the preparation ritual and the satisfying gurgle that alerts you to the fact that the coffee is ready, and I tend to alternate between a cafetiere, filter and moka according to my mood.

Know your beans

The roasted beans of two species of coffee plant, Coffea arabica and robusta, are widely used to make drinks.

Of these, arabica is considered superior – smoother, more elegant – while robusta tends to have a flatter, earthier, more rustic profile. It is cheaper robusta that is found in many instant coffees but I have a sneaky attraction for the gutsy smell of robusta in the morning, which in coffee circles is akin, I am told, to declaring a passion for Black Tower.

The robusta I drink is actually mixed with arabica and is the blend Lavazza sells under its red label, Qualità Rossa. It is a little too plainspoken for drinking later in the day, but first thing seems just right.

Many espresso blends, and by association some of those coffees labelled 'Italian blend', are based on Brazilian coffee. Partly because it works well in an espresso.

According to Taylors of Harrogate, which sells coffee under its own name as well as producing some own-label blends, "Acidity comes out much higher when you put beans through an espresso machine. So you might really love Kenyan coffee, which tends to have high acidity, made in a cafetiere, but find it too much in an espresso. Brazilian coffee, on the other hand, has lower acidity and is much more chocolatey. You give it a dark roast to bring up that flavour and it makes a fantastic espresso."

Though coffee-growing countries will all produce different styles and qualities of coffee, there are broad characteristics associated with each one. Java tends to be heavy, rich and chocolatey. Kenyan typically has a zesty, citrusy acidity and a broad fruitiness. Brazilian is quite neutral.

Ethiopia, the country where the coffee plant, with its white flowers that smell unexpectedly of jasmine, is thought to have first been persuaded to give up some of its 'coffee cherries' for roasting and turning into a drink, is said to have 'the most coffee-tasting coffee'.

Buying coffee

Freshness is key. In an ideal world, you would buy from a place that roasted the beans itself, because once roasted they rapidly begin to fade. If you can grind them yourself at home at the point of need, so much the better.

Equip yourself with a grinder with a variable setting so you can churn out grounds the size of coarse breadcrumbs for cafetieres, fine breadcrumb for filters, and something between icing and caster sugar for espresso machines. If you don't have a grinder, for reasons of space or time, then try to buy either vacuum-packed with as long as possible on the sell-by date or coffee that is well stored and ground to order.

A word on milk

Because I like my coffee made very strong, then heavily diluted with milk, I always need to use warm milk. It is very important not to overheat it. Boil it, and the coffee is lost to the taste of cooked milk, not to mention floating skin debris. Take great care, testing the temperature with your finger as it warms as you would if feeding a baby, and use it as cool as you can get away with.

You can buy small frothing devices but if you have a cafetiere, put the hot milk in the cafetiere, not more than halfway up, then pump the plunger vigorously and the milk will become aerated.

....to find a bad cup of coffee".

Tom Waits

You'll never sleep again.

Coffee Porn from the Word sinners.

Next week:
Readers Wives Teapots.
(.)(.)

I use one of these Jura machines (http://www.jura.com/).

It grinds the beans fresh each time, makes coffee and expresso's and has the milk frother. I'm no connoisseur, but it does the job. may be a bit beyond the budget though

One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I can't stomach coffee - it smells divine but the taste makes me retch. Cheap or expensive, I find it literally undrinkable. So all this coffee porn is driving me crazy - I really, really want to like it, but I just don't.

The main things that this thread has highlighted are:
a. different people prefer their coffee prepared in different ways
b. Don't get a multipurpose device.
c. Only use fresh ground coffee.

I always get compliments about my coffee when I make it for people and it's just simple filter coffee with no machine. If your preference is for espresso then my method is useless. I don't do frothed milk either!

Gold blend is just fancy packaging - it is not worth the extra dosh. Sainsburys' own brand granules are just as good - at a push Aldi does an acceptable product