I first encountered the Nespresso system back in 2005 when I visited Gilles Gravier én famille in Geneva, and he was raving about this machine which would provide good quality Arabica espresso (Gilles has a health issue with Robusta beans) on demand, and was so little mess and fuss. At the time I was interested, but not enthused, having somewhat purist notions about espresso – views which I still maintain – and not being experienced with the product, so to speak.

Last year I met Adriana and the other folk at “Hippo Central”, all of whom evangelised to me similarly about Nespresso; Adriana’s had two machines herself, and I know that the current machine gets used multiple-times-daily.

Cutting a long story short: this summer I bought a small machine, for home use. Almost immediately I took it to the office in order to “attain greater effectiveness through leveraging caffeine”, and a few weeks afterwards bought another, larger machine, for home use; so now I have two machines, and am a regular visitor to the Nespresso shop in Knightsbridge.

My two machines are:

• Nespresso Magimix M100 manual, in orange, cost £89
• Nespresso Magimix M200 manual, in black, cost £139

…and to date the experience has been superb; the cheaper machine lives at the office and doses me (plus a few colleagues) with decent neat black espresso throughout the day, the other is at home and gets me out of bed and awake in 10 minutes rather than the more typical 60. The latter also has a steamer wand, for the times when I want to play pretend barista and do a latte, cappucino, etc.

In terms of after-sales service everything has been equally superb – the machines have a three year guarantee, I’ve been courteously phoned by the support centre (out of the blue) to check everything is OK with my machines, and on the two occasions when the work machine’s capsule collection basket accidently got thrown away in the trash, a quick call to the freephone support centre led to a replacement being delivered, free, the next day.

They didn’t even bill for postage because the whole thing was less than a couple of quid.

Basically Nespresso has taken the “club” concept and implemented the whole thing, realising Gillette’s adage about “giving away razors and selling razor-blades”. Each coffee capsule costs betweent 23p and 25p, I probably burn through an average of four per day, so over the course of three years that is about £1000 which has gone to Nespresso rather than Starbucks.

Multiply by a userbase in the 10s of 1000s and that’s a pretty good annuity revenue stream so long as they keep their customers happy – and they do; special flavours, one-off speciality beans, surprise-and-delight gadgetry, biscuits, chocolate, middle-class aspirational lifestyle magazines, a top-quality support organisation, one-click ordering via the website and an addictive drug to give it all a reason to exist.

Of course it would be a success.

The downsides? To date I can think of only a couple. The first is probably most easily just clipped from the Wikipedia article:

Criticisms have been raised regarding the ecological implications of Nespresso. In terms of ecological impact, each cup of Nespresso coffee produces aluminum waste, the main material of the capsule. Recycling aluminum represents energy savings of up to 95% in comparison with the production of primary aluminum.[2] However, NestlÈ has not implemented recycling programs outside their native Switzerland.[2] This leads to a large per-cup waste generation, and some user groups have criticised this.[3] Nevertheless, in the UK you CAN recycle your capsules. Just remove all the coffee from the used capsules and dump them at the nearest recycling point for cans (Tesco has some).

…and I suspect this may be the reason for the new “Office” capsule designs on Nespresso.com. Yes the latent greenie in me cringes on occasion when looking at a pile of dead capsules, but I drive a car which does 55mpg, recycle compost (though I almost never plant anything) and produce so little trash that I put my wheelie bins out about every 6 weeks… so I reckon I am allowed an indulgence.

Then there’s my purist streak: I still have my old Krups machine which needs a gasket replacement, in facet needs a complete overhaul, and that is the only machine in which I can make espresso from my home-roasted coffee beans, on occasions when I do that; and occasionally I would get 10-out-of-10 perfect espresso from it, but frequently 4, 5 and 6/10 too.

But the Nespresso machines consistently give me 7/10 or better, so on convenience they win hands-down. I am willing to surrender some purist ground, for the ability to get good coffee within a few minutes of stumbling out of bed.

Update: for those who would like Espresso demystified, check out my links at Del.icio.us – read especially Dave Bogie’s FAQ.