Everything homemade tastes better, if you know how to make it. But if you give it time and effort, it’s possible to make it good…

I don’t drink coffee, but I drink beer. And I like beer. I wouldn’t give that up. If it’s necessary to drink less, to reach my goals faster, I’ll do it. But to completely leave it? No thanks. The same goes for coffee, for coffee-drinkers, I guess.

The problem is, that it costs a lot more to make your own beer 🙂 Well… at least I got the wine part covered. Making your own Mead (honey wine) is easy and very cheap.

The beer I’ll keep buying though… latte factor or not 😉

As someone who hasn’t yet figured out what’s so great about coffee, I thought you were going in a totally different direction with your post.

Yes, the ‘latte effect’ exists. But so does the ‘orange effect’ (the fruit). Most ongoing expenses get huge when you annualize them, but people buy things for a reason. If someone loves coffee enough to want to buy prepared at their local shop, that may be worth it – just as it may be worth it for someone to buy an orange and apple each day.

The DIY questions is important, but the latte effect is usually framed as “Here’s something you didn’t realize you was so expensive and you should cut it out now!” To which I reply “Maybe not.”

I’m no connoisseur, but my Dunkin Donuts’ coffee from my wife’s crapola 4-6 cup coffee machine does fine. I do add sugar and half/half though.

I do tend to agree with OTOF above, as long as they know what they’re spending, I see nothing wrong with getting a daily coffee. It’s the mindless spending that usually hurts.

Part of the appeal of the $3 coffee is not just the coffee, it is the atmosphere of the place where you buy it. Some people are paying $3 to get a nice place to sit and work or chat or simply to be around other people for an hour.

I don’t drink coffee. My total lifetime coffee expenses are zero.

@Nicole – I suspect it’s harder to tell when your water reaches 195 degrees in a teapot than once you have figured out the exact number of seconds to nuke it for in your machine. And if you just let the water boil, I bet it takes a while cool the water 17 degrees. Maybe he could pour it back and forth from one container to another and learn that it takes X transfers to cool it properly.

I don’t like coffee, beer, or wine. But I do like a useless expensive beverage: hot chocolate. I especially used to like Godiva hot chocolate. What was their secret? How do they get it so chocolaty?

I decided that the answer is that they instruct you to use more hot chocolate mix than anyone else does. After a little experimentation, I’ve decided that I like 2 tablespoons sugar + 2 tablespoons cocoa per small mug of milk just as much. It’s also much cheaper and this recipe allows me use shade-grown cocoa. I just whisk it all together in a small pan on the stove.

I know that’s really not hot chocolate but hot cocoa. Although I haven’t done a side-by-side taste test, I haven’t noticed a difference. I do also have another recipe involving chocolate chips, cocoa, and milk, and many people like to add a little vanilla, cinnamon, or other flavor enhancer.

I read that the US gets the worst coffee beans. The best go to Japan and Europe. Since you grew up in Europe, you may be used to better coffee. My husband and I wax rhapsodic over the coffee we drank in France.

So it’s not just method, but also quality of materials.

Once saw a funny Malcolm Gladwell interview where he discusses how most Americans claim to prefer a medium full-bodied roast, when what they actually drink is weak watery coffee loaded down with sugar and cream.

As for the latte factor I think it’s got its uses as an illustration for a certain type of audience. In the office where I work many people pay $2.50 every day for a coffee from the Starbucks on the ground floor, even though the free coffee in our break room is Starbucks too. It’s about being conscious of how much you spend and taking advantage of “80% as good, 90% cheaper” type situations.

Wow – just talked about this at lunch. I grind starbux beans I buy onsale @ costco (16.50 usually after the sale) for 2.5 lbs lasting 3 months. My milk/creamer use, and even the water and electricy calcs (rounded out of course) make my morning coffee about .22 cents (11 cents a cup roughly and my container holds 2 cups).

My splurge is usually hard liquor. I like mixing drinks and trying different alcohols from all around the world. It’s amazing what fermentation can do to the body.

I think the weather is turning around (finally) for an ERE meet-up, as an aside.

@OTOF: good call on the “orange factor”. I used to spend $25-30 on oranges each month before finally realizing how expensive the damn things are. Now I wait for sales and cycle through other less expensive fruits and veggies. Though I guess it’s not as bad as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho bragging that his Japanese apple-pears cost $4 apiece 🙂

When contemplating the per pound cost of fruit, many people express horror at the cost of berries, which are almost completely edible, relative to citrus fruits like mandarin organges or tangelos, which lose 40%+ of weight when peeled; or melons, which include the cost of an inedible rind. Even stone fruit like peaches and plums have an appreciable pit that contributes no edible value. That is why poms, like apples and pears represent such a good value: the ratio of cost per pound to percentage of edible portion is high.

I spent 30 years in the US Army where a coffee cup was part of the uniform. I have had everything from cream of the crop to the bottom of the barrel in coffee. After Desert Storm was over and we were home, I thought about writing a letter to my congressman saying that it was soldier abuse to hold a war in a country where you could not get a decent cup of coffee.
I do two things on coffee:

A. Morning coffee is perk on the gas range in a METAL perk pot, and it has to be @8 O’clock coffee which is the best ground coffee available on the retail market. @8 O’clock earned the Consumer Reports best buy and best flavor.

B. Having the morning gone, lunch over, we now turn to the afternoon coffee. This is a whole bean which I grind and use an electric drip maker. I prefer Millstone “Chocolate Truffle or Chocolate Velvet”.

I sometimes in a pinch will visit a coffee shop and it always irks me to frustration to pay the price charged when I can make a better cup at home. I will say I buy it when with a friend or something, and don’t make it any kind of a practice.
My plug is for:

@8 O’clock grind
@Millstone Beans
AND Killian’s Irish Red (lager)in the evening with either steak or chocolate cake!!!!!!

Invest in a coffee bean roaster, get organic raw coffee beans from DeansBeans.com, find an old school hand operated burr grinder (crushing vs. chopping releases bean oils much better,) get/make a French press.

@ProxyMan: Oops, I wrote the same thing twice, only in a different form… okay, so there seems to be only 1 option that I can think of. Other than what you said off course ^^

[…] Brew your own coffee, and don’t eat out. […]

@Melissa – I’m still looking for a good hand-cranked grinder. All I find are toy or “display”-models.

@Andy — http://www.makebeer.net/

Packages start at 27.99 + 9.60 shipping = 37.59 which makes 23 liters, * 33.8 = 777.4 oz, / 12 = approx. 65 bottles. 37.59 / 65 = $0.58 / bottle, or $3.47 / six pack.

Maybe not cheaper than the cheapest horse piss, but it’s good beer for about half the cost of say, Sam Adams.

Starbucks coffee is incredibly nasty if you drink it black. Way over-brewed and absolutely terrible tasting. Most people buy the expensive $5 watered-down and flavored drinks and don’t notice though. I’m guessing they do it so the coffee flavor comes through all the extra sugar, flavoring and milk of the more expensive drinks.