(no subject)

[camwyn]

After visiting my parents several times last year, they saw that I liked the coffee I got from their Nespresso machine. I was, I admit, a little surprised that they had one. Nespresso is a Nestle' company, and for the vast majority of my life my mother refused to let me so much as buy a Nestle' Crunch bar because of Nestle's role in encouraging women in Africa to feed their babies powdered formula rather than breastfeeding, which resulted in a lot of malnourished and dead children thanks to the widespread practice of using less-than-safe water and/or diluting the formula significantly in order to make it last longer. Not to mention Nestle's current policy of "aquifers should be a commercial resource, not something a community should have access to simply because it's positioned on top of one, and we, as a giant corporation, should be allowed to buy those water rights out from under communities for ridiculously tiny amounts of money because we can profit off it and they can't". Or their former CEO saying that water is not a human right and then backpedaling like a circus unicyclist.

But they had one, and I used it while I was visiting, and I rather liked the result. Which... meant that when they couldn't figure out what to get me for Christmas, they bought me one, too.

Given Nestle's track record with water supplies and community aquifers here in New England alone, never mind what they did with California aquifers and expired leases, I am really not happy with the prospect of giving that company any more money. My parents gave me a starter set of pods for the thing, but when I've used them all up, it's a Vertuo coffee maker- the line Nestle' created with bar codes on the pods in no small part to force users to buy only Nespresso pods, rather than being able to go out and get single-use pods from other manufacturers. So I'm a little stuck, there.

Wonder if anybody's come up with a hack for the Vertuo line. I can deal with using the machine with somebody else's coffee pods purely out of spite.

Comments

[hannah]

Because those machines get water almost to but not at boiling temperature, if you run them without a pod they're ideal for making single cups of green and white tea. Nespresso, Keurig, all of them. It's not a great solution, but at least it's a reasonable application of them.

[ymfaery]

There isn't a way you could use a used pod with new coffee grounds?

Too lazy to log out of my RP account for this.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Apparently this can be done if you're willing to fiddle with the pod and some tin foil, or at least it can be done with the non-Vertuo models. I'll have to see whether this works with mine or whether the act of brewing causes the coffee machine to physically damage the bar code that tells it what to do with a given pod. I would not put it past Nestle' to have rigged that up.

[tibicina]

One video of how to do it plus apparently a near-endless supply of other videos about how to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_uxUwPkay4

And a product which apparently makes it easier:

https://www.amazon.com/My-Caps-Capsules-Nespresso-VertuoLine-Brewers/dp/B01LFNWBV6

[camwyn]

Ooh, thanks!