They taste horrible compared to a good coffee, but they do taste better than crappy coffee shop espresso served in any country where espresso is not a common drink.
Plenty of people find them to be quite tasty and many people don't particularly like what you are calling good coffee. Coffee snobbery is like most snobbery it says more about the person being snobby.
I don't disagree about snobbery, but there's a huge difference between drinks such as instant coffee, drip-machine coffee and correctly brewed, fresh coffee.
I can't bring myself to drink instant coffee any more and will choose any kind of tea in preference to having to suffer the insult of instant "coffee". Drip-machine coffee at least uses real coffee, but in most people's hands leads to a horribly over-extracted brew and typically it's using supermarket-bought stale pre-ground coffee.
If you want to taste nice/good coffee, it can be made relatively cheaply. Buy some whole roasted beans (pre-ground coffee goes stale before it even hits the supermarket shelves), a decent hand burr grinder and an Aeropress device.
If you want to go for an electric bean grinder, ensure that it's a burr grinder as blade grinders are not suitable - they produce a wide variety of particle sizes which means that the small/dust bits get over-extracted and the larger particles are under-extracted. You could try sieving out the unwanted larger and smaller bits, but it's easier to just get a good grinder. For using an Aeropress, you can get away with a "cheaper" burr grinder, but if you want to make home espressos, then you probably want to be spending a LOT on a decent grinder as that will make the most difference to the quality of the espresso.
For a lot of people it is a difference without a distinction. Different strokes for different folks.
I myself make my morning coffee in a moka pot and prefer it over for example a pour over coffee. I recently got a Ninja Luxe Cafe machine which I use for espresso and fast cold brew coffee drinks. It makes decent espresso and the money, time and mental energy for getting a slightly better espresso through a more expensive machine is just not worth it to me. At my gitlfriend's I drink Nespresso because that is what she has. It tastes fine. It is definitely not horrible as many above have claimed.
I don't have a problem with people choosing to drink instant "coffee", but there's such a clear difference that and actual coffee, no matter the preparation method.
I'd agree that getting better quality espressos can get expensive very quickly, and moka pots make very nice coffee for the price (definitely diminishing returns for high end equipment).
To me, the best bang for your buck comes with grinding beans to order, as that means that your coffee isn't oxidising so much before you even brew it. Personally, I'm a fan of immersion brewing techniques, so an Aeropress is my weapon of choice - it's relatively cheap and can make outstanding coffee (also highly portable - I take it along with a hand grinder when camping).
And sorry, but I do find Nespresso to taste very flat and stale the few times that I've tried it. I'd rather just have a good cup of tea than a stale cup of coffee.
You don't know what I am calling a good coffee. I appreciate some people don't like particularly sour coffee because it's unusual for them but you can do a lot better than nespresso in the realm of that style of darker roast coffee too.
It's really simple, people are happy with it because actually good coffee is so rare that they have nothing to compare against. I also doubt most of these people have ever drank a well brewed light roast espresso anyway so I think your blanket statement about "many people don't particularly like what you are calling good coffee" is bullshit.
> I appreciate some people don't like particularly sour coffee
Is that normal in 'good' espresso? I've had some coffee from shops with a particularly sour taste and I don't like it. It's not really because it's 'unusual' to me, I just really don't like it.
PS: I don't drink it with milk nor sugar. Just plain espresso with nothing (just in the morning I do like it americano with water). I like the strong taste and I hate milk :)
Some level of acidity is normal in any coffee, an increased level is common to lighter roasts. You can get a good darker roast espresso which won't be very noticeably acidic or you can get a good lighter roast espresso which tastes like fruit juice. At that point it's a personal preference.
Or maybe they have tried it and don't like it. Maybe it is your taste that is screwed up and that is why you like light roast espresso. But either way even if Neapresso isn't the best coffee it isn't horrible.
The vast majority of people have not tried well brewed coffee. Of those who have tried well brewed coffee, the vast majority have not tried well brewed light roast. The main reason is similar to how most people have not tried well prepared food. The reason is not, as you seem to insinuate, because I am a coffee snob who is incapable of conceding that different people have different tastes. Another reason is because in most of the world people drink coffee with various inclusions like heaps of sugar (Italy) and heaps of milk (the rest of the world) and because, as a result, almost no cafe out there optimises for black coffee outside of countries like Italy.
Most people who drink coffee black (even in Italy) seem to do it either because they got used to how bad it tastes, or because of dietary reasons, or because they feel it makes them look more manly.
> Maybe it is your taste that is screwed up and that is why you like light roast espresso.
Again, you are assuming completely incorrectly and baselessly that I am claiming that light roast espresso is better than nespresso pods. I am not claiming this in the slightest. I am claiming that any good dark roast espresso is miles ahead of anything you can get out of a nespresso pod. Both in terms of not tasting like wood and in terms of not tasting like light roast.
Even petrol station cafes in Italy can produce much better results than a Nespresso machine and Italy continues to love drinking dark roasted Robusta/Arabica blends with heaps of sugar.
Likewise, any petrol station cafe in Italy can produce espresso which is so much better than what you can get in a Starbucks that it's difficult to conceive of why Starbucks even offers espresso any more. (And again, this is me talking about coffee in a country where people are used to drinking dark roast and would also likely be at least weirded out by the taste of light roast coffee.)
> But either way even if Nespresso isn't the best coffee it isn't horrible.
It's horrible in comparison to a high quality brew in the same way that McDonalds is horrible compared to anything you would get at a well respected high end restaurant.
You only think it's not horrible because you have limited experience. Yes, even in the realm of dark roast espresso.
Edit: I would also like you to consider the possibility that you personally (and maybe most people) simply do not have a sense of taste which is discerning enough to taste the difference between what someone with a more discerning taste would consider "good" coffee versus "horrible" coffee. This doesn't mean that we can't make quality judgements about coffees once they're above a certain level of awfully bitter/sour/astringent and unpleasant, but it does mean that maybe for you and for the vast majority of people, you shouldn't worry about "excellent" coffee and should instead just get on with your life.
I would like to just state that I am overjoyed to hear that you have found coffee you like to drink every day. There are lots of people out there whose experience of coffee has always been terrible (and it is my belief that most of them, with some help to explore, could probably find something they find inoffensive or even tasty). But rather than telling people who seem care more about coffee than you that they are snobs and their opinions of coffee are wrong, maybe you should also accept that not everyone has the same sense of taste as you.
I know the above sounds contradictory when I called Starbucks and Nespresso "horrible" but I would like to clarify things by saying that while I find Nespresso horrible in the grand scheme of things, if it makes you happy, you shouldn't listen to my opinion of it and instead enjoy it.
On the other hand, if you do find coffee to be generally unpleasant, horrible, or even sub-par, then I encourage you to explore and consider opening your mind to the possibility that there is a coffee out there that you would enjoy.
Every morning I make a coffee for someone I love, which I would personally not enjoy drinking very much, but which she enjoys immensely. I offer her to try the coffee I like, and on most occasions she is either indifferent about it or hates it and this is fine, I do not try to explain to her that she is wrong, I just try to cater to her particular tastes with a high quality coffee and preparation method that she likes.
> Most people who drink coffee black (even in Italy) seem to do it either because they got used to how bad it tastes, or because of dietary reasons, or because they feel it makes them look more manly.
That's a pretty big generalisation IMO.
I just like coffee black because I tried it one time (there was no sugar) and I was surprised how nice it tasted. The only time I drink it with sugar now is with the typical Spanish "cafe con hielo" in summer because the cold brings out the bitterness more. I've never taken milk because I hate it in general.
But I truly like it. I've always hated the starbucks "milkshake" idea of coffee and I like it strongly tasting.
It's not a generalisation, it's an observation, most people do not drink black coffee. Even in Italy. And most of those that do, when asked, seem to provide a justification not based in flavour.
