The #qzla office, aka my house, had an espresso machine. It has traveled with me up north to the yet to be named place that I now work.

Anyway, espresso is a lot of work and really hard to make well. It’s fun, for sure, but any machine that is going to have the right feel of actually making espresso is probably going to be too much of a pain for office use. (I think Zach was the one who enlightened me to the cake-mix dilemma) The quality we get out of it will also probably be very low. At our bests we are still just amateurs.

Then of course there is clean up. Cleaning a portafilter let alone an entire espresso machine isn’t the most fun thing to do and without a full time barista will probably suffer from the tragedy of the commons. With an espresso machine we’re also talking cleaning up milk and milk containers and milk frothers. Be prepared for the smell of sour milk.

To avoid this trouble there are the options like what I had at Bloomberg that just automate everything: put down a cup and push the button for the type of drink you want and it makes it. (An americano on that machine was much better than the drip carafe.) All they had to do was keep it full of beans and milk (and probably have a water hookup) But as you all know, coffee is an experience and the automated experience kinda sucks.