Anybody brew at work? If so, what’s your setup/process? I’m fortunate enough to have free access to a shared automatic espresso machine (beans not pods) so the drive to do this is not super strong. I wrote about my experience with the pipamoka device for travel, and I’m thinking it might make for a pretty simple at work option rather than sitting in my cabinet when I’m not on the road. Often the mediocre espresso has me longing for something better even if it means using my own stash.
Clever Dripper, a scale, a kettle, and a Knock Feldgrind 2 (I’ve had this grinder for years) but any of the reasonably priced decent grinders from Kingrind, Timemore, or 1zpresso would be fine.
I have tried a few different options for brewing at the office:
French Press: Pros - few user inputs and reasonably good/consistent cups of coffee. Cons - major pain to clean up and I don’t like the fines and micro grounds in the bottom of the cup.
Moka Pot (with a hot plate): Pros: not too many user inputs and fairly easy clean up. Cons - too hard to consistently get a good cup of coffee.
Regular pour over (Melita and V60): Pros -easy clean up and fairly easy to get repeatable good cups of coffee. Cons - too many user inputs. Must take time to get the pours right.
The winner: Clever Dripper! The lowest user inputs, easy clean up, clean cup of coffee with no fines or micro grounds in cup, very repeatable and consistent good cups of coffee.
Fyi - mentioned it in another response, but Caffi filter bags for French Press eliminate all the cons you listed there. Worth a try if you have a French Press you want to try to revive. You need to grind quite a bit finer than you normally would and maybe push extraction closer to 5min. Personally though, I feel like the flavor comes out a bit flat. Not to rag too heavily on FP, but I feel like a big part of the FP taste is oil and fines and when you cut those out with a filter it seems you are left with fairly mediocre coffee. That being said, maybe I need to work on technique because with the caffi filter the brew process becomes very similar to an immersion brewer much like the clever dripper.
Clever + Feld + something to heat the water up to brew temp in, was my kit too, back in the day.