Review: Tassimo Coffee Maker

We’ve recently been using a Tassimo Coffee Machine.  It’s not the top of range one, as we had to go with one that had a large tank on it.  Ours is the Fidelia T40 Tassimo by Bosch machine.   I was half the price on Argos website in their sale, so I’m surprised to see how expensive they just a week or two on, but also grateful for getting ours so cheaply.  It pays to watch out for bargains it seems.

With six people in the house, of whom, 2 are die-hard coffee addicts and 1 child is a right tea johnny, a machine that only spits out a couple of cups at a time would have been harder to live with, but saying that, I have nothing to compare it with as yet, so can’t express my approval at our machine highly enough.

The driving force in buying one, was simply due to my mother and her shaking hands.

She can no longer manage the kettle well, and I didn’t want to take away the pleasure of making her own coffee, so a pod machine it was.

In the end, I went for the one on offer in Argos at the time and bought the cheapest they had with the largest tank.

I did spend a fair while trying to decide on a Nespresso machine v a Tassimo.

The Tassimo won due to the availability of tea and hot chocolate pods.  The advert for £20 off t discs on the box  helped to cement that decision a little too.

We’ve had our first pods, and we’ve got our first delivery of coffee pods.  I did manage to be a tad disappointed that there don’t seem to be any compatible pods, or t-discs as they’re called for the Tassimo, but I’ve learned to live with that for the moment as these machines do so much more than just make coffee from the discs.

I’ve been offered pods/discs in the past to review, but never had a machine to use them with, so perhaps you’ll now see reviews of those going online.

I suspect Tassimo Recipes will be going up here soon too.  Tiramisu and Chocolate Mousse seem like a good place to start for me in the next couple of months.

My biggest relief was finding out that it dispensed hot water as well as making coffee.  When we first got our machine, we ran out of discs quickly.

That was no problem, as it just needed the cleaning disc inserted, a spoon of coffee in the bottom of the mug, and off it went making instant coffee too, all while only boiling enough for each mug of coffee.

It’s also been used to fill one of the pot noodles that the middle one is partial to for a snack, meaning that he does not have to manipulate the kettle either.

Each t-disc has a barcode on it.  The machine reads that barcode and it tells the machine how much water to dispense with the beverage of choice.  Some drinks are enough for Expresso type small cups and others need larger cups for the latte style drinks.  If we want a weaker coffee, we can simply choose to press the button at the right time to dispense extra hot water into the cup.

Most of us love it, that is, apart from the one person who it was bought for in the first place.  Sadly, it seems that dementia and learning how to use a new machine, don’t go hand in hand, so the machine is now fully the preserve of the rest of the family, but with one difference.

The kids are all comfortable with making her a cup of coffee with it, where they were more wary of pouring boiling water from the kettle, so I have helpers to give the elder her caffeine fix.  And for days she’s on coffee overdose, we switch to decaff after she’s had a couple of steaming mugs.  She can never tell the difference.