Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Off Topic Coffee Machine Suggestions

Yeah, we’ve experienced this crushing of non-genuine capsules also. I think it’s because most (all?) 3rd party offerings are made from either plastic or some kind of compostable material, while the machine, being one of the older designs, was only designed to pierce the aluminium foil of the original capsules. What I like about the Pixies is the simplicity, which I think makes them relatively robust. I had friends with the Citiz and the auto-loading seemed to fail a lot, whereas the Pixie has a manual lever. I have no experience with the newer machines though, as these seem to go on and on.

When we tried them, we found a lot of 3rd party options of very variable quality anyway, plus we started recycling all our Nespresso ones, so we just kept using genuine. I think they are the best capsules for Nespresso machines anyway, apart from the excellent commercial ones you rightly mentioned. It’s a shame they don’t allow more people to buy those. I wonder how they classify a business?

There are also the refillable pods, but they don’t hold as much grinds as they need to, and then you need a decent grinder anyway, so I always thought at that point I would go back to a real machine…