We’ve long been conscious of where products are made but recent international political events have brought the issue of global manufacturing and imports to the attention of a much wider audience.
We won’t linger on recent events, but they have at least served to highlight where the goods we consume are manufactured.
We just feel that it’s got to be a good thing to have manufacturing done more locally rather than relying on cheap imports, from distant lands, where we don’t know about things such as how employees are treated, whether products are safe and good quality, plus of course there’s the carbon footprint to transport them to us.
Like most Scandinavians, we absolutely love our coffee. The Nordic countries are some of the highest coffee consumers in the world and the ritual of coffee and cake is set deep within our culture. You can just tell by the vast range of amazing coffee pots produced in the Nordic region.
But whereas my dad is a purist about filter coffee, which he enjoys served strong and neat like his dad before him (my mum froths a little jug of milk to accompany hers), I do love an Italian style espresso based drink.
A new coffee machine, a De’Longhi Magnifico Bean to Cup model, was pretty much the first thing we bought after we moved into our new house nearly nine years ago - an investment to fuel all the hard DIY we had ahead of us.
In recent years the machine’s daily use had started to take its toll, and I had to service it more frequently and repair it a couple of times, and then sadly the final failure came.
I was determined to get it working again, and still think I probably could have. I started to take it apart but then got called into work so went off to Chelsea or Arsenal or Wembley, and at weekends I had a queue of customers’ lamps to repair.
So my beloved coffee machine sat in bits on a corner of the kitchen table making me feel bad for not working on it. Meanwhile we were drinking coffee from the cafetière (also known as a French Press or Coffee Plunger) which my dad had bought us so that he had passable coffee when he visited but that, whilst ok, we just don’t enjoy as much as our Italian coffee.
Meanwhile my other half had been researching new coffee machines and keeping an eye on the prices of her preferred ones, just in case this time was the time I couldn’t repair our trusted old Magnifico.
After a month or so of cafetière use, and me never quite having the time to tackle the repair, we decided that with the time and energy I needed to spend with no guarantee of a positive result and, even if I did succeed it would probably only keep it going for another few months, it might be the time to invest in a new machine.
My other half had found that one of her preferred models, the Italian-made De’Longhi Eletta, was discontinuing its more basic models in favour of its new all singing, all dancing ‘Explore’ which has the ability to make cold drinks with both cold coffee and cold frothy milk. It looks amazing but is way out of our price range but it meant the previous models were now substantially discounted.
We watched a few YouTube reviews and, although we initially wanted a like-for-like replacement with a manual milk frothing spout, we hadn’t appreciated how easy the milk canteen was to use - particularly the fact you could store unused milk in the fridge rather than wash it out after each use. We were hooked and the decision was made.
Fast forward a month and we could not be more pleased with our new machine. We even found an offer on De’Longhi’s website that included a pair of thermal double-walled glass cappuccino cups which we weren’t sure how much we’d use but that have become our coffee vessels of choice.
We are absolutely delighted with our new Eletta and the fact its made in Italy (although unfortunately not all De’Longhi machines are) is really the icing on the cake, or should that be the froth on the cappuccino!