About 8 years ago, a friend of mine bought one of those really expensive coffee machines that uses liquid capsules of coffee. These capsules looked like a those little plastic UHT milk containers that you find in cheap restaurants. You’d bung one into the machine and press a button. A few minutes later you get a cup of coffee which actually tastes like coffee.

The Philips Senseo was released in The Netherlands last year and was made in co-orporation with Douwe Egberts. It’s had rave reviews on Amazon, so given its fairly low price (when compared with grown up filter coffee machines) I thought I’d buy one and try it out.

My main conclusion is that it’s rather groovy.

The Senseo system works with what are known as coffee pods, which look like round teabags, except they are filled with coffee. A number of different machines have coffee pods, and they can be bought in different sizes. Douwe Egberts sell the official ones, but there are many other vendors for other coffees – included flavoured ones – and teas. I’ve found you can get one big mug of coffee out of one pod. The machine itself dispenses one or two standard sized mugs of coffee, which means you can put one or two pods into the machine at once.

There’s a water reservoir around the back of the machine. Press the on button and the machine draws water into its boiler and then boils it. This takes about 90 seconds. After that you simply press a button indicating whether you want one or two mugs and the water is filtered through the coffee pod(s).

It’s an incredibly easy thing to use. There’s no mess – just throw the pod away and rinse its holder through water. Furthermore, you don’t end up with wasted coffee.

Tesco in Inverness only sells Douwe Egberts medium and dark roast coffee pods, which means I was bouncing round the ceiling this morning after trying it for the first time. However, I’ve ordered some Decaf and Vanilla pods from Cafépods. The advantage with these ones is they come in sealed sets of two. Douwe Egberts’ ones come loose with a resealable sticky tab.