The Coffee Maker That Ate My Kitchen

SOMETIMES I lie awake at night and wonder if the most important decisions I made in life were horrible mistakes. Well, one of them, anyway.

Like everyone else, I prefer to think I made choices for the right reasons—I was looking for security, reliability and trustworthiness—but things didn’t turn out the way I expected. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life locked in this relationship?

I am talking, of course, about my coffee maker.

Referring to it as simply a “coffee maker” is an example of my understating the scope of the problem: A gleaming, 30-pound stainless steel monster has taken over my kitchen. In the old days, I had a modest Mr. Coffee and plenty of space to chop onions. Now my Pasquini espresso maker—and its best friend, a giant Mazzer coffee grinder—occupy an entire 2-by-2-foot stretch of stove-side countertop. I am constantly mopping up coffee spills, milk splatters and stray grinds. And I lust for more workspace.

How did my coffee maker get so out of control?

“It’s not just you and your coffee maker—it goes without saying these appliances are taking over kitchens,” said Kevin Kaminski, a Philadelphia architect. “I think during Covid lockdown, when people weren’t going out to get coffee as much, they invested in higher-quality espresso systems of their own.”

People are buying all kinds of coffee contraptions: near-restaurant-grade espresso machines like mine; restaurant-grade machines like my friend Jennifer’s; hotel-room-grade capsule coffee makers; and even Rube Goldberg-machine-grade “bean-to-cup” systems with built-in grinders that do everything but drink the coffee themselves.

It does give me some solace that I am not the only one struggling with this domestic problem.

“We’re seeing two camps of people, some who choose to make their espresso machines the focal point in the kitchen and others who want to conceal them with millwork or in a pantry,” Mr. Kaminski said. “For people embracing coffee culture, it’s an important daily ritual.”

Coffee culture has long been a powerful influence. The caffeinated drink was banned in the 16th century in the Ottoman Empire on suspicion it caused impulsive behaviour such as gambling, wrote Mark Pendergrast in his book “Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.”

We’ve come a long way, both from the 16th century and from my childhood—when the most important morning chore my brothers and I were expected to perform was to spoon ground Folgers into the basket of a 12-cup Farberware percolator and plug it in so my parents could awaken to the aroma of freshly brewed—and, let’s be honest, very bitter—coffee. Really, there is no comparison to the deliciously full-bodied cup of cappuccino I brew every day.

But as for today’s outsize coffee machines? Mr. Pendergrast said, “My uninformed opinion is that people might consider opting for smaller espresso makers—or build a special coffee room with space for a grinder, Aeropress, vacuum brewer, Keurig and Kalita Wave pour-over. Oh, and a digital scale and thermometer and water-treatment station. Just kidding, but people do take their coffee seriously.” Designers say giant coffee makers are in fact changing kitchen design in ways we couldn’t have foreseen a few years ago.

“I’m in Seattle, where everyone loves coffee, and if there’s room for a separate room, like what used to be a walk-in pantry, that’s now become a good place for a coffee station,” said interior designer Michelle Dirkse. “You need storage to hide the things that are messy. And some clients want a sink. And electrical outlets exactly behind the machine so you don’t see the cords.”

Devin Shaffer, lead interior designer at online decorating service Decorilla, said, “Five or six years ago, people remodelling homes from the 1970s or ’80s ripped out dry bars. Now they’re overhauling the space for coffee.”

Mr. Shaffer, a former barista, said he understands the impulse. “People who go to coffee shops start noticing the machines, and they fall in love with them and want to do it themselves at home,” he said. “But they’re a lot of work—and you really have to design your kitchen around it. The machine has to fit under the upper cabinets, which can mean mounting cabinets higher than you normally would. You don’t want to get so crazy that you can’t reach the cabinet shelves.”

Another issue is water. “A big espresso machine needs to be near a sink or other water source. Otherwise you have to take water to it, which is a huge pain,” said Leah Atkins, an interior designer in Atlanta.

True. My Pasquini sits next to the stove so we can fill its water tank by using the swing-arm pot filler mounted on the wall nearby.

My friend Jennifer’s monster espresso machine dwarfs ours (to the chagrin of my husband) and requires as much fine-tuning as a sports car. She’s thinking of having a plumber connect a dedicated line that would fill the tank with filtered water to prevent calcium buildup. That buildup can clog the machine unless you periodically run a solution through the system to “descale” it.

“For now, I get big jugs of purified water to fill my tank,” Jennifer said, as if that were normal.

“Where do you store the big jugs of water?” I asked.

She just rolled her eyes.

I was thinking about that the other morning, after a night of tossing, interspersed with feverish fantasies of cutting onions next to the stove and then being chased by a chrome monster with pipes and valves and gauges… And I thought, why do we do it? Why am I in this sordid relationship?

Then I cranked up the Mazzer and ground exactly 18 grams of just-roasted Verve 1950 blend medium roast beans, gently tamped them down in my double-basket portafilter, ran a stream of 193-degree water through it and watched the molasses-thick crema fill my demitasse. Then I took my first sip of the day. You can chop onions anywhere.

GENOA, Italy—Renato Zanelli crossed the finish line with a rusty iron hanging from his neck while pulling 140 pounds of trash on an improvised sled fashioned from a slab of plastic waste.

Zanelli, a retired IT specialist, flashed a tired smile, but he suspected his garbage haul wouldn’t be enough to defend his title as world champion of plogging—a sport that combines running with trash collecting.

A rival had just finished the race with a chair around his neck and dragging three tires, a television and four sacks of trash. Another crossed the line with muscles bulging, towing a large refrigerator. But the strongest challenger was Manuel Jesus Ortega Garcia, a Spanish plumber who arrived at the finish pulling a fridge, a dishwasher, a propane gas tank, a fire extinguisher and a host of other odds and ends.

“The competition is intense this year,” said Zanelli. Now 71, he used his fitness and knack for finding trash to compete against athletes half his age. “I’m here to help the environment, but I also want to win.”

Italy, a land of beauty, is also a land of uncollected trash. The country struggles with chronic littering, inefficient garbage collection in many cities, and illegal dumping in the countryside of everything from washing machines to construction waste. Rome has become an emblem of Italy’s inability to fix its trash problem.

So it was fitting that at the recent World Plogging Championship more than 70 athletes from 16 countries tested their talents in this northern Italian city. During the six hours of the race, contestants collect points by racking up miles and vertical distance, and by carrying as much trash across the finish line as they can. Trash gets scored based on its weight and environmental impact. Batteries and electronic equipment earn the most points.

A mobile app ensures runners stay within the race’s permitted area, approximately 12 square miles. Athletes have to pass through checkpoints in the rugged, hilly park. They are issued gloves and four plastic bags to fill with garbage, and are also allowed to carry up to three bulky finds, such as tires or TVs.

Genoa, a gritty industrial port city in the country’s mountainous northwest, has a trash problem that gets worse the further one gets away from its relatively clean historic core. The park that hosted the plogging championship has long been plagued by garbage big and small.

“It’s ironic to have the World Plogging Championship in a country that’s not always as clean as it could be. But maybe it will help bring awareness and things will improve,” said Francesco Carcioffo, chief executive of Acea Pinerolese Industriale, an energy and recycling company that’s been involved in sponsoring and organizing the race since its first edition in 2021. All three world championships so far have been held in Italy.

Events that combine running and trash-collecting go back to at least 2010. The sport gained traction about seven years ago when a Swede, Erik Ahlström, coined the name plogging, a mashup of plocka upp, Swedish for “pick up,” and jogging.

“If you don’t have a catchy name you might as well not exist,” said Roberto Cavallo, an Italian environmental consultant and longtime plogger, who is on the world championship organizing committee together with Ahlström.

Saturday’s event brought together a mix of wiry trail runners and environmental activists, some of whom looked less like elite athletes.

“We like plogging because it makes us feel a little less guilty about the way things are going with the environment,” said Elena Canuto, 29, as she warmed up before the start. She came in first in the women’s ranking two years ago. “This year I’m taking it a bit easier because I’m three months pregnant.”

Around two-thirds of the contestants were Italians. The rest came from other European countries, as well as Japan, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Algeria, Ghana and Senegal.

“I hope to win so people in Senegal get enthusiastic about plogging,” said Issa Ba, a 30-year-old Senegalese-born factory worker who has lived in Italy for eight years.

“Three, two, one, go,” Cavallo shouted over a loudspeaker, and the athletes sprinted off in different directions. Some stopped 20 yards from the starting line to collect their first trash. Others took off to be the first to exploit richer pickings on wooded hilltops, where batteries and home appliances lay waiting.

As the hours went by, the athletes crisscrossed trails and roads, their bags became heavier. They tagged their bulky items and left them at roadsides for later collection. Contestants gathered at refreshment points, discussing what they had found as they fueled up on cookies and juice. Some contestants had brought their own reusable cups.

With 30 minutes left in the race, athletes were gathering so much trash that the organisers decided to tweak the rules: in addition to their four plastic bags, contestants could carry six bulky objects over the finish line rather than three.

“I know it’s like changing the rules halfway through a game of Monopoly, but I know I can rely on your comprehension,” Cavallo announced over the PA as the athletes braced for their final push to the finish line.

The rule change meant some contestants could almost double the weight of their trash, but others smelled a rat.

“That’s fantastic that people found so much stuff, but it’s not really fair to change the rules at the last minute,” said Paul Waye, a Dutch plogging evangelist who had passed up on some bulky trash because of the three-item rule.

Senegal will have to wait at least a year to have a plogging champion. Two hours after the end of Saturday’s race, Ba still hadn’t arrived at the finish line.

“My phone ran out of battery and I got lost,” Ba said later at the awards ceremony. “I’ll be back next year, but with a better phone.”

The race went better for Canuto. She used an abandoned shopping cart to wheel in her loot. It included a baby stroller, which the mother-to-be took as a good omen. Her total haul weighed a relatively modest 100 pounds, but was heavy on electronic equipment, which was enough for her to score her second triumph.

“I don’t know if I’ll be back next year to defend my title. The baby will be six or seven months old,” she said.

In the men’s ranking, Ortega, the Spanish plumber, brought in 310 pounds of waste, racked up more than 16 miles and climbed 7,300 feet to run away with the title.

Zanelli, the defending champion, didn’t make it onto the podium. He said he would take solace from the nearly new Neapolitan coffee maker he found during the first championship two years ago. “I’ll always have my victory and the coffee maker, which I polished and now display in my home,” he said.

Contestants collected more than 6,600 pounds of trash. The haul included fridges, bikes, dozens of tires, baby seats, mattresses, lead pipes, stoves, chairs, TVs, 1980s-era boomboxes with cassettes still inside, motorcycle helmets, electric fans, traffic cones, air rifles, a toilet and a soccer goal.

“This park hasn’t been this clean since the 15 century,” said Genoa’s ambassador for sport, Roberto Giordano.

The Coffee Maker That Ate My Kitchen

Why do we design the most important room in the house around the gear that simply provides our morning cuppa? Because there’s nothing simple about coffee anymore.

At the World Plogging Championship, contestants have lugged in tires, TVs and at least one Neapolitan coffee maker