Easy Serving Espresso Pod

The Easy Serving Espresso pod (E.S.E. pod), is a small packed coffee pod with a paper filter covering for use in a non-grinding espresso machine. The E.S.E. standard was created by Italian Illy in the 1970s and is maintained by the "Consortium for the Development and the Protection of the E.S.E. Standard." It is open to all coffee roasters and machine manufacturers, making it the self-acclaimed "only open system available to the sector for espresso coffee prepared with paper pods".

Each E.S.E. pod contains seven grams of coffee compressed into filter pod with a 44mm diameter. In the past, many USA home single-serve brewers used 55mm pods and could not use E.S.E. pods. Also incompatible are Senseo single-serve coffee pods which are larger in diameter (70mm).

The pod is placed within a pod adapter in a normal espresso machine or inside the brewing chamber of a pod brewer. The original patent for filter pod technology was registered by K. Cyrus Melikian of Automatic Brewers And Coffee Devices, Inc.(ABCD) in Pennsylvania, USA, in 1959 Eventually licenses for pod technology were granted to an Italian firm and other developers, who created specific standards for proprietary technologies.

The original use of pod machines in Italy was to relieve designated office personnel from the tedium of continuous espresso brewing for office staff. In later years pod brewers were developed for the home market, and for restaurants and other food service businesses where espresso was not a specialty. The use of a pod brewer eliminated most of the training required to operate conventional espresso machines.

The E.S.E. design was created by illy in 1989 as a marketing effort to sell convenience in home espresso preparation.

In February 1998, the non-profit "Consortium for the Development and the Protection of the E.S.E. Standard" was founded by seven coffee roasters and machine manufacturers as a guardian of the E.S.E. brand and standard. The E.S.E. specification was intended to be an open design to encourage wide adoption in order to give customers the "freedom of choice and guarantee of quality".

Pod brewers allow many food and beverage servers to provide a standardized quality of espresso with repeatable results every time. Most coffee aficionados consider the taste to be markedly inferior to traditional espresso made with freshly ground beans, however, the quality of a cup of espresso is highly subjective, and freshly made espresso is dependent upon the skill of the barista and the maintenance and calibration of the equipment and other factors. Thus, a consumer can often get an inferior cup of espresso from an expensive traditional machine and fresh coffee, if the preparer does not make the espresso properly.

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