Nespresso Colors Decoded! PDF Cheat Sheet Here...

Like any good programmer, I drink a lot of coffee.

And like any well-cultured techie, I particularly love espresso :-)

I've been brewing my own espresso using a Bialetti stove top coffee maker for most of two decades.  Particularly on Sunday mornings, I enjoy the deliberate process of grinding fresh beans, perfectly packing  the little filter, intently listening for the bubbly, gurgly final moments of an absolutely perfect brew.

But on work days, I just want a damn coffee :-)  Quickly.  Oh, and it's never fun cleaning a stove top espresso maker.  Not even on Sundays.

So earlier this year, I made the switch to a Nespresso Pixie.  Wow.  Perfect espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, americanos, and (my favorite) cortados, every single time.  Less than 2 minutes per cup.  And no mess :-)  At all.  Ever.

The only problem?  A classic paradox of choice!  I suppose the pods are cleverly color-coded, but with 16 different hued options, about all I can remember is that black=strong+bold, and red=decaf.  The 14 others are complete mysteries to me, and I've long since tossed the packaging material that accompanied the original variety pack.

I searched for a Nespresso flavor chart, and the closest thing I found was this flavor wheel chart.  But at 500x414 pixels, the resolution was too low to print legibly.  I couldn't find a higher resolution image anywhere.

So I brewed myself a tall latte, and recreated it from scratch in Google Docs, and I'm sharing it here with you, in as a high resolution PDF and PNG.  Print and post yours next to your vim/emacs/screen/git cheat sheet :-)

Ciao, ciao!

:-Dustin