It was when I was staying recently with the Frums in D.C. that, for a dizzying moment, I thought my life-long quest had ended. Nasa can fly us a quarter of a million miles to circumnavigate the moon but nobody has yet, to my knowledge, fixed the perennial problem of making an even half-decent cup of coffee at home.

Back to the Frum residence in Georgetown, known inside the beltway as ‘the best hotel in Washington’. It is 8.30 a.m. There is no sign of Danielle, my hostess, but David is at large on the landing, perhaps as he had heard his house guest stir.

‘Coffee?’ he asked. To my amazement, he flung open some doors outside his master bedroom suite to reveal an entire separate walk-in closet complete with serried rows of glass mugs and a space-age espresso machine. Within seconds, a steaming cup of reviving black liquid with a proper crema was in my hands (I was too English to ask for hot milk, I’m ashamed to say).

Within seconds, a steaming cup of reviving black liquid with a proper crema was in my hands

The Frums take coffee, and drinking coffee in bed, so seriously that they have not one but two of these coffee stations in their house. I had found my tribe! But had I found the solution to my expensive and fruitlessly endless search for a ‘system’ that can stop me spending up to a tenner a day on lukewarm froth in one of the 23,000 coffee shops in the UK serving 98 million cups of coffee a day in a sector worth more than £6 billion in sales a year? We will come to that.

My coffee journey, as we must say now, started at boarding school where at break, I’d buy a jumbo bag of Maltesers in the tuck shop and then run to my house and spoon Nescafé into a mug and fill it with boiling hot milk. Fast forward to the present day.

If someone who doesn’t know what a coffee bore and snob I am offers me coffee (or ‘a coffee’) in their ‘home’ it doesn’t go well. If I haven’t found a home-based system to deliver a strong, hot beverage after decades of searching, you can bet your bottom dollar they haven’t either.

I think of all the machines and pots I’ve bought over the years, many of them gathering dust in the back of the larder. The stainless-steel Bialetti Moka pots I inherited from my New Yorker stepfather that are indestructible but deliver a bitter, treacly brew. The cafetières with their delicate glass innards, that keep coffee hot for only a few minutes. The ceramic Sowden pot, with an inner aluminium mesh, which you have to place on an open Aga ring if you want a hot second cup…

Apparently, during lockdown the nation went mad for home-brewing machines and now 13 million of us have invested in one, including me: a heap of plastic made by DeLonghi and a retro drip contraption (thanks for the recommendations, Nicholas Shakespeare and Ashley Baker).

The DeLonghi never worked and the drip thing is fast but however much coffee you heap in the top it never seems to be enough. And then, of course, there is the separate milk supply issue.

My brother Leo bought a Sage espresso machine which he swears by (I’ve noticed as soon as someone selects and invests in a coffee machine after exhaustive research, they proselytise only for that one). He waxes about the bean-to-cup freshness, aroma, heat and speed and something called the ‘tamper’. His model costs £800. I feel I can’t buy a third coffee machine in only a few years, unless, of course, my lifelong search had ended in D.C.… so this week I asked for more information.

The upstairs coffee nook, Danielle told me, ‘was purpose-built for laziness, with the fridge drawer for milk and seltzers and below that an ice drawer (for Scotch in the evening). We don’t keep food up there but there is also a kettle and teas.’

As for the system? I knew it was one of those sleek, high-tech jobs. Anything overly engineered gives me the fear, which is why the Land Rover on the farm is a 1972 Series 2 and I have an Aga (two in fact). Fewer moving parts. Anything involving an onboard computer and Houston, we have a problem.

‘The set-up is Nespresso Vertuo with a separate milk steamer,’ Danielle said. ‘Nespresso recycles its pods (they send you a recycling bag with every order, postage pre-paid). I happily junked my ridiculous $2,000 supermodel which was always breaking down and the milk stuck to it like hardened plaster.’

It’s £179 which seems good value. I know that if I spent £179 now, I’d save £3,000 a year on my fluffy coffee habit.

But I hesitate. The truth is, I must enjoy the daily disappointment of the £5 flat whites (anywhere but Coffee Plant Portobello Road, which is reliable and excellent).

Maybe I need the quest to go on. It gives me purpose, it gives my life meaning – and as my husband points out, it helps get me out of the house.