Man oh man, everyone you talk to seem to go on and on about their Keurig machine. Here’s my take on it…
The coffee just isn’t that good. It’s OK (and yes I’ve tried a LOT of varieties), but It’s certainly not any better than any other premium coffee.
The coffee is EXPENSIVE! The average retail for a single plastic Keurig coffee unit is about $0.40 and that’s for a single six oz. cup. My main coffee mug I drink out of at work hold easily twice that; and I drink several cups a day. I’m drinking at least $3.00 of coffee a day.
It’s extremely easy to make a single portion of coffee with a regular sized coffee pot. With the average “real” coffee cup holding at least 12 ozs. and the average pot of coffee holding about 60 ozs, (10 - 12 six oz cups) you’re looking at only about 5 cups of coffee with a standard drip brewer if used at full capacity. The math is simple to reduce the amount of grounds to make a 1/4 pot of coffee… which equals slightly more than one standard cup of coffee. (not the “6 oz” cup of coffee that is smaller than what real people drink).
My company supplies coffee and soft drinks for their employees. Since a lot of us are coffee snobs, and didn’t like the swill they served in the break room, we always bought our own coffee and kept a table next to our offices. The geography of our department is that we occupy a corner of the floor; so we’re kind of an autonomous unit over there. Anyway, the boss “Surprised” us with a Keurig at work to replace our drip pot where we all chipped in for too good coffee. Um, Gee thanks for making us pay twice as much for our coffee when the pot method was working just fine.
Now I’m not a total jerk; there are some perks to the Keurig. (ha ha I’m talking about coffee and I said ‘perk’)
You only have to think of yourself when making a cup. The old way of drinking coffee would be asking around the group… “does anyone else want coffee? Should I make a full pot or just enough for me?” With Keurig, if I want coffee, I’ll just go have some, not that I couldn’t anyway, but still.
The tea people now have ready access to a beverage on demand. Before if anyone wanted tea; they’d have to go to the break room where the coffee urns are for the entire floor, get a tea bag, use the coffee urn hot water, and make a cup of hot tea. Not so anymore, they can just bebop 10 feet away, use one of our many (but still expensive) Keurig Tea choices. My personal tea consumption has gone way up.
Variety. While personally speaking, the price of variety is still too much; it is kind of nice if I’m in the mood for an Italian Dark Roast I can have that. Or more importantly if someone brings in a flavored coffee we don’t have to drink it if we don’t want to. Ugh, last November when it was a colleagues turn to bring in coffee (pre Keurig) she brought in some kind of pumpkin spice crap. We never did get through that bag of coffee; the next person in line just went ahead and brought some in.
~sigh~ It feels good to get that off my chest.
So now for the comments. For those of you that have access to a Keurig:
What do you think about the Keurig machine that you have access to? Like? Hate? Indifferent?
Are you footing the bill for the coffee? How many of those KCups are you going through a day?
Have any of you tried the KCups where you can use your own coffee? To me that’s a big pain in the ass having to clean out a filter after a single use; unless they too use a disposable filter; in which case I’m betting individual KCup filters are expensive. Not to mention, that’s another $10 minimum to buy the KCup. Geez I hate getting nickle and dimed to death.
Wow, I see I’ve ranted enough. I think I’ll have another cup of coffee.
Too slow for me. I make a drip pot in the morning (on a timer, set up the night before) and it’s ready when I wake up. When I want another cup, it’s ready. I hate waiting the minute or two for those stupid one-cup-at-a-time machines.
Athena: Unless by “taste good” you mean “must be from an espresso machine”, that doesn’t follow, as Keurigs have filter cups too.
We have one at home, and there’s one in my workplace.
It’s fine. It’s near-immediate coffee for us after stumbling out of bed. I like the convenience; my husband and I prefer different types of coffee, and at work, there’s no “who didn’t make more coffee” arguments. I can’t claim to prioritize flavor above all else since I put sweetener and creamer in my coffee, so being a coffee snob in that situation is stupid. I don’t drink swill, but decent coffee is easily found for the Keurig, and you can always buy beans and grind them.
At home we use maybe 3 K-cups a day when we’re not grinding beans for the reusable cup. They’re not badly priced when we buy them at Costco or with the ever-present coupons from Bed Bath & Beyond.
The reusable cup is much easier to clean than the reusable coffee filter that we had with our old grind-and-brew coffee maker, and with individual servings there’s less waste.
I’m a reduce, reuse, recycle, local, organic, fair trade, farmer’s market type. Those kcups go against every grain of my being. Plus I’m a cheap ass at heart, and can’t figure any benefit to justify the expense.
My wife sort of wants one, but not enough that we have one (yet). For us, it would be cheaper and more convenient that buying coffee from Dunkin (or wherever) for $2+ a cup. Now, we don’t do that often, maybe once or twice a week for each of us, so it’s not really worth it. But if you normally bought coffee out every morning, a Keurig would pay for itself in a few months.
We recently got one at work. I bring coffee from home in a thermos, and that isn’t changing. But if I run out, and want another cup, I like that I can make just one. I don’t want to have to make a whole pot, not knowing if anyone else wants any, and I don’t want coffee that’s been sitting on a burner for who-knows how long.
I think the coffee is decent, better than a lot of institutional coffee you might get at work. I’m not the one footing the bill, but if we had to buy our own coffee, I could see buying some for the occasional day when I needed it.
I’m pretty sure my wife would have to die before I got one at home. She’d never go for the extra expense, and with both of us drinking coffee, a full pot is the right amount of coffee anyway.
Two of the four departments in my division use the K-cups. However, mine is not one of them. We drink 3-4 pots of coffee (with 5 staffers) just in my department, and no way could we manage to afford enough k cups. Plus, those of us who’ve tried them were all underwhelmed. The two departments that use them have few coffee drinkers but more visitors, so maybe it’s seen as faster to get a fast cup for a visitor rather than a whole pot going to waste?
At home, I use a french press. Best coffee ever with it and easy to do when not caffeinated.
You just reminded me of something; It’s funny (not in a ha ha way) how one of the brands of Keurig coffee I’ve had was called “Tree Hugger” and promised all sorts of environmentally satisfying procedures to how it’s made, but then it comes in a plastic cup.
I didn’t it. It was one of those things where I was really bent out of shape about it; but really couldn’t say anything. I let it slip once or twice that it was expensive; and his comment was that we end up pouring coffee out of the pot. Actually we almost always drank the entire pot when we made one. Whatever, Mr Mercedes Driver! :rolleyes: Actually I really like the guy, I just think he made a misstep with this one. Anyway, our administrative assistant said that our office services department (I work for a big company) had been give a bunch of Keurig sample that the coffee vendor brought. They didn’t know what to do with them. Viola! Suddenly we have 3 or 4 huge boxes of Keurig coffee, flavored coffees, decafs, tea, hot chocolate, etc. I’m talking huge boxes; like the size of good sized ice chest that would hold a couple of cases of beer. Huge variety. Flavored? Hazlenut? ha! Rookie! Try blueberry! We have Tree Hugger, espresso, breakfast blend, French roasts, Italian roast, Paul Newman, Pumpkin spice, about 10 varieties of tea. My biggest fear now? That they’re going to run out of “normal” coffee. Geez, it’s back to the breakroom swill for me.
So for now… we aren’t being ‘hurt’ by our new coffee machine.
Being the conspiracy theorist that I am; I’ve wondered more than once if our boss bought them so we wouldn’t bitch about the cost anymore. Who knows?
This. I think it may be okay for people who put so much cream and sugar in their coffee that the taste of the coffee itself isn’t very important - but I drink my coffee black.
We have a Bosch Tassimo that I got for free on a promotional basis. (Same concept as Keurig.) I thought it might be okay for when you just want one cup - and it would be, if the coffee didn’t taste about the same as instant. No thanks - if I don’t want a whole pot, I’ll use freshly ground beans, a #2 filter, and single-cup funnel.
The espresso and cappuccino cups produce joyless parodies of their namesakes. (They aren’t quite as horrible as the regular coffee, but they’re a long way from what you get from even the cheapest of consumer level espresso machines with half the footprint.)
Are there people that really like these at home? I guess it wouldn’t surprise me - I’ve met plenty of people who earnestly believe that you can get good coffee at Starbucks, so it’s clear that plenty of people don’t actually care if their coffee tastes like crap, as long as it’s marketed well.
I’m jaundiced on this topic, because I JUST bought a Keurig.
And right now, I’m in love.
I’ve been wanting to try different types of coffee, different roasts, coffee from different origins, and buying a one-pound bag of EVERYTHING intimidated the Hell outta me.
I just finished my second cup of Keurig, and loved both of them to the last drop.
As far as break room coffee, I was the “Koffee Kommandant” at work for years. A Keurig machine would have been HEAVEN. People are PIGS. Make that GREEDY PIGS, as Jamicat posted upthread. Part of my joy in retiring was the fact that I’d never have to screw around with the break room detail ever again!
It’s an expensive way for average coffee. I wonder how much a k-cup works out to per pound?
If you could reduce the cost of them I’d be OK. And I realize they have a reusable filter. But then why not just use a drip pot, if you have to bother with that.
I got one as a gift, and it is fine for the way I drink coffee (not black). At first I still used my French Press on weekends, but the convenience factor is huge and I stopped keeping other coffee around. I did use the My K Cup thing for awhile, but it was a pain to clean out.