Mrs. L.A.'s birthday is on Thanksgiving. I bought her a ‘My, my, my’ cup with Joe Kenda’s signature on it, because we laugh every time he says it, and she said she should get one. I’m saving the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series DVD boxed set to give her for Christmas. So what else can I get her for her birthday? Use my REI dividend to get her something from there? Nice, but she has plenty of REI-type clothing. A gift certificate to the Bass outlet store? She likes those, since she can choose what she wants and their stuff is reasonably priced. Nah. I don’t like giving gift cards if I don’t have to.
I bought some K-cups when I went to SoCal in July and brought the unused ones home. Mrs. L.A. has mentioned twice over the past year that it might be nice to have a Keurig coffee maker. We use a Mr. Coffee or Black & Decker or whatever it is, and that’s too much/too wasteful when she’s home alone and she just wants one cuppa joe. So I ordered a Keurig K55 and a reusable filter for her.
They are pretty handy if you’re just making one cup at a time. Using the refillable filter helps you avoid the “sucker” tag some people around here may want to slap on you.
If you like the taste of coffee, I’d get dark brews and use the small cup serving when making the coffee, otherwise it’s pretty weak. My son has one and I use it all the time. I wouldn’t have coffee at home without it. I should add that I’m not an everyday coffee drinker and I was raised on Puerto Rican style coffee.
In case you were wondering: Puerto Rican coffee is when you put store ground Bustelo into a muslin strainer, pour boiling hot coffee in that, collect the black thickness that comes from it and put that into a container-- a syrup dispenser works well. Keep the dispenser on the table. When you want coffee, boil some milk and add coffee from the dispenser.
What type of coffee do you like? Happy to recommend some brands. Keurig does tend to brew weak, so I’d select the strongest brew setting when you’re setting it up.
They are handy little machines. We do have pre-made k-cups we get at Costco (best prices). We also have a a dozen or so of the mini-coffee filters that you can use in the machines. I find it works best to use those with a coffee filter as well. Set those up with your own ground coffee. Make your coffee, dump out the grounds, rinse the filter and hang it in the drying rack for the next go round. Helps a little with the waste issue. TBH (see CostCo reference above), sometimes it’s easiest to just grab a premade one and go.
The k-cups I have the hardest time finding are the decaf ones. For late afternoon or evening cups.
We drink Community Coffee. We’ve been drinking Dark Roast, but we also like French Roast. The last bag was French Roast, and I’m going to switch to that for a while. Every time I go to New Orleans, I love the coffee. And it’s always turned out to be Community. So several years ago I started ordering it online. It’s good coffee, I don’t have to go to a store to get it (a nice man in a brown truck brings it right to my door), and by taking advantage of their 20% and free shipping promotions, it comes in at just under $6/pound.
If you end up Costco’ing the k-cups, they have some Peets options that are not bad. Occasionally they have Starbucks (don’t hate). If you look for their Verona or French Roast, I find those are more flavorful. It looks like you tend towards the dark side, so you might as well.
Might I recommend this dark brew sampler from Amazon? Be forewarned that if you find a brew you like, it most likely won’t be as cheap as they are in the sampler. The Coffee People have great tasting kick ass brews and Green Mountain (it’s like Keurig cheap house brand) dark roasts are tasty.
If you bought a reusable cup like you say in the OP, then you could just get her whatever kind of coffee you know she likes to go with it, and if she wants to experiment with finding the right kind of k-cup flavor after you give her the machine, maybe that could be a fun little thing to do later.
