I like coffee. I drink a lot of it. Probably about 6 cups a day, average.
I don’t believe it causes a problem for me. I can drink a cup at 10PM and be asleep by 10:30 and say asleep all night (unless I have to get up to piss).
It is not unusual for me to go a day or two without any coffee and I don’t suffer any adverse symptoms. I just like coffee.
I use the Keurig because my wife doesn’t drink and I hate “burnt” coffee and, while I will drink cold coffee, I don’t like it that much. I have a French Press and a thermos bottle, and it does a good job, but the Keurig is just too easy.
Anyway (to get to the point), I noticed a problem with these coffee makers several years ago. Sometimes, they would just not put out much coffee. At first, I thought it was the machine, but I have a few and they all would do the same. I found that by taking a piece of thin wire and poking it up the hollow “needle” that pierces the top of the K-cup and then run a cycle with no K-cup in there, that a few grounds would come out and the water would then flow freely.
Sure, you think “you must feel so proud that you finally figured out something that takes 5 seconds of Google to find out”. No, that isn’t my “fix”. That fixes the problem after the fact. No, what I finally figured out was how the grounds were getting up there in the first place and how to stop it from happening.
You see, when coffee beans are roasted, they release CO2. Well, I should say that after coffee beans are roasted, they release CO2. It takes some time for the CO2 to diffuse out of the roasted bean. When you buy roasted whole bean coffee at the store, you may notice a little “button” on the bag. That is a little one-way valve to allow the evolving CO2 to escape so the bag doesn’t “puff up”. Grinding the beans increases the surface area which allows the CO2 to be released much more quickly. I suspect that some K-cup producers are set-up to fill and seal the K-cups with coffee directly out of the grinder. As a result, I have observed some K-cups to be slightly “puffed”. The coffee doesn’t taste different from these K-cups, they are just a little “puffed”. One thing I did notice was these puffed K-cups resulted in more clogs than normal. With un-puffed K-cups, a clog was rare, perhaps one in several hundred. With the puffed ones, maybe one in 5?
So, I concluded that when you put a K-cup in the machine and close the chamber, the top needle pierces the top, then it forces the cup down so the bottom needle pierces the bottom. If the pressure inside the K-cup is greater than that outside the K-cup, some of the coffee can get blown up the top needle, causing a clog. This is easy to understand with a puffed K-cup, but even with an un-puffed one, just the forces of the needles on the plastic pressurize it some, so that it can happen even when the K-cup isn’t puffed.
My solution, press the K-cup down so the bottom needle pierces the bottom, then close the top. I’ve been doing this since Christmas and I haven’t had a clog since I started doing it.
Yeah, pretty mundane, but I just had to share.