There’s a joke in here about a java overflow error.
I like french press coffee, but it’s not for everyone. The keurig system is really the only thing out there that can make good standard auto-drip type coffee in very small dosages (although I haven’t tried the aeropress yet.) It’d be pretty darn expensive if you’re feeding your two pot a day habit with K-cups, but for people who only drink a cup or two a day, it’s cheaper and less wasteful than brewing a whole pot or half pot and throwing most of it away. I don’t really understand the keurig vitriol on display in this thread.
On the DRM issue, I will say that the only generic K-cups I’ve seen thus far that are actually cheaper than the genuine ones are the mesh bottom ones and, for whatever reason, the ones of those I’ve tried really haven’t tasted very good. I don’t know if it’s something inherent to the mesh ones or if it’s just cheaper coffee or what. It would be nice if we started getting cheap good generic K-cups, but if the only knock-offs that actually taste reasonably good are just as expensive like the Starbucks and Dunkin ones I don’t think they’ve got too much to worry about.
Try the San Francisco Bay OneCups. It’s better than anything I’ve found in a K-cup, less packaging, and cheaper to boot.
I actually bought a big thing of their french roast single-serves from Costso. It’s weird because I really like that exact same coffee when I brew it with a french press or a regular brewer, but for some reason their single-serves in the keurig taste too bitter and weak. Maybe I just needed to brew them on the lowest dosage, but if I’m getting less drinkable coffee out of them that kind of eats up the savings. Maybe I should try a lighter roast variety of theirs.
Well, you can buy little refillable k-cups and pop in your own coffee or tea.
I have a Melita 1 that I bought 2 of about 4 years back. It uses little single serve pucks made of coffee filter material, and I also have a heat sealer that will make my own pucks. Said pucks can be shoved into a K-cup for your own custom k-cups. Well, they can also be used like tea bags if you seal in a little string.
I like french presses, however with a kcup or pod you throw the thing away, with a french press you still have to clean the press.
[the melitta came with 3 nozzles, one for coffee, one I use for tea and one labeled iced tea, so you don’t mix up the coffee and tea flavors - making tea with a coffee nozzle tastes sucky because the coffee oils are amazingly flavorful and screw with a delicate green or white tea.]
And I missed it. I blame it on not enough coffee in my system yet.
Agreeing or not is one thing, but I think the vitriol is entirely understandable unless you’re the sort of blithering idiot who buys only things with bitten apples and blue and white propeller roundels because you were told they were the best.
The machines are expensive. (Skipping over this brief era of third-party alternatives - ) The refills are expensive and available only from the OEM supplier, meaning the market is what they want to provide it as. The quality is middling at best. And for some of us, that the entire system was designed that way - to extract bux even more efficiently than it extracts caffeine - allows for a high enough vitriol level all by itself.
It won’t make much dent in Keurig’s K2 sales, because the class of buyer (see above) believes that only the brand-name cups are worth buying. I can’t quite figure out the tier of buyer that sinks money into one of these and THEN is thrifty or clever or un-dupable enough to buy third-party refills.
Upon further research, it turns out Keurig licenses their tech to Cuisinart, Mr. Coffee, and Breville.
The Bunn, and I strongly suspect the Hamilton Beach, are not licensees, but work with the k-cups. So, if you want to keep using k-cups and avoid DRM, you have at least two manufacturers to choose from, and probably more.
Awesome! Consider my ignorance fought.
The original system will persist indefinitely. There’s no real reason for it to go away except (as said above) it won’t be “real Keurig” any more and that will change its market, generally downwards. Loss of quality may accelerate market shrinkage and decline.
See, I’d agree with you if there were a cheaper alternative that did the same thing, but there isn’t. There are other solutions that can make small servings of coffee that appeals to certain types of coffee snobs (myself included), but there’s no cheaper way to make decent drip-style coffee in single cup dosages. I don’t think any of your Keurigistas are arguing the machine makes better coffee than a normal drip brewer, but it makes perfectly good coffee in a more convenient dose for some people with way less work and less coffee wastage. (More plastic wastage, though.)
(Now, what I’d really like to see happen is prices come down on the full-automatic grinder/brewers that have good single cup capability. But right now, well, if you think a Keurig is expensive…)
Just as you say. During the week I use my Keurig once at 5:30 am to make a single cup of caffeinated coffee and I’m out the door. My wife uses it once when she gets up, which is hours after I’m gone. In the evening she or I might have single cup of decaf, or we might not. Maximum usage, 4 cups a day of two different coffees, over a span of around fifteen or sixteen hours. If there was a cheaper way to do it, I would. The Keurig machine is the superlative of adequate. It is stunning in its ordinariness. If mediocrity was made out of stone, it would be the Rock of Gibraltar. Truly the iceberg lettuce of coffee makers.
What’s the hard part? Isn’t it just a one-cup automatic drip coffee maker, with a form-factor for the K-cups?
Is the patent on something as simple as any =one-cup automatic drip machine?
No, the Keurig actually forces hot water through the cup under pressure. It’s way less pressure than an espresso machine, but uses kind of the same idea where forcing the water through speeds up extraction.
Single cup drip brewers do exist (think the ones you see in hotel rooms or the old mug top filter cones) but getting good extraction with such a small quantity of coffee and water is very difficult using drip brewing alone. (I’ve had the lightbulb go off in my head while staying in a hotel-- “hey, I can just cut the top off a regular sized coffee filter and use some of the good coffee I have with me in the little in-room coffee brewer.” It tasted better than the crappy provided coffee, but still didn’t taste particularly good.)
Plus they basically take the same amount of time and effort to brew a single cup as making a full pot of coffee. That’s fine if you only ever want one cup, but if you want, say, 1-4 cups depending on the day, either you’re having to brew a half pot of coffee and throw most of it away some mornings or you end up spending half your morning futzing around with a single cup brewer.
I won’t make any argument that there’s no market for something a lot like the Keurig system - for upscale waiting rooms alone, they’re a bit of genius. For certain midscale restaurant uses, same.
But everything else about them is off - ridiculously expensive for people who drink one cup of coffee, limited selection for those who like coffee, second-rate results for those who like coffee… it’s like the semi-automated Bunn-O-Matics that are plumbed into the water supply and can produce a pot with minimum effort. There’s a place for them, but it wasn’t even on my two-pot-a-day countertop.
Yes, yes, yes we can all be free to choose. I maintain that the Venn diagram of Keurig, Usefulness and Value has a very small center overlap and the first circle is much too large.
Lol. Ridiculously expensive? For a one cup per day person it’s pretty reasonable. Most drip machines, large or small, just don’t make a decent coffee when brewed in very small quantities.
Pulling numbers from Amazon…
Looks like the machines still set you back $120-130, although there are cheaper and 'spensiver movels.
Cups run about $20 for a 30-pack sampler and a quick glance around shows good-ish coffee in 50 packs for about $28. So let’s call your daily 6 ounces a cup cost of 50 cents. A year’s amortization of the machine is 35 cents a day. We’ll pretend coffee-grade water and electricity are free.
Your year of one 6-ounce cup a day costs $307, or over 80 cents a mini-cup. Okay, let’s give the machine two years or 18 cents a day: cost drops to 68 cents a day.
So you or the household drinks four mini-cups a day? That’s $800 a year.
Yeah. “Ridiculously expensive” fits, I think. It’s burning money for trivial convenience.
Meh, less than a cigarette habit by a long stretch. Anyways, as I and Greasy mentioned, most machines just don’t brew small amounts well. My drip machine is a little better than most and has a specific setting for 1-4 cups but it’s still not quite as good…
This was beautiful.
The only reason I got a Keurig was the knowledge I wouldn’t be locked into their pods. Like, the limited choice, the expense, the waste – not worth it. But making pods myself, I don’t have to worry about that.
Once again, though, making good drip coffee in anything less than about a half pot is difficult. So the alternative to the Keurig is brewing at least a half pot a day (maybe more if you want coffee at different times of day.) You get about 40-45 6oz cups from a pound of coffee, so if you’re making 8 of them a day you’re going through around 70 lbs of coffee a year. If you’re buying $10/lb coffee that’s already about $700 without including the cost of the machine or filters or anything like that.
Bottom line: yes, if you can brew a decent cup of joe in the quantity you want without pouring a lot of it down the drain, the Keurig is about twice as expensive. But for people who guzzle coffee in less-than-pot quantities the economics of the Keurig get much more attractive. People buy the things for reasons other than being lazy or having drunk the (individually packaged single serving) Kool-Aid.