Almost all the coffee I drink is made in these – Amazon.com: Hario V60 Ceramic Coffee Dripper, Size 02, White: Coffee Pots: Home & Kitchen – which make exactly one cup.
I haven’t used one of those in about a decade, but my recollection is that if you brew it slowly and carefully you wind up with something that is very tasty, but doesn’t really taste like regular old drip coffee. In my opinion that’s not a bad thing, but the Keurig isn’t aimed at coffee snobs, it’s aimed at people who just want a pretty basic drip coffee taste.
But for those you need boiling/hot water. That’s hard to come by in the office.
The alternative to my Keurig is not a pot of drip coffee. The alternative is a $2.50 cup of Starbucks on the way to work. The Keyrig gives me a cup of coffee in twenty second with zero work and only the cup to clean. Nothing else does that.
Thank you. I’d just finished doing my performance evaluations for 2013, and I had a lot of meaningless accolades left over.
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Upon further research, it turns out Keurig licenses their tech to Cuisinart, Mr. Coffee, and Breville.
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And even more sly, Keurig is a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee. It’s all one big near-monopolistic company.
They do plan on changing the name to Keurig Green Mountain, pending shareholder approval later this month, so the connection will be more obvious.
Unsurprisingly, some of the competing pod brands are suing Green Mountain over their new anticompetitive business model.
Vote with your wallet. There are single-cup coffeemakers that don’t have a proprietary cartridge system. I highly recommend mine, the Cafe Uno from Amazon. Cost for the machine was less than $15, and it turns water + regular coffee grounds into delicious coffee. I drink two cups a day and keep it right at my desk in the office. The cup it comes with is garbage, but you can use any regular old coffee cup. My only complaint is the power cord, which is *very *short.
Too bad they’re, you know, the wrong brand. Can’t possibly be any good.
The Keurig fits the needs of my family perfectly. The three of us still at home all drink coffee, but different types at different times of day. My wife prefers flavored coffees while I prefer a dark, robust brew taken black. Both the females like hot teas and hot chocolate. The wife drinks hers primarily in the morning, my daughter at mid day and I prefer a cup after supper. Even if we all wanted a cup at the same time, it would still be a different drink for each of us.
I am a bit of a coffee snob. I use the reusable, mesh cup substitute (4 for $10, lasts for years) and high quality coffee (organic, fair trade, fresh ground). It makes a good cup o’ joe.
That said, if Keurig goes proprietary on the cups, when the current machine needs replacing I will go with another brand.
Coffee is one thing; I will concede the argument that it’s difficult to brew one good cup at a time. (But then, I’d also reject the idea that “good” and “flavored” can be combined in the same sentence about coffee.)
However… making one cup of tea or one mug of hot chocolate is trivial even in the least-equipped kitchen. Justifying a K-machine for these purposes, and likely paying far more for those bitty convenience cups than you do for your premium java, takes the argument over the edge into ridiculous.
You think it’s bad now, wait until the GMCR partnership with Coke takes effect. The Keurig Cold system will be likely be released in late 2014 or 2015. It will dispense cold beverages “including carbonated drinks, enhanced waters, juice drinks, sports drinks and teas,” the companies said in a joint statement. You can bet Pepsi pods won’t fit in a Coke machine.
Preach it, brother! I tell my wife that she doesn’t like coffee, she likes the idea of coffee.
However, if the dang thing is sitting there anyway, full of hot water, then using it for any purpose requiring a cup of hot water seems not so ridiculous at all. 
Making these things is not hard, but if you have six people for a dinner party and one wants coffee, one wants decaf, one wants tea and three want hot chocolate, suddenly you are making two pots of coffee, two kettle loads of water, finding and opening various boxes or packages, messing with spoons and wet tea bags and empty chocolate packets, and trying to time drinks that all need different amounts of time to produce.
Or you gesture to the machine and say “go ahead and pick out what you like.”
But of course. My Latin is too weak to form up “Convenience cannot be disputed” but the scholars here are welcome to tackle the exercise.
Not that I agree in the slightest. Most marketed “convenience” is bushwah.
No, I tinkle the little bell and tell Carson what the guests would like. Now THAT’S convenience.
Keurig machines. A poor man’s Carson.
That’s what I do. It’s faster at making a single cup than the French press (and easier to clean), and doesn’t have the problem of my old drip machine, which produced an excellent cup of coffee-colored warm water.
When people say the Keurig doesn’t make good coffee, I can never tell if they mean the machine or the pods. A lot of criticism appears to be of the Keurig-branded pods rather than the entire system, but the critics either don’t bother specifying or don’t know to.
I wouldn’t have gotten a Keurig to make tea, but I’m happy to use it for that.
(Cocoa needs milk, though.)
Well, results./taste is variable. Not being a coffee geek, it’s plenty good enough for me.
But limited selection? Really? Here’s the list of just the K-Cups that are sold direct through Keurig.com.
241 total varieties. If we just limit ourselves to coffee, we lose a lot,f but still standing strong at 170.
And that’s just the ones sold from Keurig.com. Amazon, grocery stores, etc… all have varieties and brands not sold direct.
That being said, I still don’t like their idea of implementing “DRM” on new “approved” pods.
It’s interesting that Keurig/Green Mountain Coffee has multiple “single pod” brewing systems (K-Cup, Vue, Rivo, and the upcoming Bolt,) yet I’ve never heard anyone talk about anything other than K-Cups. I imagine they’d prefer more people use Vue and Rivo, since (I’m guessing,( they still have the patents on them so there’s NO chance you can buy packs that aren’t officially licensed by them.
If I use the French press I have more than 170 varieties to choose from. And I can taste the difference, an I don’t think I’m a coffee geek either.
170 variations on pre-ground coffee isn’t what I’d call much of a selection.
But you’ve hit the nail on the head: K-coffee is “good enough” for many drinkers. I just wonder how many would continue considering it good enough if they fully analyzed the cost against other factors. Paying $1 a cup for meh coffee adds up, both ways.
I am sure the vast majority of users know it’s more expensive per cup. Buying bulk and doing more work is cheaper in everything. “Why are these suckers buying pre-made cakes?”