I bought a Cuisinart k-cup machine a few years ago. I live alone so I never need a pot of coffee, just single servings. I got tired of buying expensive k-cup pods and eventually switched to a JavaJig. A JavaJig s a plastic reusable k-cup that you fill with a tablespoon of your favorite ground coffee. You have to wash a JavaJig after every use, and you have to buy the ground coffee and occasionally the paper filters.
The last time I checked, my JavaJig was cheaper for me to use than k-cups and I could use whatever coffee I wanted. I wondered if there was a tea-bag-like product you could just pour hot water on that would make a decent cup of coffee. It turns out there is something called a “brew bag” that makes single-serve coffee. I looked on Amazon and found brew bags and it seems they are about the same price as k-cups, so not cheap.
Does anyone here use brew bags as their way of making single-serving coffee, and why did you choose them? There must be an advantage that I’m just not seeing. Tell me your experience, good or bad, with using brew bags.
Basically a biodegradable bag to put my various Harney loose leaf teas in, add to a cup, and fill with hot water from an electric kettle. A bit over a nickel per, and it works great with no detectable added flavor or fuss. A bit easier than my tea balls, and a LOT better than the tea “spoons” which really don’t let the water circulate enough.
But when using them for coffee… my results were mixed. I needed a grind closer to what I use in my French press, and even with a careful grind, my results were inconsistent. To me (YMMV) the paper seemed to absorb some of the good oils from fresher coffee. I went back to using my reusable K-Cups for single servings and just bought a few extra so I could rotate through them when the rest were in the washer. And even then, I still prefer the results from a French Press or cold brew.
Most of my friend who have given up on K-cups have instead switched to the various one cup pour-over models and report good results.
Thanks for the quick response. There may be no quick, easy, and cheap way for me to make a good cup of coffee. My JavaJig works as it’s supposed to, but I hand wash everything so it’s a pain to use every day. My favorite coffee is Peet’s Major Dickinson Dark Roast, but they don’t make decaf kcups, only fully caffeinated, which I can’t handle. A brew bag, if I could get it with the coffee I wanted, would be easier to use than my JavaJig, but ii wouldn’t be cheaper. The same goes for a kcup, but I can’t get the coffee I want. What do you mean by a one cup pour-over model? Never mind, I just googled it and it looks like a lot more cleaning than my JavaJig.
Yeah, it’s all about the classic quandries, price vs. control vs. ease of use vs. ease of cleaning.
I switched to using refillable metal walled K-cups, so I worried less about microplastics, and felt better putting them through the dishwasher on the spoon rack, but they still have plastic tops and gaskets for a tight fit, and those gaskets tend to degrade or fall off in the dishwasher. So trade-offs if you don’t want to hand wash. The only “easy” fix I found was that I’d set aside the used reusable overnight in a dish, and in my dry climate, it would be easy to remove the used grounds the next day for much easier cleaning.
My friend uses the OXO model for the pour over:
And by their reporting, it’s pour, wait, toss the filter, and rinse the device. So the cleanup was really easy by their reporting. Since I already have two French presses, a K-cup with a half dozen reuseable cups, AND a Cold brew carafe, I couldn’t convince myself to try yet another device…
Not exactly on point, but I use a drip coffee maker. Which has a gold foil reuseable cone filter which sits in a larger plastic funnel shaped thing with the stop valve in the bottom.
My daily cleaning ritual is wait for the grounds to cool, then bang the filter upside down in the trash can a couple times to release most of the grounds, rinse the rest down the sink, and rinse the bottom cone. Then let them both dry on the drying mat until tomorrow. If it takes as much as 30 seconds I’m doing something wrong.
I just looked up your Javajig on Amazon. Given the paper filter and teeny size, cleanup ought to be even easier than what I go through. How is this process onerous enough you want to change it? What am I not understanding?
ISTR that years ago some coffee company brought single-serve packets to market. They were an abysmal failure. Apparently ground up coffee in a packet just sitting in hot water doesn’t work even as well as ground up tea in a packet.
That’s a fair question. It’s not that the JavaJig is hard to clean, it’s just that I was hoping there was a better way to make a cup of coffee without having to wash anything except the coffee cup. The K-Cup is the most convenient to use, but the cost is high. The JavaJig is cheaper, but not as convenient to use. I drink tea in thr morning and coffee at night. Using a tea bag is very convenient and inexpensive, and I was wondering if there was something similar for coffee.There is, of course, instant coffee, but I don’t like the taste.
I’ve commented many times over the years that if coffee made the traditional grounds-and-a-pot way was invented today, it’d be a total market flop. “You want me to go to how much folderol for a beverage? No way!”
If somebody made reasonably priced decent tasting prefab coffee in a soda can, or better yet a microwaveable container, the world would dump all these other coffee making methods ASAP.
I don’t drink a lot of coffee. I keep Café Bustelo in the house. Occasionally I take a notion to eat dry coffee grounds (don’t judge) and that’s the one I want.
I don’t care what kind anyone else likes. It’s not a biggie around here.
But I like the pre-fab tea bag things for loose tea. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work perfectly with your favorite brand of coffee. I don’t think I would steep it so much as bob it up and down in the cup a couple times.
As I said upthread - a small step up from most instant coffees - which isn’t exactly high praise, but I wouldn’t say undrinkable. I’d say minor failure/mediocre success which isn’t an actual endorsement. IIRC they pre-date K-cup usage, so they were selling on the same sort of ease of use and cleanup which K-cups have now become the leader. They have their uses, such as workplaces with hot water taps but no coffee maker (though I’d still prefer teabags in such circumstances).
Apparently, there are similar, better options out there, but then you get right back to pricey (about $2.00 US a bag!) using Mozza as an example.
And back to our OP, @dolphinboy, they do have a decaf option as well. At the price point for the Folgers, maybe buy a box off Amazon (Kroger was just the first link that came up, Amazon is under $9 US for a box of 19 though the decaf costs more) as a test?
Note though, since price was mentioned along with ease, the Folgers is still more expensive than most tea bag options.
I agree it’s a dismal failure and not all that cheap.Better than no coffee at all stuck in a barebones rental cabin for the weekend but that’s about it.
Starbucks Via packets are quite a bit better but even more stupidly, outrageously expensive. They are what I take with me traveling though, as the best of the dead end options.
The single cup pour overs I used for decades before Keurigs came out (my partner wasn’t a coffee drinker but there was always a kettle of water ready for his tea that worked for the pour over). I didn’t wash it every time, just dumped the grounds out and rinsed it. If you want it to be super easy, get a Melitta cone pour over with paper filters and make cleanup that much easier:
Works like the very sleek Oxo one above but no moving parts except a cone and a paper filter. At least at that price you could trial the technique and move up to the sleeker Oxo if you like it.
You can get generic cone filters much cheaper than the branded ones either at your grocery or Amazon. When we were poor graduate students I learned how to fold a circular Mr Coffee filter to fit the Melitta cone, making it even more reasonable (less guilt inducing with my indulgence).
I use a refillable k-cup, no paper filter, and I usually just bang it out afterwards. I give it a very quick rinse if it really needs it. You can also get 2 of them, and quickly rinse one while the other one is brewing. It really only takes a couple seconds. I hardly ever use dish soap.
Is Peet’s decaf dark roast House Blend k-cups pretty much like the Major Dickson? I think their medium roast decaf k-cups are pretty good. We use them at work. I’m too cheap to buy the pre-filled pods for home.
Can you show me which refillable no filter K-cup you use? That may make the most sense since I that would eliminate the mini paper filler nonsense of my JavaJig.
Yeah, tell autocorrect. I’ve got 2 bags of it at home and order it for work. You’d think my phone would know it by now. Plus, Dickson isn’t even all that common.
