Yeah, but it’s a fairly shitty cup of coffee, the keurig. I think there is something between that and the twee artisan mode of coffee making. I think the key is generally fresh roasted coffee and a recent grind.
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BoingBoing has you covered:
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We received one as a gift…
I mostly use one of the inserts that lets ya use your own grind, however, I have a variety of pods so that guests/visitors can pick their own poison.
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I don’t understand why other coffee companies would spend billions on Keurig, just for their weak gimmick coffee pods.
The aroma of grinding coffee is half the joy!
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Hint: it might have something to do with their $4.5 billion in revenue last year. Or their patents.
Not to mention the GMCR bit of KGM. They have a solid, but relatively small beans roasting business (they provide the McDonalds coffee for New England and Albany), separate from the Keurig ecosystem, that could be brought national (like JAB already did with Intelligentsia) or otherwise merged with Douwe Egberts.
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I Don’t get it at all, coffee machines or pod machines. By far the best cup of coffee you will get is from a french press. The reason it will produce the best cup of coffee is because you can readily tailor it to your mood. More fresh ground coffee or less, longer or shorter brew, adjust water temp and volume. So you can do tweaks like extra fresh ground coffee with a short brew time to produce lighter high lights. Hotter water normal amount of fresh coffee grounds and longer brew time for heavier notes. You just tailor the coffee to your current mood. Identical coffee each and every time sucks and only ends up tasting really good on random occasions, when your taste match the engineers at the factory.
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Keurig is (was) definitely the VHS of coffee systems if Senseo was the Betamax. The Philips coffee maker produced a better tasting coffee, and the only waste was a small bit of filter paper. We still have one, and make our own pods. Even in the early Keurigs, third party DIY kits never worked well at all.
Of course the masses chose the wasteful Keurig for its novelty. The millions of little plastic cups now in landfills everywhere are a very unwelcome reminder.
To you, it sucks. To other people, that’s a feature, not a bug. And all that jiggering around with amount of grounds, longer/shorter brew time, water temperature blah blah blah is just wasted time that is keeping them from getting that sweet sweet caffeine into their bloodstream.
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“It seems rare that customers so brutally punish a company for its hostility to them”
So brutal, they only eked out a mere half billion dollars in profit last year. Not revenue. Profit.
For all the reasons mentioned, I hate the infernal things as much as anyone in this thread, but no one pays an 80% premium to buy a company that’s in dire straits.
Keurig sinks a lot of money into R&D; they’ve recently been showcasing a superauto for making soda. (You push a button,it chills water, carbonates it, adds flavoring, and dispenses.) A stupid idea, but an interesting machine.
Douwe Egberts, by the way, has an interesting process for making a kind of cold brew coffee, slightly different from the usual filtron/toddy/nut bag style. I used to use their concentrate instead of instant when I lived in England, it was surprisingly tasty.
You speak like you think the landfills will never get mined for resources.
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This.
There has to be a way to turn plastic back into fuel!
Also the one with the most grounds and muddy particulates. For folks used to drip coffee, french press coffee is not only weirdly thick and cloudy, but fiddly and messy, and time-consuming. Being able to have a very decent cup of coffee in ten seconds with a pod, and getting to select from dozens of flavors every morning with no mess or fiddling about with water temperatures or measuring grounds is hugely preferable to french press. (note: I’m playing devils’ advocate a bit here, as I like french press coffee, but I completely understand why Keurig has its market share)
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#TERRIST SCUM
we r on 2 u
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Right?! They are terribly inneficient, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be used.
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Buying coffee in Keurig pods costs about 4x as much as buying medium-fancy coffee by the pound. Part of that’s the cost of packaging and transport, but it’s still a nice markup if you can get it.
And for office coffee, it’s a big win, unless your office is big enough to have somebody make coffee reliably and enough people to drink it that it doesn’t sit there burning away on the Mr.Coffee warmer, and janitors to clean up the mess. Keurig coffee isn’t too bad, way better than old coffee sitting around in a drip machine, and it lets people pick their flavor. (No, I don’t have one at home, where I usually use French press or sometimes Aeropress or Vietnamese phin dripper.)
K-cups are displacing whole bean coffee in one of my neighborhood grocery stores. I suppose the profit margins are higher.
Everything is going to the dogs. Who shall we blame it on?
