Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for reducing waste. But I think this is overall alarmist and missing the big problem. It looks scary but isn’t as bad as the things we can’t see. The overall environmental impact of all these fancy methods of making coffee is basically the same.
An espresso machine is just as convenient, costs the same too. Plus the coffee is cheaper.
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Does it make me a grumpy bastard to suggest that if someone can’t organise using a non plastic single serving variant that they should pick another drink?
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Probably, but I’ve got a soft spot for grumps.
I know it’s unAmerican but I wanted to say “Tea for all!” to that situation but suddenly realized the only reason tea is so easy for me at work is that we have those awful industrial drips that keep hot water on standby.
I feel the same way. We had normal drip machines in our previous office, and it was always getting dumped out because it was old, and totally disgusting (no one cleaned it ever). I tried to get our office manager to purchase a grind on demand commercial machine from Starbucks, to solve the one cup at a time problem with less waste, but its very expensive and hard to justify. So the Keurig is a reasonable solution to the office coffee problem.
For a while I was grumpy about it, and made AeroPress coffee at my desk. Eventually I gave up though because we don’t do any composting at work like I do with my filter/grinds at home so it felt futile.
You crazy Americans and your lack of electric kettles.
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I know right? One of the things I understand least about America is the lack of electric jugs (as we call them in NZ). Boiling hot water in two minutes? Yes please!
If I could find a reasonably priced one that would fit in my minicube, I’d have one. 
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The solution to a French Press making too big a pot of coffee when you just want one cup is easy - either get a smaller press, or just put less coffee and water in your big one. (I have two presses - I use the larger one for making tea, and the smaller one for coffee, and if I want larger quantities of coffee I’ll use the drip-filter coffee machine.)
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The reusable pods are fine, and take care of the waste and the fact that pre-packaged K-cup coffee costs about 4 times as much as good beans, but by the time you go to the effort of filling them and washing them when you’re done, it’s as much work as just using a French press or Aeropress.
On the other hand, if you’ve got an office environment where the last pot of coffee sits around on the warmer after one or two people have a cup, and an hour later it’s burned into undrinkability* and gets tossed and replaced with a new pot, K-cups look a lot less wasteful, and they let you get decaf if none of that’s around.
(*“Undrinkability”, of course, doesn’t mean that a grad student desperate for caffeine wouldn’t drink it, acidity-buffered a bit by that horrible white powder that’s not at all a substitute for real dairy products.)
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If you left the hot chocolate pods by the K-machine, at least a couple of regular users would probably be very grateful.
We’ve got electric kettles in the U.S. But they don’t boil nearly as fast as yours. I timed my electric kettle and it took more than 7.5 minutes to boil. I know I’ve talked about this with people on BoingBoing before – I think we decided it’s the difference in mains voltage that makes U.S. electric kettles so slow.
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It’s pretty damned small. If I got that one, I’d have to put the kettle under my desk and avoid kicking it. That is a good price though. I’m just hoping for one at the .5 Liter (or maybe a little smaller) range that’s less than the $35 one I saw with leaky sounding reviews.
Yes I believe you’re right there. I remembered the mains voltage issue shortly after I posted my comment. It’s entirely possible to blow a fuse in my house if I have the jug boiling at the iron on at the same time as both draw so much energy.
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My nespresso machine makes awesome espresso, thank you very much. Good pump, love the flavor selection. They recycle them in Europe I believe. Maybe someday in the USA.
My dad has one and he loves it because he only wants one cup of coffee (Mom doesn’t drink it and doc told him to keep it at one a day). He’s not picky about coffee at all - when I was a kid he would make a drip pot one morning, then reheat it every morning until he’d finished all of it.
I wouldn’t buy one because the cost is absurd for coffee at home, but I do understand where he’s coming from.
The speed is proportional to power (current x voltage) – while US mains voltage is lower than in most places in the world, you can design a circuit to supply more current to compensate. I have an electric kettle in the US and it boils in around 3 minutes – 7.5 minutes suggests just a bad kettle design.
They got a Nespresso installed at my office. Compared to the previous corporate supplied option - instant - the coffee it makes really isn’t that bad. Add in generic pods and it’s a reasonable caffeine hit for around $0.30.
Saying that, being in Melbourne means that if anyone wants good coffee, we can walk outside to the nearest corner shop, where there is invariably a barista.
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