Anybody try the new Starbucks K cups?
My sister has a Keurig and I got some of the Starbucks K-cups when I was visiting her earlier this month. I got the bold Sumatra.
Now, I normally brew Starbucks Sumatra in a drip maker at home - grind the beans and the brew the coffee. So after using my sister's Keurig with the Starbucks K-cups I could make some direct comparisons. And these were my reactions.
- there is a significant loss of flavor with the K-cup.
- the cost of the K-cups as compared with buying the same coffee is atrocious. For the same price I paid for a 10-pack of the K-cups I could buy 12 oz. of the same bulk coffee, which would yield close to 100 cups of my regular brewed coffee. And I brew it pretty strong.
- to get something I thought was decent I took to using the small coffee cup setting of the Keurig, and brewing two packs into a mug. Of course that made the economics of the K-cup even worse.
- My sister had one of the "make your own" inserts. I went to Caribou and bought one of their extra bold roasts and used that in the insert. I was still using the small cup setting with a fully loaded insert. The improvement in quality was evident.
- Drinking two large mugs of coffee in the morning, emptying, cleaning, and reloading the insert for each cup of coffee took a lot more time than it would have taken to make the same amount of coffee with a drip maker. Since the point of the Keurig is convenience, it doesn't make sense to buy a Keurig if you're going to use the insert all of the time while drinking a couple of mugs of coffee in the morning. Less convenient and lower quality.
Obviously, a Keurig is not for me. But Santa brought me a Zojirushi 10-cup drip maker that brews directly into a thermal carafe. Vastly easier than using the Keurig for my purposes, better quality, and the coffee in the carafe stays hot for hours. So my feeling is that the Keurig is OK for one or two cups of coffee if you're just looking an OK cup of Joe. If you drink more and want great coffee stick with the drip or go to a press. The press is particularly nice if you only want one or two cups, which many drip makers do not do very well on. And the press and the coffee will be cheaper as well.