I was given a Keurig Elite for Christmas ...

[decocritter]

So far not too good.

Timothy's Columbian - NO * - bitter brown water

Green Mountain Bold - ** - has substance and body - but bitter

Van Houtte Kilamanjaro - NO star

I hate to give up just yet

 

[CCafe]

Shoot it now and lay it to rest!

 

[decocritter]

There must be one decent k cup out there,

 

[CCafe]

Well here's the story of my life and many others. You have a machine that uses pods. Unless you know when the coffee in that pod was roasted, you don't know how old it is or when they made the pod. For all you know the coffee sat around for 3 weeks before the made the pod and another 6 months before you made it in your machine.

Not trying to be rude, but you will never get a good cup. Those people who comment on Amazon.com stating it’s the best think Folgers Coffee in a can is superb! Once you take someone to a coffeehouse that is serving coffee that was fresh roasted that week it will be hard for him or her to turn around and say his or her pod machine makes better coffee. The ones the do say it are uneducated hypocrites who just like to argue the point but don't understand the meaning.

 

[carolmaziarz]

k-CUPS

I don't know much about the k-CUPS. We specialize in custom roasts/grinds for our pods but do not support your machine.

Have you ever visited www.singleservecoffee.com? They conduct some pretty extensive tests on pod machines as well our coffee pod products.

You might want to cruise the site and see if they can recommend another coffee company that will provide you a good cup.


Best of luck!
Carol@CreativePods.com

 

[javahill]

Ove the past 3 years, I've given about half a dozen Keurig machines as gifts and haven't heard a bitter complaint. Which Green Mountain did you try? I don't drink the stuff myself (espresso at home, espresso at work) except when I'm visiting. From their web site, it looks like they have Dark Magic and Sumatran.

The regular k-cups have 9 grams of coffee. The bold has 12 grams. That is where the body is coming from. I believe all roasters us a Melitta-shaped filter for most of their products (9 grams) and a muffin shaped cup for the 12 gram coffee. 33 percent more coffee per k-cup.

My guess is that you tried Dark Magic - which is an espresso coffee if you buy it by the bag its called Dark Magic Espresso Blend. It is going to be on the bitter side unless you can get good extraction which Keurig doesn't - probably best with milk. If you haven't tried it, give the Sumatran a try. That is what my son's godmother drinks and she seems happy enough.

 

[javahill]

When is Van Houtte going to open the coffee bars in college towns? Can you see the poster in the windows - Van Hooters, Home of the K-Cup.

 

[whfite]

Ccafe's derisive dismissal to the contrary notwithstanding, the Keurig machine has a place within the legitimate world of coffee. It does not make the best coffee, by a long shot. It will never satisfy those who claim to discern a difference in the taste of coffee ground five minutes before brewing versus ten minutes before brewing, or those who firmly believe that two degrees difference in the temperature of the brewing water makes all the difference. Neither, and this is significant in a forum such as this one, will it ever be accepted by those who make their money from coffeeshops or beans or roasters or grinders.

It is not perfect. Most of the blends are too weak, a consequence, I'm told, of an error in judgment on the part of the designers, who did not make the cups quite large enough. And Ccafe is correct in noting that one has no idea when the beans were roasted, ground, packaged.

But....to compare it to Folgers or Maxhell House is self-evidently foolish. The Keurig (and maybe a few of the other pod variants) makes coffee a heck of a lot better than one is going to get 99% of the time, whether it be made at home or in a shop.

And it is consistent, convenient, quick, and easy for those to whom coffee is merely a beverage and not a religion.

Try Tully's. Many people think it is the best of the lot.

OBTW, Ccafe and others, I am NOT a swill-drinker. My usual cup is from Intelligentsia, ordered weekly, ground immediately before brewing, and prepared in a Technivorm KD-741. My Keurig is used when I want a single cup in a hurry and don't have time to do the other.

 

[javahill]

whfite has it right. The key thing about tastes is they change. Before Starbucks and specialty coffee, a great many people thought Folgers and Maxwell House were great cups of coffee. Many still do. But if you look at how people are voting with their coffee cups, the red and blue cans are riding downhill in terms of volume. People who drink that are switching or dying off or waiting to do either of the above. There are no new Folgers drinkers.

Depending on whether you measure dollars or pounds of coffee, specialty coffee is growing about 40 percent a year. Keurig is growing even faster than that.

The biggest place Keurig is growing is in the office. The competition for Keurig is office coffee - the stuff that has been sitting on a burner for who knows how long, the last half cup of sludge in the glass decanter, the why the hell doesn't the manager make his own damn pot of coffee if he takes the last cup. And I like French Roast, how dare you brew hazelnut without scrubbing the decanter afterwards? We're going to be tasting hazelnut in our coffee for weeks. Pity the decaf drinkers in the office. Talk about second class citizens.

In the office universe, Keurig isn't just convenient - it is superior. If you are in an office that is brewing prepackged portion controlled coffee, take a look at the weight. Most office coffee is brewed with between 1.3 and 2.0 ounces of coffee per 64 oz of water. For reference, the Specialty Coffee Association Golden Cup standard has a minimum of 3.5 (maybe 3.25).

It I did the math right, Keurig is targeted at coffee brewed in a range of 2.2 to 2.5 oz per 64 oz and close to 3 oz for the bold k-cups. That is going to tend to make it a bit thinner than you'd get at most coffee shops and probably at home, too. But well within drinkable.

And yes, there are some coffee snobs whose noses are so high in the air, they actually pushed them up over their backs and so onward arching until they've managed to plant their noses - and in extreme cases - the entire head - up between their own buttocks. It is kind of like yoga.