Thrashing Stinks

I drink roughly 12oz of coffee once a day in the morning. Ever sick of spending $1.70 on coffee at Panera Bread and ever sick of washing a Krups pot, metal filter, and the plastic filter holder every single morning for my whopping serving, I recently purchased a Keurig Elite B40 coffee/tea maker.

Here’s the basic summary: A coffee/tea maker that quickly puts an internally metered amount of water through what is known as a K-Cup. A K-Cup is a plastic container with sealed foil top that contains your coffee ground or tea. You pop open the coffee maker, drop in a K-Cup, and press the brew button. You might want to put a coffee mug under the spout first too. When it’s done, you pop the K-Cup out, throw it away, and power off the machine. There’s nothing to clean on a daily basis at all. One simply has to keep the water reservoir replenished when it runs out.

Okay, neat. How well does it work?

A coffee 25-pack of K-Cups runs $14. That’s 56 cents per cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it’s a very small 7.25oz and comes nowhere near filling any good ceramic coffee mug. Except maybe my grandmother’s. From 1938. In fact, to fill my mug of choice, I have to use 2 K-Cups. Actually, I have to stand there and watch it fill the mug, then power it off before it finishes the second K-Cup cycle. Not cool. So I either have to buy a bigger mug that will hold 2 brew cycles (2 K-Cups’ worth) or settle for 1.

Point being, it’s $1.12 per day for me if I use 2 K-Cups. A little disappointing there, but still roughly 50 cents a day cheaper than Panera Bread, let alone… Starbucks’ stupidity.

Want a 9.25 ounce brew? That’ll cost you the $199 model. Yippee. Pass.

Who the HELL drinks only 7.25 ounces of coffee? Not a single person I have ever met in my life. Ever.

Another disappointment is the two stage nature of the process. Let’s say I wake up and stumble into the kitchen. I power on the unit. It begins a water-heating process which I counted to be 49 seconds long. No worries, I have my K-Cup loaded and my mug under the spout. I can just walk in, press the power button, press the brew button, and have a cup of coffee in roughly a minute, right? Wrong. Once you have powered the unit on and the water heating cycle has ended (something you are not going to sit there and stare at), you have to come back to the unit, lift and close the cover to tell it you’re ready, then press the brew button (which is not illuminated until that time).

So the process is juuuuust short enough that you won’t leave the kitchen and juuuust long enough to annoy you for having to stand there for 49 seconds before you can start stage 2 of your coffee making.

Other than that, it works fine.