I have to wonder what the DRM the new system will take. I thought they had already done something like this with their new Vue systems. The cups are a different size and have a ridge down one side.
I used to have a Melitta-shaped one like that. Do they make them in a basket-shape as well, I wonder? Off to Google I go!
Lol infomercial industry made a portable French press for people who can’t operate a k-cup machine https://www.myjocoffee.com/steps.html
That’s more like an aeropress knockoff that works with k-cups. Since the main distinction between a French Press and the Aeropress is that you’re using air pressure to force the water through the grounds (aeropress) vs. just soaking them and then filtering them out with the press (French Press). It’s about 4x bigger for the same functionality as an aeropress.
Well, on the front page of the site, they make a big deal about how big and expensive the machines are… It should have been in B&W and with a voiceover.
$20 ain’t bad. The aeropress runs about $25. That front page looks like something from Ronco, though.
The whole point of the Keurig is it does everything for you, including heating the water. The sacrifice you make for that convenience is accepting the inferior coffee you get from Kcups. That MyJo is a hilarious idea. Let’s take the convenience of the Keurig out of the equation but keep the Kcups.
The beauty of it is that many of us, perhaps even most of us, can’t really tell if the coffee is inferior or superior. It’s just coffee that doesn’t taste terrible, one cup at a time.
The whole explosion of those little coffee making machines that only take their own branded refills is DRM also. There is a big push of advertising for those currently. Stay clear, keep your coffee drinking ‘free’ and ‘open’ is my motto.
I’m so glad I’m a connoisseur of about virtually nothing. Cheap red wines and stale coffee - ignorance is bliss!
Those things represent the triumph of excess packaging, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve been on both sides of that and I have to admit ignorant bliss is not a bad place to be. Just make sure you never take a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once I learned what kind of coffee I could have, it ruined mediocre coffee forever. If I had only stuck to instant coffee…
I heard a story once about a guy who brought his own coffee and a French Press to a restaurant, because he wanted real coffee. What an asshole.
Now, I understand. It’s still rude, he should have just forgone coffee entirely, rather than make a display of himself. But I understand, because it’s like being offered Kool Aid (or Crystal Light, which is still Kool Aid with fancier name) when you’re used to drinking juice. It’s not that it’s actually awful, it’s just a shadow of something with the real flavors.
Bill Murray sat down at the fancy steak joint where I was waiting tables back in the 90’s. He took a sub sandwich out of his bag and asked for a plate and a beer.
I appreciate the idea that ignorance is bliss. I think I’m still there with scotch: I can definitely taste the difference between a really good one and a really bad one… but I can’t detect any real difference between a reasonably good one and a pretty bad one. Yet.
An anecdote: I didn’t have my first coffee until after my freshman year in college. My father drove down to help me pack up the dorm and drive the trailer back home. After packing the previous afternoon, he and I sacked out in the now-empty dorm to drive back the next morning. After the sun came up I did the last-second cleaning up and he ran out to grab breakfast; he came back with some donuts and a pair of 16-oz coffees. “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t think to ask for cream or sugar.”
Now, like most surly still-teens, I didn’t like my father much at that stage in my life. Don’t get me wrong: we never had screaming fights or threaten each other or anything like that; it was just the typical Dad-doesn’t-get-me and Dad-can’t-understand-what-it’s-like type of stuff. But regardless, I was not about to admit to weakness in front of the Old Man, especially when he had sort-of paid me a compliment by assuming that as an adult I would be drinking coffee.
So I drank the whole, miserable, 1980s fast-food coffee black. Sip. Grimace. Sip. Grimace. Sip.
A glutton for punishment, I resolved that summer that I would learn how to drink coffee, by gum. My summer job was as a “robin” for a surveyor - I would stand in the middle of field (usually in a patch of poison ivy) with a 12-foot measuring stick while the surveyor looked through his scope and took the readings. Then I’d go to another spot, etc. This particular surveyor started work at 6 AM… but we didn’t usually reach any given site until near 9 because we would stop at the local greasy spoon for breakfast first. So every day we would go to this diner and I would order some coffee for breakfast and drink a couple cups’ worth. By the end of the summer I was kind of enjoying the taste.
But here’s the rub: the coffee in that place was absolutely terrible. I don’t know what horrific bulk-price grounds they used, how stale it may or may not have been, or how they managed to insert that bitter, burnt taste, but it was gawd-awful. I just didn’t know it yet. In the Fall when I went back to school I had my first cup of Maxwell House drip coffee… and it was absolutely spectacular. It was like I had been drinking stuff filtered through someone’s thrice-worn gym socks and no one had told me there was an alternative.
That realization - that coffee had radical extremes of goodness - led me to try and seek out better stuff as my life has progressed. Now, any coffee is better than no coffee, but I can’t imagine subjecting myself to K-cup coffee when five minutes of inconvenience can net me something far better.
My wife tried to start me on coffee a while back. She did so by serving me some convenience-store coffee with lots of cream and sugar in it. Which says something about my wife and her relationship with coffee.
Brewing coffee properly isn’t hard, but from what I’ve read, there are a lot of ways to brew it badly if you’re lazy, don’t care, or don’t have the remotest idea what’s a bad idea when brewing. Bitterness is over-extraction, and burnt is probably that it’s been sitting on a hot plate for hours, and the stuff at the bottom is cooking from the heat. The over-extraction may even have been deliberate, to save money by getting more coffee out of the grounds.
The basics are actually pretty simple: use fresh beans, grind just before brewing, drink promptly before it turns bitter. There are various nuances like burr vs blade grinders, paper vs metal filters, water temperature, etc. which impact your final results, but that’s as much about personal taste preferences as anything else, IMHO.
It’s when you go down the rabbit hole of instant-read thermometers and super-precise scales and home roasters that the next thing you know you’re freebasing fermented weasel poop - at that point, you may have gotten too carried away.
Presumably it would work fine with reusable K-cups - no DRM here! - but if people are willing to go to the bother of filling those with their own grinds, why not just use an Aeropress or single-cup drip in the first place?
I look at that and wonder who’s the target market? Are there really a lot of people with a microwave or water heater, but no Keurig? People willing to pay the premium on K-cups vs instant or bulk coffee, but not pony up a hundred bucks or so for a proper brewer?
I prefer filet mignon to cheeseburgers, but I eat a lot more burgers because they’re a lot cheaper & easier to find than filet mignon. But if I’m jonesin’ for a burger, I will go out of my way to eat at, say, Five Guys or Elevation Burger rather than a fast food joint; the difference in quality is worth a couple extra bucks and a little extra wait to me. So it’s all a matter of how much effort & expense you’re willing to go to get what you want; sometimes “second best” is good enough, especially if the alternative was “utter crap.”
They should have charged him a “cupping” fee, like they do when you bring your own wine or dessert.
My lady-friend lives for Pilot gas station coffee loaded down with ~4 packs of sugar, a lengthy nozzle-spray of vanilla creamer, and a couple of mini-cups of some hazelnut nonsense. Living in NC, now, she can’t get it, so she settles for lesser brews or, now that we’re budgeting pretty heavily, Seattle’s Best bags brewed in our little $15 Mr. Coffee. She knows there’s something different about what she makes vs. the Pilot gas station brew or the really nice coffee my mom prepares her at home (which, again, is more creamers and sugars and flavors than coffee, but whatever), but she doesn’t care enough to work on it. Coffee is functional for her: without the caffeine, she’s unable to do much of anything before ~7PM.
I still can’t stand the stuff, whether it’s fancy-schmancy fresh-ground, steamy esspresso, gas station stew, or even K-cups. It’s all too bitter and hot for my tastes, which I think means I miss the point of coffee entirely.
But, being a ridiculous foodie, I can’t help myself from reading about it when it comes across my radar. I’m weird.
We have an Aeropress and a Keurig and the Keurig wins every time. Sometimes on the weekend we will bust out the Aeropress. Convenience and laziness trumps all.
No, you’re not missing the point. Much of coffee brewing centers around reducing the bitterness, even without adding sweetener. An aeropress with a paper filter does a pretty good job of taming Starbucks French Roast, which is nasty stuff. I use a metal filter for my coffees, but I’m using coffee that hasn’t been brutalized by Starbucks.
It’s possible to learn to like coffee even if you’re very sensitive to bitterness. I didn’t like coffee either for most of my life. However, I did love coffee ice cream. It was when I explored the process of making my own coffee ice cream that I decided that if I could make an coffee ice cream base that I liked, I could make coffee that I liked. So I approached it from that direction.
With coffee ice cream, there’s no water involved, since any cream base with water will turn to ice. I started first by soaking whole beans in a cream base, 2 cups cream, 1 cup half and half, heated to about 170 degrees. Then I experimented and discovered I could use grounds, if I filtered the grounds with a French Press. This is still how I make it, soaking the grounds for about 10 minutes before filtering it and pouring it into a blender with 3 eggs (needed to avoid the nasty filmy mouthfeel you get without) and 3/4 cups sugar. 10 minutes is a long time to brew coffee, but you can’t heat a cream or milk mixture to 190-200 degrees, you’ll cook the milk solids, so I soak it longer to compensate.
I discovered I could make a reasonable coffee-like drink by brewing coffee in 2% milk instead of water in that French Press. With further experimentation, I found that I could make regular coffee with water and tolerate it provided I added enough half-and-half to brink it to roughly milk levels of creaminess. I also drank my results cold, about 40 degrees. Coffee ice cream is cold, so cold isn’t inherently bad. Cold tends to tone down all the flavors, including the bitterness.
I drink it hot now, because I’m trying to maximize the other flavors, but I started cold, and it still tastes good when it’s gone cold.