Keurig

Wednesday, 3:42 pm

By Kate

Mar

25

2009

This is a coffee maker. It is named Keurig and it seems to be taking this area by storm—I can’t speak for other areas. But these things are popping up all over the place. There’s even one in the grocery store for customers who need a coffee fix. There’s one in my kitchen, too.

The Keurig is the most wonderful coffee maker in the world, I’m convinced. It also brews one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever tasted and only takes about 15 seconds to brew a mug of fresh, piping hot coffee. I mean hot coffee. There is nothing quite like an almost instant mug of delicious steaming coffee first thing in the morning.

It also solves the problem of figuring out how to keep an entire pot of coffee hot for the next eight hours. Not an issue now.

However, the Keurig is potentially one of the most environmentally irresponsible products on the market.

Each cup of coffee is brewed using one of these K-Cups. The number of K-Cup boxes lining the shelves in my grocery store is horrifying. There is also a local coffee vending company that almost exclusively trades in K-Cup products. They are doing a booming walk-in and mail-order business.

For the occasional at-home coffee drinker, K-Cups might possibly be excused. Nice for guests, too. But for those of us who swill coffee in quantity, they are horrible little plastic things. It’s just too bad that they work so well.

I figure, with my coffee intake, I’d end up with about 150 used K-Cups per month. For most people, those probably end up in the landfill. Imagine 150 K-Cups per month times a village of similarly dedicated K-Cup users. That’s a lot of plastic in the ground. And, of course, at about $11.00 per 24 K-Cups, that adds up to a sizeable amount of money every month for coffee.

After the first blush of thrilling delicious convenient coffee last month, my conscience started bothering me mightily (although I was relieved to discover these things are recyclable and they make excellent little pots for starting seeds). My checkbook wasn’t all that excited, either.

Enter the more environmentally responsible (and cost effective) solution—a reusable filter. Keurig at least tried to offer a mitigating product for the consumer. Their parent company, Green Mountain Coffee, has admitted that the K-Cups are a thorny little environmental problem for a company that has highly touted their social and environmental responsibility. I don’t, however, see K-Cups going away. They are kind of integral to the Keurig reason-for-being.

I ordered my reusable filter from Amazon and haven’t looked back. The thing works beautifully, despite the odd complaint in the Amazon reviews. Perhaps the gizmo has been re-engineered since the first reviews—not sure—but it has worked well for me every single time.  And I get to select my own favorite coffees at a fraction of the K-Cup price. I will say, though, that through my initial K-Cup experimentation, I discovered Green Mountain’s Nantucket Blend, which is one of my new favorite coffees. I can buy whole beans at the store and grind to my own specification.

Okay, so now my conscience doesn’t bother me. I love my Keurig coffee maker. Love. It.