For Christmas, the spouse-unit finally caved and bought me a Keurig single serve coffee machine. I'd been dropping hints about one since the previous holiday or gift-giving occasion and over 2009, it had turned into a private joke where the spouse would roll his eyes and groan. We generally have a policy of getting rid of bulky, single-purpose appliances in our tiny house, so the whole idea of getting something like that instead of instant coffee, or a simple french press, was indulgent.
I sneaked a
Keurig B70 into the house in late November under the guise of taking it to our geek office. Well, okay, I did take it into the office after a few days trial use at home. It was awesome, but huge on our small countertop, so I was content to downscale my wild dreams of a home one to the much smaller, but equally awesome
Keurig B30. This was the one the spouse surprised with me on Christmas morning! Yay!
The B70 has a water reservoir, which is great for the office. In the morning, I turn it on and fill it with fresh water from our water cooler. A few of us there use it through the day for 1-3 cups of coffee each. It's pretty fast and the room under the spout accommodates standard-sized freebie mugs and my tall travel mug (if I scoot the bottom cup holder to one side).
The B30 is a little less convenient in that you pour a cup of water into it each time, but for our house that's good, that no water is sitting around in it all day long. The opening mechanism is a little strange in that every time you open it to put a k-cup in, closing it triggers opening the water reservoir area. After some extra fumbling with the opening/closing order, I've gotten it down to the following process: fill mug with fresh water, grab k-cup, press OPEN lever, drop in k-cup and close, pour in water and close, hit BREW. I know it sounds confusing, but if you use one, you'll get the habit of it easily.
For coffee selection, I started with a Gloria Jeans Variety Pack since I was a cream-and-sugar kinda girl and a unflavored box of
Coffee People's Donut Shop for the office. I have this lovely
OXO Travel Mug that I love to death, sans cleaning the cream-and-sugar gunk out of. The more I've been drinking my coffee black over the past few weeks from my travel mug, the more I've come to enjoy the Donut Shop blend and good regular coffee, in general. My coffee-drinking mother-in-law was staying with us over the holidays and so we quickly went through most of the home stash of Gloria Jeans, so I ordered a
Timothy's World Coffee Variety Pack. Aside from a strange "italian lemon drink" one, it's been pretty good and now the GJ coffee tastes like flavored water in comparison. Bleah. While the Timothy's is good for now, I can imagine that my black-coffee-palate will outgrow the k-cup selection, but I loathe the waste of the k-cups anyway, and look forward to playing around with more of using our own coffees from places like
Peet's. I also noticed there are strange/interesting things you can do to
re-use k-cups, but might stay away from this for BPA-related concerns.
The k-cup tea selection on Amazon is a little weak, and the spouse-unit and I prefer Peet's anyway, so we did some tea-brewing experiments with the Keurig My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter. It turns out you can brew a pretty decent cuppa in a Keurig, but you have to do one of two things to keep it from being weak. Typically loose leaf tea sits around in boiling water for a few minutes to steep, but you don't have that time in the process with a Keurig so you have to help it along. One way is to wet the leaves first; fill the filter with tea, close the holder around it, cover the bottom hole with a finger and pour some water in, letting them soak a little. This was way too much work for me, for only a marginally stronger cup of tea and I like my chais and earl greys strong. I could get this with the second technique: grinding your tea leaves.
I used the small container on our hand blender, but if I was going to do this regularly, I'd get a cheap coffee grinder ($10) to only use for tea. I ground the leaves to a tea-bag leaf consistency and put 1-2 tsp in the filter and brewed a lovely cup of earl grey. I'm on the hunt for a small spice rack holder to store some pre-ground teas in and will be picking up a few more of the
reusable filter baskets to use for home-ground tea or coffee. I plan to mark the ones for tea somehow to keep from cross-contaminating the milder teas.
To cap this all off, my mother picked us up this wonderful k-cup carousel. This one is great in that it takes up a LOT less room than the round one I'd seen on Amazon. No more digging through the box looking for a blend. :-) Thanks, Mom!
