Single-Serve Coffee Makers

Exactly what Is The Future Of Single-Serve Coffee Makers?

The well-publicized commercial success of the Keurig single-serve brewer and Starbucks' efforts to obtain in on the single-serve action have developed much breathless reporting and speculation in the financial press, but we don't hear much about the quality of the coffees the different battling single-serve systems are putting out, or their conveniences (or pitfalls) for the coffee-engaged consumer. For this month's post we tested 5 strong single-serve systems and their coffees. We provide in-depth testimonials of three coffees connected with each system: the greatest ranked, the lowest rated, and one with a middling rating. We checked the Keurig system and its K-Cups, the Bunn My Café© and its paper pods, the Senseo and its paper pods, the espresso-oriented Nespresso system, and the complex, multi-beverage Tassimo and its hi-tech T Discs. Learn More - Free CoffeeMaker Guide

What can a customer who drinks brewed (i.e. non-espresso) coffee expect from these machines and their matching little capsules, pods and disks?

1. Clear ease - All devices we attempted worked well right from the box and produced coffee from their particular little thingies with minimum fuss, no mess and reasonably quick warm-up at start-up.

2. Limitations in coffee selection - No matter whose device you purchase, the capsules or pods that fit it will certainly not bring you the widest range of coffee designs and coffee origins, nor will certainly they bring you the world's best coffees, which just do not show up in capsules and pods. On the other hand, and in different methods, both the Keurig and the Nespresso programs provide outstanding coffee variety and quality.

You additionally could use your own coffees in the Keurig, Bunn and Senseo by buying multiple-use filter capsules or (in the instance of the Bunn and Senseo) by making your very own paper pods utilizing a sheath maker. Either method you will need a regular grind, something just got with a good burr grinder, not a blade-grinding machine. And whether it is worth the fuss (considerable) or whether you would be much better off simply taking the exact same coffee and brewing it in a single-cup manual pour-over is something that only you, the time-pressed coffee fan, could choose.

3. Short servings - We found we had to stop the extraction at about 4 to 6 ounces with all of the checked equipments to optimize flavor and taste. You could produce a satisfactory cup at eight or so ounces with some devices and some capsules, however taller than that and you most likely will locate yourself consuming a thin, listless beverage. The exception is the Senseo, which includes an adaptor that permits you to brew a taller cup using two pods stacked atop one an additional.

4. Additional cost for coffee - The little atmosphere-protected pods or capsules connected with these gadgets include anywhere from a little extra (state around 25 %) to a whole lot much more (as much as 200 %) to the expense of an equivalent whole-bean coffee.

Contrasting the Equipments

Taking these systems one at a time, what can a customer anticipate from each?

Keurig: The Group Gorilla; Choice, Quality

The Keurig produces a style of coffee probably better in sensory terms to timeless American filter coffee than anything produced by the competing systems, which use differing intensities of pressure removal.

Offered Keurig is owned by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and Green Mountain most likely roasts and offers a higher variety of coffees than any roasting specialist in the world, it should be no shock that K-Cups give the single-serve customer without a doubt the biggest selection of quality coffee choices offered in any sort of single-serve format. This is not to even mention K-Cups from the smaller specialty roasting business Green Mountain owns or certifies, plus new K-Cup brand names introduced by Green Mountain, and coming soon, yes, trumpets, Starbucks coffees in K-Cups.

Keurig B155 Commercial Brewing System with Bonus K-Cup Portion Trial Pack

And the quality of this large choice is outstanding; our evaluations of K-Cups did not top 90 due to the fact that, frankly, the Keurig, like many single-serve systems, does not appear to remove a full variety of aromatics, but of the twelve K-Cup offerings we checked for this month's review, two impressed at 89, and in both cases when we experimented by eviscerating the K-Cups and preparing and tasting the contents utilizing standard cupping procedure, both topped 90.

Single-Serve Coffee Makers

Keurig Scores: Twelve K-Cup coffees checked: High 89, reduced 84, and typical 87.

Bunn: An Open Door with Couple of Takers

Bunn is unusual worldwide of single-serve coffee since it does not supply a Bunn-branded coffee to match its makers. It provides a line of well-engineered single-serve brewers using universal paper pods that do not need licensing and are branded under the names of the roasting companies that produce them. Regrettably, few roasting specialists have stepped up to benefit from this invitation, and having actually tasted our method with eleven Bunn-compatible pods it is tough not to reach the conclusion that those experts that have actually joined are not attempting very hard. Five of the eleven coffees we tested shown outright taste problems that drove their ratings under 80. On the other hand, the Baronet Colombia examined here at 88 was traditional and exceptional, recommending that there is certainly no barrier to a roasting expert producing distinguished pod-format coffees for the My Café©. (Pods produced by Douwe Egberts for the Senseo system also could be used on the Bunn My Café©, by the way, and vice-versa, though based on our ratings the Senseo-brand pods offer no appreciable improvement in ordinary quality over the roaster-branded pods we checked on the Bunn.)

Bunn Ratings: Eleven Bunn-compatible roaster-branded coffees tested on the Bunn platform: High 88, low 72, and normal 80.

Nespresso: Quality in European Short Black Coffee

The Nespresso system, evidently as impressive a success in parts of Europe as Keurig is in the States, was created originally for Swiss taste in coffee, where servings are small, from the ristretto, a small pool of espresso at the bottom of a demitasse, to the "lungo" or long black coffee, about 4 ounces of black coffee brewed using the espresso system. (Offered the taste for mammoth beverages in the USA, "shorto" might be a better term.) I have endured numerous a bad lungo during my work and travels in the Europe: rough, silty and bitter, basically badly over extracted espresso. But the Nespresso system, with its cautious blend design and capsules that appear to filter the coffee through a hardly punctured rubbery membrane, produces a rather pleasurable 4-ounce lungo that should please American brewed coffee drinkers who can easily get over the idea that they are being asked to please themselves with a simple four ounces of coffee at a pop. An override allows you to brew a cup much longer than 4 ounces with the same capsule, however having actually tried it, well, me, I would not do it; I 'd brew yet another four ounces.

One could say that the Nespresso approach to offering coffee variety and quality is the opposite of the Keurig/Green Mountain method. Instead of supplying as large a variety of coffee option as feasible along the lines of the Keurig program, Nespresso utilizes a less-is-more technique by narrowing the possibility to sixteen remarkably well-designed blends or "Grands Crus" that effort to represent a sort of wide-ranging however securely modified performance of the world of coffee sensory possibility. Only 4 are especially designed for "lungo" manufacturing, including one decaf. But the 3 caffeinated lungos are pleasing and distinctive, from the richly bright, fruit - and floral-toned 89-rated Finezzo to the heavier, lower-toned Fortissio (85), with its chocolaty, mildly fermented fruit notes. Those interested in sampling an uncommon all-India blend that appears to make skilled use of wet-processed India Robusta might find the Indriya (87) of interest.

Nespresso Ratings: 6 Nespresso capsules tested: High 89, reasonable 85, and ordinary 87.

Senseo: Inexpensive, Straightforward, And Flavor-Compromised

Senseo supplies the least costly line of single-serve brewers offered, and the Senseo pods on a normal make up the least-expensive line of single-serve coffees. The brewer produces exactly what appears to be a suitable removal from appropriate paper pods, but the unit we tested produced significantly off-tasting brewing water (chemical tasting and astringent) that consistently depressed the quality of the finished refreshments.

Senseo-brand pods provide a limited though attentively circulated assortment of blends. Quality of these blends was decent but not impressive, located in quality and character well above canned grocery store coffees but no better than a lot of grocery store whole-bean bin providings. Bunn-compatible pods can also be utilized in Senseo brewers.

Senseo Scores: Seven Senseo-brand coffee pods checked: High 85, reduced 76, normal 81.

Tassimo: Versatile, Technologically Advanced, And Coffee-Compromised

The Tassimo system, with its Bosch-manufactured brewing gadget and matching proprietary T Discs, aims at supplying a convenience-first single-serving solution for a variety of beverages, featuring filter-style coffee, tea, espresso-based refreshments and hot chocolate. The Tassimo T Discs integrate a bar code that instructs the brewing gadget how to prepare the specific refreshment integrated in the Disc, though the instructions could be overridden manually. Utilized singly or in mix these Discs can produce an impressive selection of beverages. Sadly, the coffee drinks we sampled were compromised in different means. The espresso was not nearly as outstanding in quality as the espresso produced by the Nespresso system, and (with the exception of the Starbucks co-branded T Discs) the European - and American-style black coffees struck us as inferior to their Nespresso and Keurig counterparts.

The only bright spot was the Starbucks T Disc blends (ranked 85 to 87) which pack almost 15 grams of ground coffee in a mammoth Disc, and if brewed at six to eight ounces per serving produce a convincing rendering of an excellent, freshly brewed Starbucks café© coffee. Since Starbucks has actually parted ways with Kraft, Kraft has revealed plans to replace the existing three Starbucks T Discs with 3 Gevalia "X-tra bold" coffees presumably designed to provide consumers with a similar coffee experience.

Tassimo Ratings: Ten Tassimo coffee T Discs tested: High 87, reasonable 79, and normal 84.

I expect that this entire workout was rendered a bit out-of-date the moment Starbucks determined to join forces with Green Mountain behind the K-Cup format. It would be good to picture some consortium of high-end roasters getting behind the Bunn paper shell option and doing the coffee part of that program right, however that seems unlikely, as does Peet's handling to promote some choice to K-Cups. Unless Nestlé© foments an extremely unlikely success with its up until now rather under-coffee-ed and badly distributed Dolce Gusto system, it appears like a coffee future where consumers with adequate time for quality continue to brew their coffees in traditional methods while the no-time-now set brews their drip-style coffee from K-Cups and their espresso from Nespresso or contending capsules. Not a bad outcome, I expect, offered the quality of these two programs. At least quality prevailed in single-serve, unlike Starbucks' apparent triumph with VIA instant coffee, a success that just could be attributable to a combination of shrewd marketing and mass sensory hallucination.

Keurig Coffee Maker

Single-Serve Coffee Makers