I've been a coffee addict since I was about eighteen. An alcoholic, I had to give up alcohol when I was 23. I gave up biting my fingernails when I was 25. At 27, the cigarettes went.
No way am I giving up coffee. Ever.
On the submarine, back in my Navy days, I would go through a dozen cups every day. When we ran out of coffee filters, I used paper towels that made the coffee taste like dishwater. Hey, even a bad cup of coffee is better than none. Once, in Yokosuka, unable to find a restaurant anywhere that served hot coffee, I purchased a can of iced coffee with a viscosity and sweetness like maple syrup. It was disgusting. In the grip of my addiction, I drank it and another right after.
The only coffee I won't drink is instant. I'm none too keen to try the stuff they glean from civet poop (Kopi Luwak), but I'd probably drink it if someone offered me a cup.
In support of my habit, I have owned percolators, various types of drip coffee makers, espresso machines, French presses. I've made espresso, cappuccino, ca phe sua nong, Turkish coffee, café au lait, latte, and many thousands of cups of straight black coffee. About ten years ago, I got hooked on coffee shop coffee. I had finally come to the conclusion that I just could not make a decent cup of coffee at home.
I know they have a bad name with some coffee-snobs, but Starbucks was my salvation. They're closely approaching ubiquity, and the coffee-snobs have it wrong: Starbucks produces a variety of consistently good coffees. I could get a venti red-eye (20 ounce cup of coffee with a shot of espresso) in the morning, and my java jones was pretty much satisfied for the day.
Of course, this satisfaction came with a price—literally. We were spending an average of $120 per month on coffee.
Princess V to the rescue
Princess V—in addition to being a beautiful, smart, funny, and capable sex goddess—is an habitual researcher. Rarely does a day go by that she's not on the computer or buried in a book learning how to polish her Ajax and Java code, how to properly set in a sleeve or efficiently hem a skirt, how to balance a stock portfolio or improve her credit rating, how to bake artisanal breads or construct the perfect tiramisu. So, naturally, she eventually found a cure for my Starbucks addiction. Reading through customer reviews on Amazon, she discovered single-serve coffee makers. Again and again, a principal element in praise in the reviews was the claim that "it saved me from Starbucks."
In the '90s the ultimate in coffee snobbery was the gold-plated coffee filter. It sounds like a joke, but no. Gold-plated ultra fine wine mesh provides filtration without the need for replaceable paper filters. Gold, chemically, is fairly inert. So, no oxidation, no reaction to the acids and oils in coffee. Even better, put that gold-plated filter in a French press, and you can make coffee one cup at a time—no pot of coffee sitting on a burner for a couple hours getting all stale and nasty.
Sadly, even the gold-plated filter could not solve the biggest problem with home brewing—those nasty wet grounds. Once the coffee is made, you have to deal with the grounds.
Enter the Senseo corporation. In 2001 Senseo introduced the pod-brewer, a single-serve coffee system that used pre-measured, sealed filter pods (called "pads" in some parts of Europe). Coffee in a tea-bag—sort of. The top of the pod-brewer clamshells open to receive the pod. You close it and push a button. The pod-brewer ports a single cup of hot water through the pod. When it's finished, you have just that one pod to throw away. Some of the pod-brewers have reservoirs so that you don't have to pour in water every time.
In the past few years, Cuisinart, Bunn, Grindmaster, and Melitta have all joined in the game of trying to produce the ideal pod-brewer. Krups and Lavazza have introduced pod espresso machines. Machines range in price from $30 to $300 for basic coffee and $200 to $750 for the espresso machines.
Keurig and Tassimo have gone a step further: their pods are encapsulated in plastic cups and discs, respectively, sealed with a foil top. The clamshell tops of the Keurig and Tassimo contain sharp nozzles that puncture the K-Cup or T-Disc. The top nozzle punctures the foil and the filter. The bottom nozzle punctures only the cup. No mess, no grounds, one cup at a time, coffee in mere seconds, a vast range of fine coffees: coffee snobbery has found a place in the 21st Century. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, check out the Single-Serve Coffee Forums.
Last October, when my darling wife shared her research, I was skeptical. Then she informed me that she'd found a Keurig B40 for sale on Amazon. I was interested, but not quite ready to buy the latest coffee gimmick.
Then she informed me that she'd already purchased the thing.
"Try it for a month. If you don't like it, it will already have paid for itself. Just a month. You can do without Starbucks for just a month."
I reacted like a typical addict:
- I was shocked. How could she do such a thing to me? This is my angel, the love of my life, she's supposed to understand me. My Starbucks addiction is an essential part of my personality.
- I went into denial. She could not be doing this to me. No. I won't allow it. I don't even want to see it. Don't open the box. When it arrives, slap a return sticker on it and send it back.
- I bargained. I would cook more chicken, less of the expensive sea food, switch to a cheaper body wash, ration the olive oil more carefully. Surely I could find a hundred twenty dollars a month somewhere else in the budget. Not my Starbucks. Anything but my Starbucks.
- Did I feel guilty about being such a pathetically desperate addict? About making a fuss over ludicrously-priced beverages? For doubting my Princess's motives? Hell yes.
- Still, it did make me angry. Shit yeah. It's my money. I'm a grown man. You can't tell me where I'm going to get my coffee. I spend all that money on coffee because I choose to do so. I can stop—I simply choose not to.
- After steeping in anger for a while, I fell into depression. Why me? Why Starbucks? Oh, what's the difference? I'm doomed to a life without decent coffee. May as well take up herbal teas.
- Ultimately, I accepted that I was being a putz. I survived all those months at sea drinking sludge. A month of questionable coffee would be nothing. So, certain that the experiment would be a failure and that the Keurig would be on eBay in just over a month, I agreed to give up Starbucks for a month.
I began preparing for the month with a more thorough review of the Amazon customer reviews of Keurig single-serve coffee makers. One issue raised in almost all of the negative reviews (less than 10% of the Keurig reviews are negative) and occasionally addressed in some of the positive reviews was the strength of the coffee. The most frequent negative criticism of the Keurig is that its prepackaged, sealed pods (called K-cups) don't contain enough grounds to make actual coffee—just coffee-flavored water.
This concerned me. Like most avid coffee fans, I expect my coffee to have depth and body. Lucky for me this is a known problem. Within the past year, the various coffee purveyors producing K-cups have been producing an alternate set of varieties labelled extra-bold. The extra-bold K-cups contain 30% more coffee.
When the Keurig arrived, Princess V read the instructions and we ran through the set up procedures. Within a few minutes, we had run a couple cups of water through it and I tried my first single-serve cup of coffee. I didn't want to prejudge the coffees. It was always possible that the dissatisfied 10% of Keurig reviewers had tried a bad batch. Possibly they had used the wrong setting. The B40 has two brew-sizes—7 and 9 ounces—but the K-cups come in only one size. So, for my first cup I selected a dark roast (I don't care for medium and light roasts).
It was ghastly.
Not only was it thin and watery, it had a nasty background flavor that reminded me vaguely of the aroma of burning oysters, flavored with a subtle hint of mildew.
It's okay, I told myself, I knew this was a possibility. The sample pack includes a handful of extra-bolds. One of those has to be all right.
My second cup was an extra-bold. It was even worse than the first. True, it was stronger, but stronger and tasting of burnt rubber is not an improvement. And it still didn't have much body.
Now I panicked. What had I gotten myself into? I should have known. Porting hot water through coffee in a cup—why why why would I ever believe something like that could work. I'm screwed.
Lucky for me, the next K-Cup I tried was Van Houtte's Eclipse extra-bold: rich, dark, flavorful with winy and fruity notes. And it had body. This cup of coffee was easily a match for anything at Starbucks.
In the next two months, I tried thirty more blends. I never found any non-extra-bold varieties I could stand (Princess V found a few, but she drinks her coffee with cream and sugar). Ultimately, I found a half-dozen coffees that I like. My favorites are Coffee People's Jet Fuel and Emeril's Big Easy Extra Bold.
Once in a great while, we drop in at a Starbucks to read a paper and do the crossword puzzles. It's been a few weeks, though. Most days, I make my own coffee at home. Most work days, I drink three or four cups. On the weekends, I might drink as much as five cups in a day—the equivalent of four "tall" coffees at Starbucks. In any Austin Starbucks, with tax, four tall coffees would cost $7.49.
We buy our K-Cups through Amazon: thirty-four cents a cup (thirty-seven cents for the Emeril's). You do the math.
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