I read a blog post today on Keurig brewers and brewing, a piece self-described by the author as an “epically long post”. As I read, I found myself generally agreeing with most of the major points: bad for the environment, lousy coffee by Gold Cup standards, and certainly not less expensive than brewing a great cup from beans (I didn’t necessarily agree with views on GMCR, the Keurig company, as I’ll explain toward the end).
But as I read this admittedly feel-good rant (don’t you just love it when people say the things you already think?), I realized it was actually rather shallow and the author was missing the real point: the shift to Keurig is going to fundamentally alter the specialty coffee landscape for the worse. Allow me to explain, in my own epic rant.
When my grandparents were young, in the 1930’s and 40’s, they made coffee with a vacuum pot. I remember them in my grandfather’s restaurant (he was still old school by the time I was a kid). I still use a pot like theirs at my Mom’s house. My parents made coffee with a percolator when they were young in the 60’s. They even had a super-hip electric version in avocado green. The really cool kids back then used a Chemex in the 70’s, and the truly worldly crowd had a French press – I still remember the first time I saw a press pot around 1982, in the home of a (relatively) wealthy family. Since the mid 80’s and until recently, electric drip brewers were the way my generation rolled. But I’m pretty sure my kids’ generation, who are young teenagers now, will view single-cup brewers as the new normal. Except to them it’s not new, it’s just the way things have always been, like ubiquitous broadband internet and a thousand channels of nothing to watch on HDTV.
So what? It’s just the beginning of the latest multi-decade trend in brewing hardware. That’s the way it’s always been, isn’t it?
Yeah, except this time it’s different. The vacuum pot, the percolator, the Chemex, the French press, even the Joe DiMaggio-pimped Mr. Coffee drip had one common thread running through them: they didn’t give a shit whose coffee you used.
Keurig and their ilk, e.g., Nespresso, are a new breed entirely. Because with them, it’s not about the brewer at all. It’s about the coffee. In the MBA parlance they taught me at the Fuqua School of Business, this is the “razor-razor blade model”. There’s a new sheriff in town, and the guys who make the blades for the old straight razor are about to be gunned down in the streets. And I’m one of them.
This fight isn’t about Keurig, per se. Sure, they’re the most visible actor in the US right now, with something like 80% of the single cup market, and 6% of the home brew market, total. But this, too, shall pass. I’m no patent lawyer, but I’ve worked with enough of them to know a little about the subject. The core intellectual property around Keurig appears to me to be US patent 6,607,762 from 2001. There’s potentially a parent family that pre-dates it in the late 90’s, and a few children in the mid-2000’s. So Keurig’s built a picket fence around the space, as the IP people like to say. Their lawyers will fight like the dogs they are to protect the government-granted monopoly Keurig now enjoys. But sometime toward the end of this decade, the barbarians will be at the gates of the Green Mountain empire. Some big swinging dick like Procter & Gamble will be brazen enough to scale the wall, they will avoid the hot oil poured from above, and they will successfully breach the fortress. And when that happens, God help us, the market will be flooded with 25-cent K-Cup knock-offs, and free brewers when you sign up for supermarket rewards card.
“Wow, that’s great!”, you say. Cheap K-cups for all! That’s the American Way, after all, isn’t it? Um, yeah. Not always, but for the last 50 years or so, it actually has been, and it shows no sign of turning around anytime soon. So along with giant boxes of Twinkies and 5-gallon buckets of Gatorade, you’ll be able to buy junior skid-loads of shitty K-cups that are almost free at your favorite warehouse club. Hell, they’ll probably package a quasi-disposable brewer free with the largest box of cups, and you’ll get a new one every time Martha Stewart Living decides that the color of your last one is so last year.
Still not seeing the downside, are you? Because while you know in your heart-of-hearts it’s a substandard product in every respect, it’s just so damned easy. And cheap, at that point, too. And it’s not like you’re gonna use it every day. Because on weekends, you’re gonna make yourself some Weekend Coffee. You’re gonna pick up a few French pastries, or maybe some bagels and a shmear, and the Sunday New York Times. Not every weekend, mind you, because you’re much too busy for that noise. But maybe every other weekend. Or every third weekend. And you’re gonna buy some beans from a guy like me, and grind them with love, and brew them carefully, then savor their (and your) brilliance. ‘Cause it’s a WEEKEND.
Just one problem. I’m not going to be there for you. Neither are my other friends who do what I do. Because, unfortunately, just like a restaurant that’s busy on weekends can’t make it without at least a couple strong weeknights, we can’t make a living selling you Weekend Coffee three times a year. The guys who are left standing at that point will be the ones who sold their souls in exchange for a license to make cups for the flavor-of-the-month single-cup brewer manufacturer, because the brewer guys will have access to distribution channels, and they will have secured incredibly narrow, incredibly clever design patents on the square peg in a round hole format that’s popular in the first half of 2021. And if you try to scale their wall, they’ll carpet-bomb your ass with lawyer letters telling you to pay a royalty, or cease-and-desist, RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
So, as America accelerates its brand-conscious journey to become the United States of Mediocrity, guys like me will start to go out of business. At first, it will just be a few, and no alarms will sound. We were the weak ones, after all, we deserved it. And with fewer of us out there, great coffee will be even harder to get, and more expensive. So you’ll buy less of it, less often. Next thing you know, you’ll be making your Weekend Coffee with stale beans that you bought from the Last Guy Standing three months earlier, which is something he concocted with whatever mainstream green coffee is still being imported. And you’ll begin to think, “Wow, this formerly great coffee really isn’t any better than my K-Cups. Weekend Coffee isn’t what it used to be. Why bother? Hey, let’s go to the mall, I have a coupon for a free Trenta!”. And with that, our descent to mediocrity will be complete.
All this will happen because, as we statisticians like say, we’re experiencing a great regression toward the mean. We’re being homogenized. Standardized. Fredrick Winslow Taylor‘s Efficiency Movement is alive and well, and it’s going to bring Specialty Coffee to its knees.
Do you think that vision is crazy? Let’s see. How easy is it to buy a Walla Walla onion? Never heard of it? I’m not surprised. I grew up with them, but they’re already a thing of the past. Hundreds of vegetable varieties have already gone extinct, solely due to our desire to homogenize, to have crops that ship well, regardless of how they taste. Only 5% of US apple varieties that existed just 200 years ago still exist today. Ninety percent of vegetable varieties have gone extinct over the last 100 years in the UK. The crimson flowered broad bean, the Champion of England Pea, the Bath Cos Lettuce, and the Rowsham Park Hero Onion are just a few examples of vegetables that are lost forever. Hundreds of heirloom vegetable varieties are on the brink of extinction. And there are all kinds of other foods that are falling victim to this same phenomenon. Try to buy a really great charcuterie today – Boar’s Head is as close as you’ll get in most places. A beautiful creme fraiche? How about Yoplait? Great cheeses? We got your Kraft, RIGHT HERE. Don’t believe me? Go check out Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. Oh, what’s that, you would like to have a nice meal at a cute bistro? Sorry, all that’s available now are chain stores like Panera, TGI Friday’s or Appleby’s. But you can probably score some Jack Daniels chicken wings, or some other ill-advised mess. I can sum it all up in one word: Monsanto.
No, sadly, I see Specialty coffee on the same path. Those of us closest to it wear the biggest blinders. Because we love the bean, and our customers love it, too, and the the micro-trends in specialty seem somehow favorable at this moment, so we are tempted to believe that everyone thinks like us, and that things are moving in the right direction. Make no mistake, things are not moving in the right direction.
Because while we delude ourselves, great coffee supplies are shrinking. More of the best coffees are avoiding the United States entirely. Farmers are giving up on things like organic because it just doesn’t make them whole. And while I don’t pretend there won’t always be some people at the pinnacle of the craft (as there is in every craft), my concern is that those people will become very rare, and that hardly anybody will have access to them. And the mainstream consumer will be left to their mediocre K-cups, as they so richly deserve.
Because after all, they’re cheap and easy. And good enough, right?
So is it hopeless? Well, I’m not optimistic, obviously. But what I think is a red herring is the fourth point the original blog article tried to make: that, somehow, Keurig is at fault because they are morally bankrupt, because they used to be crunchy granola and now they’re like the evil empire. A concept they they teach in medical school (and taught to me by one of my physician friends) comes to mind: true, true, irrelevant. When looking at a case, they teach developing physicians to disregard things that, while true and seemingly pertinent at first glance, are irrelevant to the case at hand. So it is with Keurig. It’s not Keurig’s fault that they answer to their shareholders – that’s the way business is structured. It’s not their fault that consumers are dying to buy huge quantities of convenient, mediocre shit. It’s our fault.
We have met the enemy, and they are us.
Holy buckets, you hit this one out of the park. I’ve mainly tried to encourage people, if they must use a single-cup brewer to at least use a Keurig and use their own coffee because I felt GMCR had better environmental cred than, say, Nestle or Kraft who also are in the single-cup game. Now that you can get ridiculously crappy mystery-coffee Folgers in a K-Cup, I’m completely discouraged.
I focus mostly on environmental issues, and hadn’t looked into patent expiration and the long-term future. Thanks for doing it. This is a perspective that really needs airing and discussion.
FWIW, Keurig’s CFO, John Heller, is also a Fuqua grad. Personally, Worked with him at a startup a decade ago. Not an evil guy.
K-cups are a symptom. Hell, even Monsanto is a symptom, although I’d love to see those bastards wiped off the planet. The problem is greed. Both on the consumer part and on our politicians who profit from misguided and corrupt government food policies.
Hi Rich
I agree with you completely. I was not in agreement with the original article’s take on Keurig. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, and I’m sure their management team is populated with stand-up people. The problem is greed. And since politicians have been the same since the dawn of time, our only hope is consumer education. But there are just so many more things to buy these days – half of our household discretionary income (at least) is spent on things that didn’t even exist when my parents were my age.
jim
IMHO its not just simply greed. It is too easy a target to bash. Guld oil spill? Greed. Monsanto? Greed. Coffee? Greed. So simple – and this is most likely why it is wrong. The world is not that simple.
Your first problem is Intellectual Property. Such lawsuits you mentioned should not be possible in the first place and they would not be possible they would solve your problems at once.
Then your problem is rationalism: it is the general drive that everything must be measurable and exact and thus “scientific”, and of course the most measurable thing is price. The second most measurable thing is time, as in time to make a cuppa. Taste is less measurable.
McDonalds and suchlike are based on such rationalism: you can fill your belly for X amount of money in Y amount of time, and this is possible because their internal processes are extremely rationalized.
Then the third problem is the lack of pride in business. Basically a decent person is in business not only to make money, but also to make products he can be proud of. OK this is about greed, but more about what else should drive business, other than greed? Well it should be pride.
You have pride, Keurig has less, and P&G has none at all. Why? Because they are a big bureaucratic organization, not a family business. They are not a personal business, thus cannot have personal values.
As Keurig moves toward Dunkin and Folger’s, this grim future is accelerating.
http://environmentalgeography.blogspot.com/search?q=dunkin
I know the frustration of the shitty aspects of life. But it’s poisonous to attack individuals as if they made this world rather than having been given it. (BTW, the attack on mediocrity that overshot past coffee makers into personal attack went over slightly worse than a lead balloon.) I don’t think you can tackle this problem by the route of “more education for consumers so each one will pick the [long-term] wise choices.” Humans probably have enough intelligence (IQ points) to handle the learning, in theory, but there’s a bigger endemic human cognitive defect that is actually more of a roadblock. It is a constraint rather than a problem, meaning that we can’t fix it so we’re going to have to engineer socioeconomic systems that compensate for it and bypass it. Most humans are wired to subconsciously start from a COI and work backwards using specious, selective, rationalized “logic” to support that COI. It’s what puts the dog (wolf actually) in a lawyer. In other words, although the human genome has sufficient cleverness genes, it has insufficient empathy genes, leaving only a minority of individuals with nonretarded empathy. So unfortunately, no amount of IQ points and training/education will ever get a majority of humans who are acting individually as market players to make wise choices for the long-term interest of the overall group. The responsibility for social balance is too diffuse for an empathy-retarded individual to stick to the individual-choice-making wisdom without veering off into the short-term self-interest. A corollary effect of that is our current socioeconomic systems having large winner-loser imbalances, by which it ends up that many humans are also too poor to do anything but try to maximize short- or medium-term self-interest. So now that there are too many humans on the planet for the externalities of individuals’ selfish choices to flow anywhere that doesn’t choke someone else, like sewage backed up and seeping into the water supply, it seems to me that humans would have to redefine their standard working definition of what a corporation is supposed to be. Right now and for the past several centuries, we’ve had them set up as completely sociopathic entities of the cutthroat criminal mindset. If you create a bunch of evil monsters and pit them against each other in pure social darwinian fashion (laissez faire), it’s not a surprise that the results are unpleasant. Right now those stand-up guys who are the little pilots inside the evil monster robots’ heads are *legally barred* from making any choices except for what will cut the most throats. That’s the only definition of “maximizing shareholder value” that humans have managed to engineer so far. It’s defective and inadequate, and has had its run of comfortable externalization that doesn’t boomerang and choke it. Just as the shittiness of our current overall situation is not the personal fault of the stand-up Fuqua people, it is even less the personal fault of the speech therapist who happens to like her coffee machine. Hating the “people of Walmart” [customers, not execs] will not solve the problem and will only poison the well. We have to modify the rules of what corporations are, such that they begin producing antiexternalities, like we might modify the genome of a bacterium species such that it produces antibodies or medicine or biodiesel or whatever the hell.
Thank you sir, may I have another?
My point was not about Keurig or Keurig coffee. It was about hypocrisy. If people want mediocre products, fine, that’s up to them. And even if they want to have it both ways, i.e., convenience products sometimes, scratch products another, that’s fine too. What’s not fine is to feign surprise when your options disappear because they weren’t important enough to you to support. I get my hair cut by the same guy every month. Sometimes it’s not convenient. Sometimes I’d rather have it done at a mall or an airport. But I want my guy to be there. So I don’t go to the mall or airport for haircuts. My choice. But if I went to the mall sometimes, it would be disingenuous of me to be shocked when my guy goes away.
As for reinventing the corporation, that’s a conversation for another time. We have different views on the subject.
I can’t change everything, I know that. I can only change the things in my sphere of control, like my own purchasing behavior. And I can shine a light on others to encourage them to think about theirs. Which is what I do here.
I do agree that getting people to be aware and make good choices is necessary. For example, after years of consumer education and cultural awareness, many people are trying to make greener choices than they used to, which nudges corporations to improve their green quotient (or at least greenwash). I just think we also need to tackle the corporate responsibility differently at the same time, too, because if we don’t, the world will continue to have a steep sucking quotient. Possibly things like forcing a Keurig to make some breathing room for small coffee suppliers to contribute to the stream of consumables that go into their machines. Antitrust type regulation, or taxing the 800-pound gorillas of the corporate world enough to make space for other life. I know regulation and taxation are medicines with nasty side effects, but I think our patient (the world of humans) may need some medicine nevertheless. Better to live comfortably while guarding vigilantly against polypharmacy than live in sharp pain from untreated disease! Oh well, back to work …
I would simply observe that related to the question at hand, Keurig currently enjoys a government-granted monopoly. It’s called a patent, and its express purpose is to allow the inventor to exclude others from practicing their invention for a finite period of time (17 or 20 years, depending on some nuances), in exchange for teaching, which is the objective of the process. As a roaster, I am able today to make K-Cups by securing a license from Keurig (in exchange for a $0.06 per K-Cup royalty), and invest in a K-Cup packaging machine (not sure what that would cost, but a quarter million might be a good guess). I happen to think this is a fair and equitable arrangement, albeit one in which I’m not interested. We in the US have a good and robust patent system and body of law that is the envy of the world. I don’t suggest for a minute it needs to be fundamentally changed, as it provides the economic incentive for innovation.
You won’t ever get me to choose government intervention (in the form of taxation or any other action) over individual freedom and responsibility, especially when it comes to questions of consumer choice. The only way to tackle corporate responsibility is via shareholder and consumer activism. Not regulation. All of the recent corporate malfeasance was already either illegal or ill-advised. The mistake we’ve made in dealing with it, in my opinion, is not letting the whole thing burn to the ground. So instead, it continues to smolder. No, I think government intervention is almost always a mistake. What we need is transparency, not bureaucracy. And we do have regulations around transparency, we also have lazy shareholders and lazy consumers who don’t make it a priority to learn what’s already available to them.
Your former Doylestown neighbor, Margaret Mead, said famously, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” That most people seem to have no interest in changing things the way I’d like them is sad only for me, and for others like me. But we must try.
quarter million dollars? try 18.5 million for the components plus air, N2 and electric services to support it. over all each machine comes in at just under 25 million installed and running
Wow. And I thought I knew about equipment prices. I was way off on that one.
True, but it’s not sustainable as a basis for feeling superior to others. None of us can be omniscient, so someone else can always find something that we ought to be doing better or learning more about. If everyone takes that as license to disdain everyone but their own particular informed ingroup, then the world will still suck, because it’ll be filled with tribes hating each other and constantly warring. To my mind there’s something about it that relies on externalization to find sustainability. Like “75% of the world can go to hell as long as the other 25% sees things my way, and we’ll live well according to our definition of living well.” But to work for all of us humans, that plan relies on a resource that I see as not available in our closed system. In an extensively networked world, if 75% of the world goes to hell, then the hell is going to encroach upon the other 25% like metastasis. Thus I think the furthest that the “make your own difference” theme can be constructively taken is respectful teaching with patient forbearance for those who don’t follow along very much, with some ground-rules protection in place in the meantime to keep the most ruthless from being the only winners. It’s the only way that 6 billion preachers can all preach at each other without becoming bitter and tending toward mutual assured destruction. This is a puzzlement because the same concept, “live and let die,” seems to simultaneously contain both the problem (the 75% threatens to ruin quality of life [QoL] for the 25%) and the solution (countless 25% permutations must not make war on their various 75% counterparts, because the overall net result is MAD for everyone=shitty QoL for all). If it turns into a scorched-earth crusade, then its victories can only be pyrrhic, yielding a world where happy living is not available to anyone anyway. Thus people like MLK Jr are probably onto something useful with their nonviolent resistance theme, even though unilateral disarming is not a theme that can be hastily pursued without counterbalancing forces (because the guy who’s still armed will just trample you). This all sounds too abstract to be relevant to a specific concrete discussion, but I believe it’s very much relevant to particular instances, because those instances are usually about “how to make QoL in this world not suck,” and none of the solutions is sustainable without exploring these conundrums.
Wow. If I thought the original article that started this discussion was too shallow, certainly we’ve taken it to the other extreme.
At this point I circle back to the original points:
1. We’re all free (or should be) to make the choices that make us happy, provided those choices don’t infringe the freedom of others;
2. Small businesses very often operate on the edge of viability. If you want them to continue to be there, you need to patronize them, even when it’s inconvenient. If the choice that makes you happy is availing yourself of products and services from small business, then be consistent about it;
3. I have no desire, personally, to convert anyone to a particular viewpoint. My goal is to shine a light on hypocrisy, and make people aware of the consequences of their consumer choices. You are welcome to see the consequences, and ignore then, just don’t feign surprise, as in “How could this happen? Those evils corporations are behind it all.” Because it’s not true, WE are behind it all;
4. I recognize that I act in my own self-interest, as we all do, usually. I’m OK with that. In fact, the mass demand for mediocrity actually serves me well, as it inhibits the demand for the things I prefer, thus assuring adequate supply for me. My goal is to keep the demand for my preferred options high enough to assure a convenient and competitive supply, a delicate balance. Which is what I’m afraid of losing should Keurig and their spawn ever achieve 50% or more US market penetration.
Almost done blabbing. Must say that I agree with the non-hypocrisy part. Don’t decry the decline of any craft that you didn’t try to support while it was still viable. At least admit that it didn’t make your triage list of things to support. I totally agree with that, and that’s why I’m often suspicious of nostalgia.
But with ground rules that prevent “ruthlessness-reigns-supreme,” maybe not everything has to die for lack of arduous support. Hard to balance this against mere propping up failure, but we may have to have a grain of spice if not more.
The “ground rules” to which you refer are less codified than you imply. In actuality, they are crowd-sourced, transient norms. Keurig, for example, is not ruthless in the sense that their objective is to crush others, namely our business. They would be perfectly happy if there were a bifurcation in the marketplace such that their product was desired, and so was mine (sure, they would market their value proposition in hopes of swaying some consumers’ opinions, but that’s hardly ruthless). Their objective is to serve the crowd-sourced desires of their shareholders by providing the crowd-sourced desires of the marketplace. And in both cases, ultimately, it is all of us who make up the crowd.
Propping up failure usually serves me well, but I am against it nonetheless. I’m an advocate of free markets and informed consumers. An idealistic position, perhaps, but one to which I’m committed.
This may be an over simplification of the issue; however, isn’t there an opportunity in all of this as well? If Keurig has successfully responded to fulfilling a need–decent coffee that’s convenient to make for a one mug serving, then where are all those engineers who could make something similar to a “grind and brew” drip coffee maker that would grid the beans and make an 8 to 16 oz serving of coffee?
In other words, the end is at hand only if someone else fails to come up with another coffee maker that would fulfill the convenience factor and prove k-cup coffee is mediocre. I’ve had k-cup coffee and found it lacking in numerous respects, but for most people it might be 1) better than the drip coffee they’re making, and 2) provides a flexible platform for coffee or tea. Am I to believe that a similar creative response to the much better taste of fresh whole beans is only for those of us willing to take the time and trouble to grind our own beans and use a cone or other method to brew coffee? It might be so, but I’m not entirely convinced.
“Am I to believe that a similar creative response to the much better taste of fresh whole beans is only for those of us willing to take the time and trouble to grind our own beans and use a cone or other method to brew coffee?”
I think so. Fresh bread beats supermarket bread. Heritage breed animals beat industrial meat. Homemade ice cream beats Breyers. Slow food is where it’s at. That people accept convenience over taste is, in my opinion, unfortunate but a fact of life. Sometime you can’t have your cake, and eat it, too. My only point in all this is that if you’re one of the people choosing convenience over quality, don’t lament the passing of quality. It’s disingenuous.
In my office, there is a Starbucks-branded machine that will grind and brew individual cups. You dump a bunch of beans in the top and select your size, and about one minute later you have a freshly ground and brewed cup (or carafe) of coffee.
While this machine is fairly big and expensive-looking, I can’t imagine that the technology to attach a grinder to a drip coffeemaker and program it to dispense single servings is that complicated. There will always be a market for quality – maybe not as big as the market for Folger’s, but it will still be there.
So are you saying they can never be both at once? That everything convenient is always tasteless and everything “inconvenient” is better?
While I respect your opinion, it smacks of a somewhat-elitest hipster viewpoint that all mainstream, and highly popular, inventions (or processes) are destroying our society and our small businesses.
Did MP3’s destroy the music industry? Look at that, music is still being made. Good music. Only now it’s more convenient to get it. Is internet shopping killing local boutiques? It’s more convenient so by your argument it must be. But no, MORE boutiques exist now thanks to the internet because people can work from their homes and not be forced to pay rent for a storefront.
Look, I’ve been a patron of cafes my whole life (while hunting for a really good cup of coffee) and I gotta say, many of those cafes had awful coffee. So it’s not right to say all “properly” brewed coffees are good, they’re not. On the other hand, some of the best coffees I had were in cafes in New Zealand, so sometimes people do get it right.
The bottom line is that I hate drip coffee machines and presses. I don’t like the taste of the coffee they produce, and I’ve tried everything from high-end beans I grind myself to purified water, etc. It just never tasted as good as those cups I had in NZ, for whatever reason. But in my town, there’s only 1 semi-good cafe and it’s up to $7 a cup (also not easy to get too). So I decided to try the Keurig. It was convenient and, what do you know, I liked the taste. I liked it so much better than the drip brewer or the press, or the old school model you mention above (I tried them all).
All this to say, you decry the Keurig as a symbol of our society turning away from quality but as far as I’m concerned *quality is relative*.
What you consider quality is not what the next person considers quality. That why restaurant or product reviews differ so much. What one person felt was the best product they’d ever tried was garbage to the next. It’s all relative and the Keurig simply appeals to some people. I highly doubt it will destroy small cafes or bring our economy under the control of mass corporations.
Sometimes I want a delicious plate of pasta that took 25 minutes to make. Other times, I crave a baconator. And know what? They both taste delicious at the time. Equally, but differently, delicious.
On a side note, I wonder if this kind of thinking doesn’t have some undertones of classism.
I just can’t help but notice that the convenient, cheap, easy to get and fast products – which are the products most working-class people have access too – are the ones being trashed. Whilst the “inconvenient”, expensive, difficult to get and slow products – typically only accessible to middle or upper-classes – are inherently better and higher quality.
Doesn’t that seem a little strange to anyone? So nothing cheap is quality? And everything fast is crap?
Again, I simply believe that quality is relative. But I just wanted to point this out.
Regarding the notion that it may be classist to complain about the Keurig, I understand the question, but the answer is readily available. Keurig costs $100-$200 or more, plenty of money to buy a grinder and French press ($50-$100 total). And coffee for the Keurig is $20-$30 per pound, which is at the high end of specialty coffee.
How about an open Keurig-like system? Open up specs so machines can be made by anyone. Allow pods for any coffee; small roasters can make their own pods with an inexpensive machine, or users can make their own pods with their own coffee; competition can continue, and those looking for quality coffee can still find it.
I lament the trend as you say, but I wouldn’t lose hope. Keep on trying to offer a better product, and there will be a market for it.
Tristan – In my opinion, the issue isn’t the inability of people to get in on the K-cup game… it can be done. The issue is people’s aceoptance of the mediocrity that is everything Keurig.
uhh, you can buy a reloading cartridge for keurig that allows you to fill it with your own coffee.
Yes, true. Still not very good. The machine itself leaves a great deal to be desired.
If you look at the Beer industry, the exact same thing happened except now we are out of the other side where homogenization is out and micro/craft is back in. Coffee will follow the same path, it will be back in fine form once the homogenization kick is over.
I’d just like to say, while I do agree with the article about the K-cups, and I’m not a huge coffee connoisseur, I have one of the Keurig brewers and I use it daily, because I live alone and only make a cup or two of coffee in the morning, but I have the separately sold filter that allows you to put in your own coffee and I buy whole bean coffee and grind it to put in that. Personally I love the convenience of the Keurig brewer and for right now it’s perfect for me.
I use my own coffee in the filter for my Keurig all the time.
While I can see why ‘connoisseurs’ of individuality are getting their panties in a bunch over the monoploising and commodification of coffee (again…), I urge you to consider the easiest way to make the only sort of coffee that counts, that is, a good strong black cup of joe.
I use a tea infuser – it’s so easy.
A couple of measures of coffee go in the infuser resting inside my morning cup of joe mug, over goes the boiling water, let it surrender for a while, lift out the infuser and enjoy…
Simple.
I grind my own coffee beans and use a reusable mesh filter for my Keurig!
Regarding the most recent posts about the refillable cartridge. I suppose there is a small upside, in that this allows for a single serving. But the fact that $200 machine can be retrofit to prepare a single cup of coffee does not make it a good investment, when a single, old-school Mellita filter will do the same thing for $3.
https://shop.melitta.com/itemdy00.asp?T1=64+007
Best post on here, by far! Thanks.
I wrote a post, somewhat inspired by you and Dear Coffee I Love you. It’s on my blog, here: http://www.jonahhorowitz.com/2011/04/aargh-keurig-k-cups-suck.html
Hi, I’m from Australia and we don’t have Keurig in Australia, though we do have Nespresso, but it’s terribly unpopular. The main type of coffee consumers use is Instant, but many people do brew their own coffee, and we have less of a problem with homogenising of coffee, because they’re are a lot of franchised coffee shops around and a lot of them do sell coffee beans, as well as individual coffee shops with their speciality coffee. The whole one cup brewing just hasn’t become popular. You can tell just by going into the nearest homewares shop, not a single one cup machine to be found but you can find espresso machines ranging from $100 to $1000 AUD.
I still buy walla walla onions every year when in season…
K-cups. Keurig. Starbucks. WTF people! Americans consume, consume, consume. We want our shit and we want it yesterday. Set your alarms for 10 minutes earlier and grind your own beans and make a good cup of coffee with respect to the people who live in poverty, who grow the coffees you demand and are so addicted to! Jesus…blah blah blah
@Angie – yup.
This is a pretty good take on the pre-packed one cup coffee market. I agree with a lot of what you said, but you are focusing on one facit of the keurig coffee maker. I have a Keurig and was reluctant to switch to it, but have grown to love the connivence of the Keurig. One thing though, you aren’t at the mercy of Keurig, you can use what ever coffee you want. I use the Solo Fill re-usable k cups, and actually save money on coffee over using my old drip pot. There are a plethora of re-suable k-cup options to choose from. I still go buy coffee from local roasters and then have the connivence of using my useable k-cups. I have 3 of them and just fill them up ahead of time, and they are ready to go.
Glad to hear you’re using the refillable options.
Why not worry about important issues. This is just plain silly. Drink a K-cup or don’t who cares?
Well, I care, for one.
People who like good coffee will continue to buy and make it. The dichotomy between it and the swill emitted by the K-cups is far too great. If nothing else, Starbucks has raised the bar for many people, and those same people view K-cups, canned Folgers or instant coffee as an abomination. Of course, there are always people for whom convenience – not quality – is the greatest consideration, but I would submit that those are the same people who would drank swill to begin with.
My press pot is the most prized element in my kitchen and was the very first thing I scattered to unearth when my wife and I recently moved into a new home. The sense of panic I experienced when I couldn’t find it, and the relief I experience when I did, is hard to convey to anyone who takes coffee seriously, but is undoubtedly familiar to most posters here.
You may be surprised at the level of apathy out there.
Starbucks has raised the bar?? Really??
My favorite coffee shop was a little place called Blue Mountian Coffee Shop. They used beans personally roasted by Miravonda delivered fresh each morning. Best Coffee ever IMHO. Starbucks and their black swill put them out of business. So there you go. What’s the argument in this case? That the move to “Quality Starbucks” (that put my favorite little coffee shop out of business) is OK. The same race to mediocrity could be made by the corporate invasion of Starbucks as Green Mountain or Keurig. Why are you so quick to assume that people like us that really like a great cup of coffee had “our bar raised” by likes of Starbucks.
One last thing. It’s what most people opining here are lacking and it’s why I use it for my name KWYDK (Know what you don’t know)
I wasn’t the one who said Starbucks raised the bar (it was @Reconsidering Digital). So I don’t assume that people who like a great cup of coffee had their bar raised by Starbucks.
Regarding your Blue Mountain Coffee Shop, you make my point perfectly. Starbucks did NOT put them out of business. Blue Mountain’s customer base went somewhere else, that’s what put them out of business. And when Blue Mountain went out of business, there was some customer who expressed shock and dismay, “How could this happen?!”, because THEY were a loyal customer. Maybe they were. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe they frequented Starbucks because it was convenient. Or less expensive. Whatever. Their patronage of Blue Mountain wasn’t what it could have been. And Blue Mountain went away. That, friends, is my point. So I agree that the race to mediocrity could be SBUX, could be GMCR, could be Applebee’s, could be Panera, could be any product or industry where mass production is patronized at the expense of artisan.
Again, the point is that CUSTOMERS make the choice of who they patronize. And I’m fine with people picking the mass production. But I’m not fine when they say they prefer the artisan option, and express dismay when it goes away, when they themselves are responsible for its demise. Period.
Wandering in from a link just today via Marco Arment’s blog — normally very tech focused, but he’s also a coffee nerd (meaning that in a good way).
As I understand it, Green Mountain bought Keurig completely a couple years ago (before they were just an investor) and started getting really aggressive in pursuing distribution deals for both brewers and new brands of K-Cups to try to get as much locked in before the patents expire as possible. The persistent rumors out here in the SF Bay Area were that Green Mountain was desperately trying to get Peet’s to make K-Cups but Peet’s was having none of it; Keurig finally got Starbucks as the marquee brand after Starbucks got into a fight with Kraft.
Anyway, I don’t think the future is as dire for specialty coffee roasters/sellers as you make it out to be, simply because I don’t think there’s a substantial overlap between people who regularly buy coffee from you and Stumptown and Blue Bottle and such, and people who would become regular Keurig users. Here’s the thing: if convenience is a major motivating factor for you, you’re not making a special trip to a coffee shop for home brewing. You may get a “higher end” brand from your supermarket’s coffee aisle — Starbucks or Jeremiah’s Pick instead of Folger’s — but going out of your way? That’s not convenient.
Keurig’s main challenge is to pod coffee brewers and more generally to all supermarket coffee, in part because Keurig’s roped in roasters that are higher-quality than Folger’s and Maxwell House. (I know that’s subjective, but I’m pretty sure I’d get a better drink from a Caribou or Diedrich K-Cup than I would from Maxwell House in your typical Black & Decker filter basket brewer.) But the people who have already made a habit of going out of their way to spend more money on whole beans from a high quality roasting company they’re grinding at home? I just don’t think most of those people are going to be buying Keurigs.
I’m glad you’re more upbeat on the topic than me. But I’ll point out that I sell into this space every day, and I’m not encouraged by what I see. Between home and office, Keurig placed about 1.5 million brewers last year.
The Walla Walla onion is far from dead. They are all over the West Coast.
I’ll have to get to the west coast, then 😉
I just think single-cup coffee is stupid, regardless of taste/cost/convenience/whatever.
There’s a countering force here, at least for the product of quality coffee itself. That force is easy international access, via online ordering. While the trend toward the mean means that the number quality purveyors will decrease, they’ll fight back by consolidating in order to have enough sales per business to survive. Helping this trend will be the fact that the international market is somewhat different than that of the U.S. There is far less centralized farming and a much deeper culture of tradition-based foods made from locally-grown product. This means that as long as someone, somewhere cares enough about quality coffee beans to keep them for sale, we’ll be able to get our hands on them.
David… I agree about the power of the internet, at least as far as coffee is concerned (easily shipped, not immediately perishable).
I agree with @chipotlecoyote. The target audience here is buyers of supermarket coffee, looking for convenience. I would never want one of these at home. We have one in the office, and frankly it’s better than the burnt swill from an average office drip setup. I’m certainly not gonna have my Vario or Mazzer on my desk at work. And I’m never gonna have a K-cup at home.
I agree 100%. Kcups are a great source of fresh satisfactory coffee at work where tastes vary, but for many they serve no real purpose at home. I dont use kcups at home and they are free!
hmmm, where did my post go
[…] Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.: Do you think that vision is crazy? Let’s see. How easy is it to buy a Walla Walla onion? Never heard of it? I’m not surprised. I grew up with them, but they’re already a thing of the past. Hundreds of vegetable varieties have already gone extinct, solely due to our desire to homogenize, to have crops that ship well, regardless of how they taste. Only 5% of US apple varieties that existed just 200 years ago still exist today. Ninety percent of vegetable varieties have gone extinct over the last 100 years in the UK. The crimson flowered broad bean, the Champion of England Pea, the Bath Cos Lettuce, and the Rowsham Park Hero Onion are just a few examples of vegetables that are lost forever. Hundreds of heirloom vegetable varieties are on the brink of extinction. And there are all kinds of other foods that are falling victim to this same phenomenon. Try to buy a really great charcuterie today – Boar’s Head is as close as you’ll get in most places. A beautiful creme fraiche? How about Yoplait? Great cheeses? We got your Kraft, RIGHT HERE. Don’t believe me? Go check out Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. Oh, what’s that, you would like to have a nice meal at a cute bistro? Sorry, all that’s available now are chain stores like Panera, TGI Friday’s or Appleby’s. But you can probably score some Jack Daniels chicken wings, or some other ill-advised mess. I can sum it all up in one word: Monsanto. […]
Great article. And few authors these days know how to hyperlink as selectively and as helpfully as you. It’s becoming a lost art of its own, for different reasons entirely!
Thanks, John!
We have a Nespresso at work, and the coffee tastes great, far better than anything that can be made by any other machine costing under $1000. Honestly, I think 90% of the taste from coffee comes from how it’s prepared, and about 10% from the beans used.
10% from the bean? If that were true, we wouldn’t have a business.
Tobias probaby represents the masses, its scary out there.. I feel like Gandalf in the LOTR, keep it hidden keep it safe. On the flip side maybe I could add 90% rice to my coffee blends and increase the profit for my roasterie the 90% I saved in bean cost.
I don’t know, I think that the people who would run out and buy the k-cup system are the same folks that are buying 3-pounds cans of Folders (people like Tobias above). I think there will always be enough real coffee lovers to support real coffee roasters.
The Keurig system was only possible because there was no other simple way to brew one cup of coffee. That is no longer true. I have invented and am in the process oif making a one cup brewer which makes a mug of coffee in 15-30 secoinds using any brand of coffee that you like. It uses a 50 micron mesh permanent stainless steel filter and brews firect into teh mug.
Ian Bersten
ian@helian.net.au
teh website does not refer to this invention yet
The patents on the K-Cup expire in September 2012. Anybody will be able to make their own k-cups after that.
That’s a gross oversimplification
How so? That’s what I understood David Einhorn, a respected hedge fund manager, to be saying.
Do you mean that GMCR will file patent suits which are unlikely to succeed in order to scare competitors away with the costs of litigation? Or what?
First, being a respected hedge fund manager doesn’t make one an intellectual property professional. It’s unlikely with a franchise this large that the patent landscape hinges entirely on a single patent with a crisp expiration. I suspect they have numerous CIPs and child patents that while not critical in and of themselves, are likely to be important. Second, intellectual property is but ONE form of barrier to entry to a market, and sometimes not the biggest one. In this case, capital intensity will be an issue for smaller roasters, as will access to distribution channels. Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you can sell it profitably.
How stupid. These are such first world problems. Waaaaah, no more gourmet coffee for the first world snobs. Meanwhile, orphans in China get a new gas stove.
Anyways, I use my own refillable k-cup, so i STILL buy beans from snobs like you. I just want to make ONE cup, is all.
And I use my french press twice a week, and my moka pot when I want coffee with dessert.
But, I’ll let you keep QQ’ing about your lost coffee art.
Spoken by a member of the “ubiquitous internet” generation. Take a chill pill, gramps.
Wow, name calling. That’s productive.
Have you ever even been to the developing world? Having spent a fair amount of time there myself, I can tell you that this debate is relevant to them, too. The rise of the K-cup will continue to put downward pressure on coffee prices, if for no other reason than the Cost of Goods (because there is so much to it) becomes increasingly a factor.
Lost arts and the regression to the mean are worth lamenting in many arenas. They have implications for real people, real jobs, real economies all over the globe.
And notice he doesn’t respond to reasoned arguments, only the people that agree with him, or are easy to shoot down.
Actually, I grew up in Ganeshpuri India, a slum, and worked in an orphanage in Longhui, China.
I’ll tell you for sure that these are first world problems, and you’re argument is classist and silly. I love my keurig, I love my french press. And guess what? Good for me. I love my keurig and bought it for 40 bucks and it’s fabulous. So convenient and I enjoy the taste. Why? Because I am not an elitist. Social activism and actually making changes in the world instead of ranting online, doesn’t leave me time to be an elitist about ANYTHING. Let alone a drink. That’s what coffee is. A drink. A good one..but it’s water and plants…just like tea (water and leaves…and god knows how I am a FREAK about my water and leaf drink). All I’m saying is, you come more off like you’re an elitist ranting about Keurigs and people who like convenience. It’s very silly to thing everything convenient is bad.
And it’s not name calling if it is what you are. I’m a a black female college student. If you told me I was such, I would have to agree with you…
Um, the name calling I referred to was “gramps”. Really, you had to go there? Insulting my age? (I’m not a grandparent by the way, not yet anyway, so it is by your definition name calling.)
Secondly, I’m not ranting about Keurig, per se. I admire GMCR and their Keurig franchise as a brilliant commercial venture. I also respect people’s right to vote however they like with their dollars, whether I think it’s swill water or elixir of the Gods matters not. I’m ranting about people who say they want high-quality, hand crafted products, say that they prefer to patronize those alternatives, then complain when those options disappear because they didn’t put their money where their mouth was; there is a difference. And I’m pointing out the long-term impact of that behavior, in hopes of alerting people who care that their daily choices actually do make a difference on many levels.
I respond to comments that resonate with me, and/or when I simply have time to respond. This thread created a ridiculous amount of commentary, not all of which I had time or cared to respond. You give me entirely too much credit for being thoughtful about where I engage in dialog. In case you’re wondering, your comment fell into the category of one to which I had time to respond; no more, no less. And yes, comments that agree with my positions are more likely to resonate with me, that’s just human nature. I run my own for-profit business and use this forum to advance that business; I make no apologies for that.
I’m glad to hear you’ve been in areas of the world other that the USA. It’s unusual here (in the USA) in my experience. But I stand by the thought that the things you trivialize (perhaps rightly) as “first world problems” have an effect on people in developing nations. I’m surprised that somebody who has spent significant time in India and China doesn’t at least tacitly acknowledge this.\
Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment.
You talk about snobbery on your bio….well, you are the embodiment of the hypocrisy you so denounce.
The anonymity of the anals of the internet that allow for such silly arguments as these…now THIS is worth lamenting.
Why dont you gear your marketing towards the K-cup crowd who uses the reusable filter? They can put whatever kind of coffee they want in there and it is more reasonable that way rather than buying .50 cent K-cups. People want whats new and hip so redesign your strategy to be the “five star coffee for your reusable k-cup” 🙂 good luck and keep roasting!
Thanks for the comment, Brandon. We do stock some refillable K-cup filters, and have, at various time, targeted marketing toward the crowd that might use them. At the end of the day, there’s just not that many of them, and it’s unsurprising. The primary value proposition of Keurig is wide variety at the ready, and a clean, convenient brew. Never have they claimed to be (nor are they) good. Nor have they ever claimed or been inexpensive (you’ll pay about $0.50 per cup, versus $0.25 to brew from scratch with some of the best beans on earth). But clean and convenient I’ve gotta hand to them.
I had marked this post months ago with Read It Later when I first read it. I agreed with your point and thought it was interesting.
I visited a Walmart in search of a thermal carafe and discovered reusable, individual K-Cup filters.
Your point is now moot. This may even give a boost to roasters where you foretold their demise before.
http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=keurig+filter+reusable&tag=googhydr-20&index=garden&hvadid=7751008065&ref=pd_sl_7cm7au7b6r_b
Thanks for stopping by, Keith.
The reusable filters aren’t very good (well, it’s the Keurig itself that’s not very good), but more importantly they change the value proposition of Keurig, so consequently they’re not used much. They don’t change my core thesis here, which is really about people who say one thing, do another, then complain when their actions have consequences. I don’t care if people prefer to use K-cups, do so with gusto, then don’t complain when independent roasters go away.
Why all this angst? Nothing’s changed. People who enjoy drinking Folgers and Maxwell House dish-water will continue doing so — they won’t buy Keurig. As for one day giving away Keurigs with coffee as mentioned above, that is almost the case now. Just as Kodak sold cameras at cost to make money on film, GMCR is selling Keurigs at cost to make money on K-packs. But the fact is that Green Mountain is good coffee: shade grown and fair-traded, which improves quality. Consumer reports rates Newman’s coffee best — Newman’s is a GMCR.brand. There is only one other roaster I would rank above GMCR (he also personally buys fair-trade, shade grown from the plantations) and fortunately his roaster is only three miles from my home (I’m not revealing where). I buy from him at about $12 a pound, grind it on my burr grinder, and brew it in a Bodum (or a brixi if I’m brewing Greek). Best coffee in town, you betcha. And that will not change regardless of innovations and chain stores. As for that creep Einhorn, he saw an opportunity when GMCR stock rose above $110. He probably had a bunch to cash in at that point; then sold short hugely and came out with his rant against GMCR in order to make make the stock tank so he could make more gazillions. That’s the routine when any stock takes off, assuming one already has a fortune to play around with.
If you think Keurig coffee is good, you’re in the wrong place – Maxwell House could out-cup a K-cup on a bad day (which isn’t saying much, of course). Consumer Reports couldn’t find their a$$ with both hands and a flashlight, it’s a publication written specifically to accelerate the regression to the mean. And why would you not want to tell people about your excellent roaster you like so much? I would have hoped you would like to help his (or her) business with a shout-out. I think you’ve missed the point of everything here.
WOW! As incredulous as this may sound I was just in the market looking to pick up an after Christmas Sale Keurig. 3 years ago I jumped on the Tassimo machine but it has be so crushed under the Keurig brand I gave up trying to find anyone local selling it. So I went back to my 2 beloved’s a Farberware perc.and my seductive French Press. I love them dearly….the flavor, the texture ( can coffee have texture) the aromas. As a small business owner myself I’m busy, and sometimes it would be so easy to drop a K-cup in and go, not to mention there is no clean up. But after reading your blog, I feel I must support my fellow smal businesses and turn away from the Keurig temptation. The simplicityof the Keurig is exactly the same as the homogonization in every industry, mine included.Thank you for your time, I couldn’t agree more, and now I see the 5 extra minutes it takes to clean my french press are worth so much more!
Wow. Thanks.
I was just browsing facebook and saw that my brother-in-law’s wife had been raving about a Keurig they received for Christmas. I was like, what the hell is a Keurig? I already suspected it was some contraption to facilitate the chute to mediocrity, as is usually the case with anything that gets accolades from that branch of the family. A quick search led me here, where I enjoyed feeling superior about a number of things as I commiserated with you over the decline in the general public’s ability to appreciate a decently brewed cup of coffee.
Then I realized that it’s probably not actually a decline; I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that a huge portion of Americans who drink coffee don’t even actually like the taste of it. They drink it for the caffeine, or for the loads of sugar and cream they can add to it, or just because it makes them feel like grown-ups. Most of them would probably drink it whether it was freshly ground and brewed, or composted by worms and then put into a great big glass jar to steep in the style of sun tea.
I can totally appreciate your lamenting the possibility of a bleak future for “specialty” coffees, but I feel more optimistic than you in that regard. Even as things “regress toward the mean,” rediversification inevitably starts anew. There will always be the irritatingly unrefined and complacent masses, but so will there be those who cherish the old ways and a nature as unadulterated as it’s possible to have.
Thanks for commenting.
I hope you’re right. In fact, I know there will always be some who “cherish the old ways”, as you say. The question is, are there enough of them, especially in light of the number of specialty roasters in the US? As the guy who has to sell the coffee, my concern is that some day soon, there won’t be. We’re seeing it already – subscription customers who cancel and tell me they got a Keurig, quasi-regulars who drop off the face of the earth, etc.
We’ll see where it goes, I suppose.
Your blog post is so paper thin that I can’t believe I am even responding. Check out your local Kroger before ranting about some conspiracy theory with Keurig. You can get fucking Folgers or Starbucks K-cups. You’re pathetic.
Normally I don’t comment on blog posts, but after reading this on facebook, I had to. First off…I’m not even going to go into how misinformed this article is. If you did any looking at all (such as a local Kroger), you would find out that both Folgers and Starbucks offer K-Cups now in many varieties. You may wanna do a little research next time before posting a bunch of douche-bag ideas.
Wow, really surprised at all the name-calling this post has generated. Now I have “a bunch of douche-bag ideas”?
So this reply is to BOTH your comments.
First: this post is not about Keurig, per se. It’s about people who say they patronize small, artisan business, but in fact only do so when it’s convenient, and then express surprise when the businesses they like go away. The product in question could be pottery, movie theaters, pizza restaurants, or any one of dozens or hundreds of example products. The fact that this post is about a coffee maker is secondary.
Second: I don’t have “conspiracy theories” about Keurig and/or GMCR. I admire them as a company. The fact is that they have captured a significant portion of the US single-cup market, and continue to grow. They are simply selling a product to people who want to buy it. I have no problem with that, even if it meant EVERYONE wanted to buy it and I had not business as a result. The problem I have is with people who say one thing, do another, then express shock and dismay that their actions have consequences (see point one).
Third: On your point about Folgers and Starbucks K-Cups… I can only assume you bring that up in response to my assertion that Maxwell House could out-cup a K-cup. I stand behind that statement. The reason it’s true is that the user can do something not possible with a K-cup, namely, use a brewing method to better optimize the extraction. No matter who puts the coffee in the K-cup, it is subject to a sub-standard brewing process.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland specifically, and I can proudly say that it is hard to not “shop local” here. It is also very hard to get a mediocre cup of coffee. If you haven’t been out here to explore the fertile coffee shops, you should come. I think you may enjoy it.
So, I support everything you are saying, and I support and love local businesses owned by real people with real estate in the town I live in. It’s important, I can’t express that enough. However… the Keurig.
My parents gave us one for Christmas. Other than the awful non biodegradable K-cups, and the chemical-leaching plastic that the water container is made of, I really want to like this machine. My parents love it, they are so excited they got us one since we are “coffee lovers.” So, we moved our beautifully simple, compact, glassware french press to a shelf and have been trying to coerce a good cup of coffee from Keurig. We have the little “My K-Cup” thing that is basically a compact filter basket that fits where the K-cups go. Are you familiar with this?
But I feel like I have been slaying lambs every time I grind some fresh beans from the roaster down the street and subject it to the hissing of this machine. I get this pool of wretched brown/grey water. Those poor beans, those poor people who worked to get these beans to my kitchen!
So, I am still wholeheartedly supporting my local coffee roaster, but is there anyway to get a good cup of coffee from the Keurig using my own beans and burr grinder????
Thanks for your comments. I always enjoy getting to the Bay Area; my favorite coffee there is Blue Bottle.
I took the same approach to Keurig you did, initially: try to figure out how to get a passable cup using my own coffee and refillable filters. I bought the top of the line Keurig brewer, and every filter on the market. Unfortunately, the machine just doesn’t make a very good cup. My best results were obtained with the “My K-Cup” reusable filter, filled with 12 grams of finely ground coffee, and the machine set to the smallest brew size (which in my opinion is still quite large at like 6 ounces). The heavens won’t open and the angels won’t sing for that coffee, however.
Thank you very much for the response! I just tried it with 12 grams, and packed it in (blue bottle – it is the roaster up the street!), and it was passable! A morning breakfast coffee if you will. Nothing to share with a biscotti, mind you. But at least I am not having a severe guilt complex now. 🙂
So with that brings hope that specialty, artisan coffees may have a chance with this new brew system. Out here, shopping local, health/environment and good coffee are strong values (yes, values) that I don’t think convenience could mar. I am not sure why you can’t get an exquisite, strong brew from the Keurig, but perhaps that can be designed. Maybe they will sell it in the new hip color and label it Artisan and charge an extra hundred bucks for it. The accessories for good taste never come cheap.
I also think once people experience the joys of knowing where and from whom their products are from, it is hard to go back to trusting ubiquitous brand names. Once you build any sort of relationship with a local business, or farmer’s market, it doesn’t work to go back to Safeway. So, what needs to happen to make this change permanent and as ubiquitous as Starbucks (and save local coffee roasters, or other entrepreneurial businesses), is to keep going. People are smart, once they are privy to the positive experience of community, they won’t go back.
Next time I am in NC (my parents are retiring there) I will be sure to stop by! It is very refreshing to read your thoughtful and insightful posts about such important topics, so I thank you for that too.
Please do stop in when your in the ‘hood!
Regarding the use of high quality coffee with Keurig… I appreciate your sentiments, but I cannot for the life of me understand WHY anyone would want to do this, as it defeats the value proposition of the Keurig. A Hario V60 pour-over will rock your world for less than $25, and it’s actually easier, more convenient and cleaner than using your own coffee in a refillable K-Cup.
You forget about one thing–the “My K-Cup”. I grind my own beans, put them in an air-tight glass jar, and scoop them into that little gem and have one awesome cup of coffee each morning. Then it’s on to work and the mediocre stuff. I have a Platinum Keurig and have adjusted the settings to my tastes. It takes a little time but is SOOOO worth it.
Maybe I’ll have to try adjusting settings. I wasn’t aware there was much to configure.
Oh please let me know what these settings are! I can make a B minus cup of coffee (after grinding and and keeping them in an airtight glass jar) using the “My K-Cup”.
What is the magic? 🙂
I’ve been all over my Keurig. There is nothing adjustable on it.
At last, I have reached the end of this thread. I thought “they” were done back in the Dark Ages when “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” was a hot topic, but it appears that the debate rages on. In its newest manifestation, the pros and cons of the Keurig Coffee Maker and K-cups have replaced the angels and the pins.
Shakespeare wrote a play whose title describes this brou-ha-ha to a tee — “Much Ado About Nothing”.
My take on the matter is that the Keurig and the K-cups are there for those who choose to purchase and use them — as well as for those who don’t. Until Michelle Obama’s opinion on this becomes a new federal regulation and our choices are taken away from us, à chacun à son goût!
Why is it that nobody seems to understand this post isn’t about Keurig or its coffee, per se. It’s about consumer behavior, and more specifically, hypocrisy and its consequences.
My French is poor, the the phrase that comes to my mind is, “Si vous allez parler pour parler, vous feriez mieux de la marche à pied”
Can always use your own coffee in the K-Cup with a K-Saver. http://www.k-saver.com
Just a heads up!
It’s the exact same issue as the Music Industry. Any audiophile will tell you that MP3’s are at best B-level quality. The last true audiophile standard was the Analog Record. SACD comes at least close in the digital world. However, the people en masse have decided that $1 song downloads onto a MP3 phone/player with sub-standard ear buds is sufficient for the casual listener. Therefore, those of us that appreciate audio, are stuck paying thousands for specialty equipment that actually produces good audio and perusing the internet to find a couple decent recording sources (SACD being about the only one “widely” available at the moment).
Thanks for the comment.
The analogy would be the person who says they wants a local, independent record store, but in practice buys most of their music on iTunes, then expresses shock and dismay when the local independent record store goes out of business.
Nice diatribe about nothing… Your ranting about consumer behavior is more about how you think your bottom line of finances might be affected…
Think about the coffee shop diners similar to what was in almost every episode of Seinfeld… I’m sure there were coffee shop regulars that whined about the Starbucks coming into their neighborhood was going to ruin everything…
Change happens. Relax and deal with it.
The same people that turn their nose down at regular store brand coffee, are your main customers… they are coffee snobs or enthusiasts depending on which side you are on…
I don’t even own a Keurig, and am not so sure I will even buy one… but I do see it as an easy way for me to get what I WANT.
Much like your customers coming to you to get the beans that they WANT.
You cannot have it both ways… you can’t condemn people for choosing the nontraditional coffee maker… because you have made an income from people choosing a nontraditional source of coffee.
People should be free to choose whichever option they want. I don’t condemn them for their choice, regardless of what it is. The behavior I find reprehensible is the one where they say they want local, independent options, but in daily practice they patronize other options, e.g., large, national chains, and then they express surprise and regret when the local options disappear.
Drink what you want. Keurig. Not Keurig. Buy Keurig on weekdays and independent on weekends. I sincerely don’t care. Just don’t buy Keurig while saying you want independent options, and then act surprised when your local independents don’t stay open.
If it helps, I completely understand your point. And yes, it is enjoyable to read thoughts and attitudes that make me feel someone else understands my problems.
I am a photographer that still uses film. And not just any film, but large format, 8″x10″ black and white film. AND I process and print in my wet darkroom. Besides traditional silver prints, I also make platinum prints; a process dating back to the 1800’s. Those of us that do this are a smaller and smaller number.
Film is harder and harder to find, even Kodak (The Great Yellow Father) has almost quit manufacturing film, and certainly in larger formats. Films, papers and chemicals are being discontinued everyday. The products you are able to get have increased in price so dramatically that many photographers simply cannot afford to continue.
Today, everyone has a digital camera or phone that takes pictures. Many people, in fact most, do not see or care about the difference between silver grains or pixels. We have a whole generation that has no clue what film is.
I don’t have the talent or patience to write a “rant” as well as you have done but if we were to sit down and talk over a cup or three, I could discuss this for hours. My point is, I have empathy for you. Also, I refuse to give in. As long as there is film to buy (Yea Ilford!!!!) I will continue to be an analog photographer!
A side note, my husband received a Keurig for Christmas and loves it. I drink only espresso and buy most of mine from a local roaster.
I’m betting that your husband likes your photography and hopes you’ll continue… but himself uses a digital?
Found this rant randomly while looking for how to repair my Keurig. I had been buying k cups with a faint sense of misgiving to which I hadn’t yet turned full consciousness. Noticed it was pretty crummy coffee, but being narcoleptic I have even less morning sentience than your average Jo looking for a caffeine fix. So – post-rant-reading, I bought one of those little filter thingies for the Keurig, and went back to seeking and buying Coffee rather than whateversinthecup. Thought you’d like to know.
Love the barber analogy. Same is true for stores that stocked wallpaper samples. Big, heavy, and cumbersome to ship…I heard a saleswoman ranting about people coming in and looking, then ordering the paper for less off the internet. Now the store is gone, un-coincidentally. I just hadn’t yet applied my usual thoughtful consumerism to coffee yet. Thanks for the prod.
🙂
[…] Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee […]
I never realized there were so many people in this world that are completely lost when it comes to how free enterprise works. I personally believe that you cannot get these people to understand your point because they cannot see it. Anyone whose first response to this includes anything about a Keurig is an idiot. Everyone complains about government bailouts of large companies. Everybody wants the government to fix everything. Use the power you have in your pocket in the form of paper money. Take it to establishments that follow policies you agree with. Spend it with them. A certain amount of your money must go to big corporations, because they have been able to destroy the small competitors as the lazy americans choose convenience and price over everything else. Does your household really need 5 different telephones? 5 computers? 100Mbps connections to the internet? 6 televisions all over 4 feet in screen size? All of these things that we “need” have led us to shortchange ourselves. We Americans have decided that we would rather have everything, instead of a handful of things to enjoy that are truly quality. The “good ol’ days” of our parents’ time is not all that different than the world that we will soon wish we had back. I hope that I can still manage to grow as much of my own food as possible, and buy other food from local sources in 20 years. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is going to be possible.
Agreed.
[…] quite well — environmental consequences of this product’s popularity and how it affects the coffee industry at […]
I’m fairly certain that Coffee is not doomed for eternity.
By the way, you seem to miss a few important points on the timeline of coffee, including the introduction of instant coffee – instant was/is horid but, at one point, it was new and cool so alot of people got excited about it… for a while… then, people realized, if they wanted quailty they would have to work for it a bit and/or pay a bit more… K cups aren’t that different than the instant craze, although they are MUCH better than instant…
By the way, I live in Canada, one our most popular Coffee stops up here is a place called Tim Hortons – a donunt shop. I can tell you their coffee is swill by just about any measure BUT it is convient and seems to be good enough to satisfy the masses, in fact, there are those that swear by it. That said, some will still go the extra mile or two to get to a starbucks while there are even a smaller few will seek out shops that roast their own beans, etc. There will always been a group of coffee drinks that are willing to go the extra mile and there will always be those that are staisfied with good enough (by their own measure of course)… And world continues to turn…
Thanks Jeff. Let’s hope you’re right.
Still, with global instant coffee consumption being 40% of the total consumption (and rising), coupling that with the rise of the Keurig suggests that the two technologies will alter the landscape in terms of availability of high quality whole bean coffee.
I’ve never suggested it will go away entirely.
If it’s any comfort, I think this is a fad, which will pass. At least I hope so. The coffee is just horrible, and there are a -lot- of “coffee snobs”. Hell, shitty instant coffee is better. I’d maybe be more worried about the impact of VIA longterm, because for instant coffee, it’s freaking amazing, and Starbucks is just a little evil. Anyway, whole bean coffee will hopefully survive and resurge, bringing with all of the upsides (besides non-shitty coffee) that have been mentioned.
Well, I’m too lazy to grind my beans to start with but, if it makes you feel any better, I just bought a new keurig at the apparently evil Costco and it came boxed with an adaptor that allows you to use any coffee you want.
Also, I went to Paris a few years ago and the coffee in the cafes was awesome! I have not found any brand or roast in the US that even comes close that flavor. Any suggestions?
Sounds like a crap load of goverment fearing hippies on this blog. I’ll shall continue to enjoy my consumer level enjoyment of fresh, instant coffee in the morning with my Keurig and not give a damn about anything else, patent ending or landfills full of k-cups be damned.
I respect your attitude. Really, I do.
This was by far the most entertaining post I’ve read in very very long time…I give u props for ur sarcasm… it was beautiful
I agree completely!!! I own a coffee shop, used to taking my special blend, espresso ground for the hotels…. No more. Forced to use the K machine inroom. I now have to seek out an open coffee shop and grab a 20 oz and take it back to the room. My roaster sold his Co. from the 70s to another Co. Hense, one choice and one roast for the coffee shops in our state. I remember my folks having a stove percalator on top the stove where you watched the glass bubble on top for a certain color for your drinking pleasue. My job was watching for the right color and turning the stove off. Than the plug in perc for the counter. Please, lets keep on educating our young employees to the old and better ways of the great roaster. Coffee shop freshly brewed with real beans roadted with love!
You had me at “Monsanto”. I get your point. We choose homogenized (and poisonous if you’re talking GMOs) everything out of convenience and, in the end, we suffer….except, we don’t realize we suffer. Its the proverbial “frog in a boiling pot of water.” The change happens slowly, even over generations, and one day you wake up and realize that we are living in out our own version of Aldous Huxley’s writings.
Replace Keurig in your post with Wal-Mart. Same concept. Americans, as a society, are lazy and get lazier with each generation. We want whatever we want immediately, without inconvenience, at a low price now matter what the real cost, and we don’t care (or don’t realize) if it hurts somebody somewhere outside our own little world.
As far as coffee goes, I think the slippery slope started with Starbucks, when it became fashionable and trendy to pay $5 for a fancy paper cup with a fancy lid and fill it with piss. Over the past 15 years or so, the consumer has been trained to believe that brewing a pot of coffee at home is way too time consuming and inconvenient, when they could just drive through a window and get “gourmet” coffee. So Keurig and other systems like it, tap into this by saying “hey, you can get that same GREAT $5 cup of coffee without the inconvenience of a messy filter basket, messy coffee grounds, and all that time and effort it takes to brew a pot of coffee, and it will be cheaper than Starbucks.
I get that your post isn’t limited to K. Its about our attitude as Americans. And how we are so willing to sacrifice what is good for what is easy and cheap. There’s a reason China owns $8 trillion of our national debt…its because we don’t give a shit. As long as we can walk into the warehouse stores and get our cheap flat screens, shoes that will make our butts look better, our Viagra, and still be on time to the kids soccer games and dance recitals, we will never realize the world outside is crumbling around us.
Of course Walmart provides jobs and health care plans to thousands of people in various communities.
They provide jobs to the elderly and handicapped as well.
How many jobs does your local mini mart create? Ask those people if they have insurance.
The ignorance of people who bash Walmart has no end.
I have no beef with WalMart, just as I have none with GMCR (the Keurig people), either. Both do exactly what they are supposed to do – produce a return for their shareholders.
It is hard to argue, however, that they (either of them) are not accelerating a national regression to the mean. And if product mediocrity and/or low-skilled jobs are your thing, you should celebrate both of them.
If you read carefully, you would see that neither I nor the commenter bashed WalMart. We both point out that people are inconsistent about what they say they value, and how they behave.
My K-Cup, Ecobrew’s refillable, and 20 other varieties allow you to use your own grounds in a K-Cup. So I would probably buy your (or someone more local to me) beans, grind them myself, and put them in my little personal ecobrew re-usable cup.
And I love vacuum pots – one was used at Victoria & Albert’s when my wife and I last made a trip to Walt Disney World. Bets cup of coffee I have ever had.
You are full of doggie doo and obviously afraid of change (at best). I am sick of drinking the same bland coffe my husband drinks and when he makes a full lousy pot of it, I am stuck with it too. We were always throwing out coffee. How is that good for the environment? We were never bean grinders. I believe most of us are not. We always bought our ground coffee in a bag. Now we have a fresh and rather tasty alternative. Don’t worry though, we still like to visit overpriced coffee shops such as yours for the atmosphere…
Thanks for the attack, that was really nice.
Composting coffee, while not great for your wallet, is great for your soil.
If our experience is any indication, about 70% of people grind their coffee.
If you think coffee shops are overpriced, you have no idea what costs are involved in running one. Hardly any coffee shop operators make even a basic living.
And for what it’s worth, I’m a fan of change. Just not change for the worse.
If they weren’t making a basic living they wouldn’t be running a coffee shop.
Leave it to a liberal to not understand business.
You may be surprised by how many people work for years, for almost nothing. They dig a hole one spoonful at a time, so it doesn’t seem like it’s getting too deep. Then one day they realize they can’t get out. And sometimes the hole collapses on them. And I’m not claiming that NOBODY makes a decent living running a coffee shop, just many of them. That’s an objective fact, sadly, (average 3-year turnover rate of coffee shops is 70%).
Funny that you would call me liberal. I don’t generally lump myself in that category. And as for understanding business, I guess I’ll have to give my MBA back to the Top 10 school that granted it, since in your estimation I don’t understand business.
Now go pick up your IPOD and reminesce about how great those vinyl records sounded because of the “warmth”.
What a joke.
If vinyl records are your thing, you may lament their passing. The analogy here would be people who complain about digital music, and claim they favor vinyl, yet buy their music from iTunes, then moan when the vinyl record store goes away.
What’s an ipod?
heh heh
I agree with you about the k cups, but what is the problem is you use a reusable filter and your own coffee? I would never consider buying coffee in a K cup, but I like the idea of not wasting so much coffee from a drip maker which typically need about 6 cups of water to get a decent brew and then you end up tossing 3 or 4 of the 6 cups.
Did I just read all that crap must be a slow day.
Fear not. I’m heading out today to shop for my son – who’s turning 18 and a full-fledged consumer. What’s the rage these days? Vinyl. Listened to by a “vinyl player” separate from any ipod. He has both, but spends more money on vinyl than downloads, even though he probably uses digital tunes more frequently, and visits vinyl shops in his free time. Specialty coffee has gone the same way – did a long time ago, actually. it’s a specialty. There’s always room for the best quality experience. Heck, I bought my own roaster, just to make sure I get what I like. Looking forward to my own roasted, ground, brewed-by-the-cup experience with some newly released vinyl playing in the background.
I’m just HORRIFIED by the prevalence and acceptance of the Keurig and its ilk at a time when the effects of climate change are being felt world wide in catastrophic ways. How can anyone in good conscience use such a device that results in HUGE amounts of non compostable waste into our ENVIRONMENT. Even if they go with a compostable material for their throwayay cups thingies, you know many (most) people won’t bother to recycle ’em.
What’s the big inconvenience using a percolator, a standard coffee maker or a melitta??? For over 30 yrs, I’ve used the same Braun electric grinder; I buy Peet’s or another good coffee on sale, and load it in a filter directly into my heated coffee cup. The filter is biodegradable & the grounds, as others have said, are great in the garden, and also biodegrade. Also love the guy’s suggestion of a tea ball! Works on the same principle as a melitta more or less…
Grow up[ and stop whining Susan. Only a delusional twit thinks a coffee maker’s waste will end humanity. Shame on you.
What bizarre, whining, elitist bunch of nonsense. Too bad for your goofy friends and their vacuum pots. People like convenience and technology. Sorry grampa, it isn’t the 40’s anymore. And yes, we still use a french press when we want to savor our coffee.
We would never buy from oddball/unsanitary niche vendors. We buy from Amazon (oh no – I’m sure that’s like kryptonite to people like you who can’t compete in the free market) and the blue mountain beans will continue to grace our kitchen. I hope you do go out of business and can’t afford a computer to blog on. Unbelievable.
Again with the Gramps thing?
The wife just bot one of these cheap ass pieces of shit. Yeah its convienent, if you want to drink the sad shit that comes out of it. It’s a QVC thing.
I buy all my beans from a small speciality company on an Amazon subscription (git on it if you ain’t, you need to) $35 bucks for 5 lbs of fantastic dark expresso delivered twice a month. And yes I have a pretty expensive Italian SAECO brewer that does a worthwhile job. I told the wife to put the pipe down and get real…My 80s Mr Coffee with folgers classic does a better job. Hopefully she’ll get a clue. I’m self employed so every day is a weekend. Life’s too short to drink shit coffee on ANY day…I’ll give your beans a try, but you damn well better be competitive
And yes I wholeheartedly agree about supporting the smaller speciality merchants. I myself specialize in vintage railroad watches, and bring my customers only my best efforts. I too get my hair cut locally by the same barber
and I will pay more for a good product. (By competitive I meant not only price of course but price/quality ratio which I’m sure you’re familiar with) If you have something similiar to the Dark Rich Expresso I buy at http://www.coffeebeandirect.com
I would entertain a bag. Good comments, I like what I;m reading here, look for me on your site to order.
Good stuff…Mark my words: Green Mountain/Keurig = Enron of coffee. Most of the commercial success you see is the result of classic fraud…similar to people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford (by lying about their income), Fraud Mountain Coffee Jokers has done similar.
It tastes like garbage…because it tastes like PLASTIC…I don’t care what is in the actual “cup” I have always hated this coffee. The amount of plastic waste is staggering..and for what? Crappy coffee! I use a French Press every day, I waste no coffee whatsoever and I don’t even have a filter to throw away, just the grounds. I do it because a French Press makes a damn good cup of coffee and because it is cheaper than having to buy filters. K-cup is the devil of coffee the absolute opposite of what is good about coffee. I would sooner drink instant…and I mean it!
I know the point of the original blog post wasnt to critique the keurig, and i agree it makes a sub par cup of coffee by many peoples standards. Has anyone tried the new VUE brewer keurig released? apparently the cups are home recyclable and I heard from a few people it makes a decent cup of coffee. Two of the people i heard this from were folks who would cringe and scold you for even considering using a kcup. Just thought I would ask, haven’t used one myself.
I’m not a fan of K-Cups. I like real, fresh coffee.
However, my parents have a Keurig brewer. It has a little cup thing that you can use to put whatever coffee you want in it.
Although it’s still kind of nasty because it passes through this rubber cup thing, but you can technically use whatever coffee you’d like.
Americans have always loved crappy coffee. Just buy good coffee, a good grinder and a French press and stop bitching, what a waste of time and Internet space.
I think your raving is ignorant. There is a keurig converter to allow you to use any type of coffee. Just go to Keurig.com.
I read the first post, glanced through some of the following and jumped to the end. I sell Rainforest Alliance certified single estate Gourmet Costa Rican coffee, from a sweet little varietal called Geisha. The plantation belonged to my German grandfather, who would drink coffee as thick as tar daily. It now belongs to his five daughters. I import our coffee and roast it locally, fresh to order. And even though this sounds like an ad, it’s the preface to the point that I too am seeing how some of my clients are switching to K and wish I had my coffee in a K cup (even though they can choose to use the reusable one, it’s not as convenient). That’s how I came across this blog. If K cups become the mean, my absolutely exceptional coffee will be no more; instead will be sold to a major corporation so it can be blended and sold as their own special crap. It will be the end of small boutique lots. So it is scary to think we are headed in the direction of crappy coffee being the norm. But, I hope that all those that for years and years could stomach Folgers are the ones using K cups and those of us who truly appreciate the flavor of a good cup of coffee will take the extra 10 minutes to make it from real good and fresh beans. Has anyone looked at expiration or production dates on the k cups? Coffee is considered old 30 days after roasting and once it’s ground, it needs to be brewed within 20 minutes or it starts losing its properties. Old coffee tastes nasty. Jim, there’s hope. Keurig is just an annoying trend. Hang in there! My plan is to buy the Keurig brew-your-own cups and re-sell them to my K clients along with my coffee! You can’t beat them, join them!
Great post! Ive been using a french press up till now and just purchased the keurig. If it makes you feel any better you can buy eco reusable cups NOT made by keurig of course to fill up with your favorite coffee. Saves money and the eviorment
I’ve been using a Keurig for the past few years. For a lot of that, I was a smoker and didn’t really have taste-buds and was just choking down some caffeine in the morning before going to work – but it never actually tasted like GOOD COFFEE.
For the past year or so, I had a refillable K-Cup filter… and it still just didn’t taste like good coffee. I’m more in tune to the flavor now, and no matter what I put in that filter, or what kind of cup you use, it’s just not as good as coffee is supposed to be. It works if you’re in a hurry and don’t mind the sub-par flavor, but it’s just not where it should be.
I don’t think the world will ever be satisfied with that as a total solution for coffee brewing. People still have to brew large pots when family is in town, or when entertaining, etcetera. And people aren’t really happy with what they get from a k-cup.
I just bought a french press and it has changed my world. Start the water when I get up, put in the grounds, take a shower, then pour the water, get ready, come back, have GOOD coffee.
Keurig isn’t selling coffee, they are selling time. Time is the one commodity that both rich and poor can’t buy more of. So it’s hardly surprising that people value 5 to 10 min a day more than a good cup of coffee. I dnt see this as a bad thing, there will always be niche markets for specialty products.
“Selling time” is a probably a better way to look at it and does help to explain the tremendous markup. But the costs are more than the $75/pound cost of the coffee itself. There is the needlessly diminished quality of the coffee and the incredible waste.
There is also a difference — as Pirsig wrote years ago — between “GOOD time” and “good TIME.” I actually enjoy spending a few minutes in the preparation of my coffee.
just did a bit of math and if my math is correct, 10oz of coffee is equivalent to 56 k-cups. with that, it’s definitely cheaper to buy coffee from you guys. i have a my-k-cup thing with my keurig so that i can use my own ground up coffee with it rather than the pods and i gotta tell you, you may have just found a new customer. any recommendations for a particular flavor from you guys?
Hi Robert. Thanks for the math – you are correct, K-cups are expensive. As for our current offerings, my favorites are Ethiopians, especially the Natural Sidama. Use the search box on our website, http://www.muddydogcoffee.com. I don’t want to paste a permalink to the product because it will be outdated in months. Hope to see an order from you!
Just received it in the mail. Grinded it up and enjoying a cup right now. I love it. Thanks, man.
The World Is Not Going to End.
Little roasters as well as all small companies will find a way to survive.
Everyone will not trade quality for convenience.