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Keurig are...coffee machines for places that want to serve coffee without going through the trouble of making that coffee. Waiting rooms - just go and make yourself a cup. Cheapo office kitchen machine.

It does make pretty bad coffee, but hey, it's better than not having coffee an all...sometimes. Buying it for home is another story.

Aeropress is a great travel coffee maker. Still need to clean it, grind beans, but managable.

Chemex... Have to buy filters (aeropress you can buy reusable metal filter that is better than paper ones), takes a while to make. We actually had an issue with new company management because of how much time people spent making coffee with chemex (fuck em, but still)

Frenchpress are great. A bit annoying to clean, but nice coffee.

All of them require you to grind your own coffee. That means easier cheap manual grinder or somewhat expensive electronic grinder (because cheap electronic grinders are trash).

None of them work well in places that any pod-based coffee maker works well: self-serving waiting rooms.

> All of them require you to grind your own coffee.

I'm not sure if this is one of those weird only-in-America things, but in every European country I've ever visited, you can buy pre-ground coffee in supermarkets, and specialty coffee suppliers will grind the beans for you at the point of purchase. Sure, it might not taste quite as good as if you grind the beans yourself every time, but I wouldn't say all the methods above require you to grind your own coffee.

For a high-quality brew, you absolutely want to buy whole beans and grind them immediately before use. However, you definitely can buy pre-ground beans in the states or grind them in-store if the market offers a grinder. Though, I think the point of the response above is more to demonstrate that either option is impractical in waiting rooms since you either have to ask a guest to grind their own beans or serve them grounds that have likely gone stale from lack of use. Either is a subpar option.

In most grocery stores I've been to since the 90s, fancy and middle class, there was at least a few whole bean bags or some bulk beans in a dispenser for sale, with an adjustable grinder there. Heck, one time I opened a bag before paying for it and ground it with their grinder, then had them scan the empty bag.

IIRC ground coffee is still "fresh" even by snob standards for a day or three before it goes stale.

Pre-ground coffee is stale coffee unless it's stored airtight. I would take Nespresso pod over pre-ground supermarket coffee roasted 6 months ago.

You can buy pre-ground coffee and grind it in-store in many supermarkets in America, it's just if you like coffee - you don't buy your beans at the supermarket.

I've used my SnowPeak titanium French press for years. It fixes the weak point of 99% of French presses -- the glass carafe that inevitably breaks when you're most vulnerable. (before you've had coffee!) It also makes great coffee every time. And you can take it camping with you!

https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/coffee-tea/products/tit...

And this is the upgrade pick. Expensive until you consider how much you save by making coffee at home.

https://www.espro.com/collections/french-press/products/coff...

I stuck with the Bodum brand mentioned above. This stainless, huge-ass, french press has served me well for about a decade now after I broke my second glass model. https://www.bodum.com/us/en/1312-16-bodum-columbia

Honestly unsure why anyone would go for a french press when AeroPress exists, it seems to me to be strictly superior. And of course you can take it camping, too.

Bulk brewing, less sensitive to grind size.

Is the double filter of that espro worth it?

Yes for me. Way fewer grounds in my coffee.

There's a far better Keurig alternative with ZERO cleanup. Not easy cleanup, ZERO. (Edit: To clarify - zero extra, relative to a Keurig.)

They are called "hanging ear coffee filters" - it's just a disposable paper filter with two arms on it. You can get a box of 100 for about 10 cents each.

Filter attaches to your mug, coffee goes in filter, pour boiling water into the top. The process is almost exactly what a Keurig would do. Makes a single-serve coffee in your mug with no cleanup.

It's cheaper and better and more environmental, and you can use whatever coffee you want.

Normally I wouldn’t be a pedant and nitpick this but you went out of your way to be confidently incorrect about there being exact ZERO cleanup.

The only way this is true is if the filter dissolves into the coffee and you consume it.

But it’s not, there’s still a thing you have to throw away. You can mishandle that waste and accidentally spill the grounds everywhere. If you drink enough cups you have to take out the trash.

Given your familiarity with the product, I consider your statement as pretty much lying, and it’s driving me (and probably others) to distrust your more. In the best case someone is gonna try it and realize, oh, there is non-zero cleanup

Thanks for that perspective. I wanted to emphasize the difference between this solution and the Aeropress. I went into hyperbole in doing so, and will be more careful about that in future.

Hopefully the clarifying edit resolves your concerns.

Aeropress is really peak coffee simplicity, especially if you use metal filter. Couple simple parts, stupidly easy to disassemble, stupidly easy to clean, stupidly easy to make at least decent coffee - beans dependent of course.

I've had a lot of success with James Hoffman's method[1] for making coffee with a french press. Good coffee and with a larger french press you can make enough coffee at once for at least two people. You only need a french press and optionally a coffee grinder if you want to grind your own beans to get started.

It is a bit time consuming (10-15minutes) so it may not be great for making a quick cup before leaving the house in the morning though.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st571DYYTR8

I only drink 1-2 cups each morning, and I bargain-shop for k-cups that are 20-30 cents each.

I enjoy a nice cup of coffee, but I'll drink trash to get me going in the morning.

I would normally judge you, but I've definitely gone a similar route - our office had a Keurig machine (as a gift from some vendor) and a supply of crappy K-cups that no one else wanted.

And all I needed was a caffeine boost before going to the gym. So all the things just aligned for me to use both the machine and the (frankly terrible) coffee it made.

Can't beat free. Even if it is terrible quality. But in the future, I would probably just go with a 150mg caffeine pill, simply because it produces less plastic waste (I hope?)

You can buy chocolate-covered espresso beans from Trader Joe's for a good bit less than a Keurig will cost.

> I enjoy a nice cup of coffee, but I'll drink trash to get me going in the morning.

Same. While I do enjoy the occasional good cup of coffee, I just need some black liquid with caffeine in my usual mornings. Full stop.

I think the popularity of the Keurig's(and clones) have a lot to do with the legends about how difficult pour over coffee is along with the fact that American's don't really have electric kettle's nor coffee grinders.

So for the cost of one overpriced toy the Keurigs lets you play at being an coffee snob without really having to learn anything about coffee or how to use an grinder or buy an electric kettle and that speaks to a lot of people.

And we should not forget that if your only experience with manual coffee makers and grinders is watching some internet coffee snob use massively overprized equipment and obsess over every little detail the process of making coffee the old fashined way might seem overwhelming.

Pre-ground coffee in an AeroPress is infinitely better than Keurig.

Keurig is really terrible, like the fast-food version of coffee. But I don't really like electric kettles. Sure, they let you control the temperature a bit better, but you can do it with traditional kettle over a gas stove if you add a thermometer (or have a thermometer built in to the kettle). I know most people probably prefer just pressing a button to waiting for the water to reach the right temperature, though.

I've been using the cheapest Keurig machine for I think four years now without issue. Roughly five cups a week go through that thing, and it never fails to work. I use unlicensed biodegradable k-cups.

I initially bought it as backup for my Aeropress, but eventually switched to using it full time and keeping the Aeropress as backup instead. I use a French press while camping.

They don't seem to sell the model I have anymore, so perhaps all the models available today are garbage, but the one I have is notably not.

Can I recommend some of the ninja machines? I have the dual brew one which supports kcups but the machine itself doesn’t give a hoot if you use branded kcups or reusable cups. And it can brew regular coffee as well.

The one thing I like about kcups is how stupid simple the whole thing is while I’m in the middle of something like work. So this machine lets me be a caffeinated monkey during work things and I can also brew regular coffee when I’m okay with a slight distraction.

It’s been working a whole lot better than the cheap-o keurig I initially bought which comes with a tiny water reservoir enough for one cup of coffee only. Most stupid thing I’ve ever seen. Why am I going for convenience but I also have to refill the water reservoir every time I want coffee?!

I am personally not in the market for anything, because what I have works.

I like the idea of adding water every time I want to make a cup of coffee. It’s what I do with my French press or aeropress after all. I have the possibly-mistaken impression that machines with larger reservoirs need to be cleaned more often, to avoid bacteria in the reservoir.

"But drip is for people who hate themselves and know their lives have no real purpose or meaning." -- Wednesday Addams

I don't get the drip hate. It makes perfectly good coffee. The main step functions in coffee quality for me were 1) A burr grinder and 2) get fresh roasted light to medium roast beans

Everything else had negligible benefit for me. I tried the French press and Aeropress thing a while but it's way too labor intensive for how much I drink (one "10" cup drip pot per day).

Agree. I was a died-in-the-wool drip-hating espresso snob until we were getting some work done on the house and our espresso machine had to go into storage. Then I was forced to learn to make nice drip coffee and aeropress and now I can make basically all the types of good coffee. It's a valuable life skill for sure.

The real crime is most people make drip coffee too weak or with bad beans (or badly-ground beans).

Just being pedantic - it is dyed in the wool, not died :)

It works well in the context of that quote: the Wednesday character is smart and competent, but not nearly as much as she thinks. There's nothing wrong with drip coffee but some people think it does because they skimped on the two things you mentioned or are getting diner coffee which has been on the burner for a couple of hours. At least in this case, that mistaken attribution doesn't have a body count.

Good drip is stupidly close to pour over in function anyway.

There are things you can do to improve it massively, even with a $20 brand-less drip machine from walmart: 1) Make sure your coffee maker is free of old, dry, rancid coffee or coffee oils, and not clogged with scale 2) Use really good water. 3) Grind your own coffee 4) Buy coffee you enjoy, which might be a national, name brand, cheap bag of beans, but there's significant flavor and style differences in these different brands! Try several different ones. Some lean acidic, some lean earthy and bitter, find your personal preference

Now we get to the "over fussy" stuff depending on how lucky you are 4) Use a concical bur grinder instead of a blade grinder for more consistent grind and extraction 5) Play with your coffee to water ratio. Everyone has different preferences here 6) Rinse the paper filter for your machine before use, or replace with a reusable mesh of some sort if you like your coffee more "sludgy" like cold brew or french press 7) "Pre heat" the water. Lots of drip machines don't heat the water very well in the beginning. My machine has a feature where if I keep the top open, the water recycles back into the tank so I can let it run and heat itself up. Alternatively heat up your water before brewing. 8) Let the grounds degass: remove the carafe or otherwise block the basket output, let hot water drip into the grounds until they are mostly submerged, and stop water from going into the basket. Let the grounds steep in the hot water for like a minute, then continue the brew as normal. I find this helps reduce acidity personally 9) Put a pinch of salt into the pot of coffee. Salt has a bitterness blocking effect that you might enjoy 10) check the output spout of your brewer into the basket. It can help to add some sort of "diffuse" so all the water doesn't just dig itself a hole into the grounds. When you go to empty the basket, it should look like a very even bed of grounds that got even water mostly all over

Check out James Hoffman on youtube for more information.

I'd add that an insulated carafe is a big improvement over glass on a hot plate.

Yes, instant is the choice of the patrician.

aeropress is just a low tech device built to sell filters. A regular french press doesn't need to buy disposable filters so is better.

I used a metal filter with my Aeropress for six years. It's fine. The paper filters are an option, not a requirement.

Yeah me too. I literally haven't even used the filters that came with the aeropress when I got it and I use mine every day.

I rinse and re-use the aeropress filters. If I'm somewhat careful handling them I get 10 uses or more per filter.

Except you can't produce a clean cup of coffee with a french press.

What do you mean by clean in this context?

Filters remove sediment and oils, which gives the coffee a 'clean' mouth feel. A little hard to describe, but easy to observe if you make a french press and a v60/aeropress using the same beans and grind and compare.

True, a french press tends to leave sediment at the bottom of your mug. Easily solved by leaving the last tiny sip behind.

Maybe! But the filters are currently under €0.02 per unit on Amazon in a pack of 700 and it makes incredible coffee when paired with pretty much any (non spinny-blade) grinder, and pretty decent coffee when paired with preground. And the inventor says he washes the filters off and uses them two or three times each.

Yeah, I'm sure Aeropress is making bank selling you $15 worth of filters once or twice a year[0]. Or you could spend that same $15 on Aeropress' stainless mesh filter[1], and they'll never see another dime from you again.

Downside to metal mesh filter: it doesn't pull out all of the oily residue that a paper filter would. It doesn't bother us, but you might be more picky.

[0] https://aeropress.com/products/micro-filters

[1] https://aeropress.com/products/aeropress-stainless-steel-reu...

$4.99 for enough filters from Target to last me a year (350). Quite the money making scheme they have!

Aeropress and French Press make fundamentally different coffees. The paper filter in the Aeropress changes the taste and "feel" of the coffee in ways that many people prefer. Additionally, the pressure created during the "pressing" process changes the extraction a bit (nowhere near as much as espresso type pressures, but more than nothing).

The main issue with French press is that it's unfiltered and filtered coffee is considered healthier.