I’m a big-time coffee drinker, and I’m dedicated to getting my morning pick-me-up when I get into the office every day. When we made the switch to a Keurig coffee maker, I needed to do a little shopping to accommodate my coffee-brewing needs. That’s why I’m now the proud owner of my own reusable K cup filter!
The Advantages Of The Keurig Coffee Maker
When our office manager announced that we were shifting to using a Keurig single-cup coffee maker, I was pretty suspicious. I’m a long-time lover of serious coffee, and I never saw any problem with our old standard ten-cup Bunn machine. However, I have to admit that a little experience with the Keurig won me over. It has significant strong points: Each cup of coffee we make is fresh and hot. Everyone in the office can choose the blend that suits their tastes. The flexibility of the machine makes it capable of handling hot tea and cocoa, too, so it can provide useful beverages even to those coworkers who don’t care for coffee. And the care and cleanup required for the Keurig is really easy.
The Inevitable Drawbacks
Although I’ve made my peace with our new coffee machine, don’t think for a second that I’m completely won over. I can see there are still some shortcomings in the “brew one cup at a time” setup. For one thing, it produces trash. LOTS of trash. Our office drinks a lot of coffee, and that translates into a lot of used K-cups. That brings up another problem: Brewing our coffee one cup at a time means that, well, we’re limited to one cup at a time. On several occasions we’ve been caught short when enough coffee drinkers want fresh coffee at the same time. It makes meetings a real pain! Finally, there’s a problem that affects real coffee snobs like me: I can’t find my favorite brand of coffee in K-cups. Does that mean I have to give up on drinking it at work?
The Solution: A Reusable K Cup
No, it doesn’t! I found the perfect way to solve at least some of my problems with the Keurig machine: A reusable K-cup filter! I bought myself one online. It interacts perfectly with the Keurig and allows me to brew my favorite blends no matter where I am. I’ll admit that cleaning out the reusable filter does add a little bit of labor to the process of making coffee, but I’ve never been afraid of expending some elbow grease. It’s more than justified by the savings in trash I get by using a permanent filter. My contribution to the office trash bin is that much smaller these days. I’ve had such a good experience with this filter that I’ve even swayed a few of my coworkers into buying their own.
Purchasing Considerations
I just have one word of caution for anybody who wants to follow my example: Do your homework before you pick out a reusable filter for a single-cup coffee maker! Many manufacturers use different designs, and one size does definitely not fit all. From what I hear, even within a single manufacturer’s brand you have to be careful. The Keurig 2.0, for example, has an absolutely unique set-up that only works with official Keurig K-cups and filters.
