Coffee Pods: Money Savers?

If you consider the amount of coffee per dollar, pods are going to be more expensive, and the reasons are obvious. Say you're cooking dinner for twenty people. Should you make them all some Hamburger Helper, or make them individual hamburgers? Which one is going to be cheaper, and which one will they like better? I'm betting the answers there are pretty universal, and the same holds for coffee pods. They're fresher and more customizable to taste than your standard cup of coffee. Also, before you look at costs too closely, be sure to factor in how much coffee gets thrown down the drain because it's old or stale before another pot is made, only for most of that pot to suffer the same fate a few hours later. Traditional coffee pots are, let's face it, wasteful and not at all efficient. Does it make sense for you or your office to switch to pods? That's largely a personal decision, but I would at least give coffee pods some thought.

Coffee Pod Brewers

As with any other small appliance, coffee pod brewers tend to be all over the place in price. Budget models can be had for as little as $10 while the “higher end” ones with more features can cost well over $300. Most of these only brew one cup at a time, though there are some that brew up to two cups using two separate coffee pods. Commercial variants can be upwards of $1200 and will include such features as push button pod loading and multiple cups. I'm not entirely sure what the advantages of commercial coffee pod makers would be, though. I guess they would still end up fresher if nothing else since the coffee wouldn't be brewed to just sort of sit. Maybe commercial coffee pod machines will be the end of the “nasty machine coffee” stigma.

Open Source Coffee Pods

Luckily, as opposed to some other coffee formats, coffee pods aren't trademarked by any one particular company. I'm talking about coffee like it's software here, but I really can't think of any other way to explain it. Although coffee pods do require their certain type of brewer, any company can produce both pods and brewers, so there is competition among the different manufacturers. Just be careful to match your pods to your brewer. Pods can be as little as $5 to as much as $30 per package, depending on the type of coffee they hold. Premium brands cost more, as usual, and it's really up to your taste buds to decide if the premium coffee pods are worth the premium price. Should you be low on money at some point in the future, you can always make your own coffee pods as well by using typical grocery store items.

Efficient Coffee Pods

Coffee pods are the model of efficiency. They're basically a measured amount of coffee grounds wrapped in the perfect sized little filter. They obviously cannot be used in normal coffee brewers, but require a pod brewer that they can be inserted in. There's nothing more convenient when it comes to single cups of coffee. There's not measuring grounds or hunting down and separating filters because each pod can just be dropped in to the brewer whenever you want a cup of coffee. The price per cup of coffee is higher compared to traditional brewers from which every cup of coffee gets drunk but, honestly, how often does that actually happen that way? And we're not talking about bank breaking, here. The brewers themselves aren't much more expensive; most of the cost comes from the pods. You do have to be careful, though, as some pods don't fit certain types of coffee pod brewers, and vice versa.

Newfangled Coffee Pods

I didn't know what coffee pods were until I started doing some research on the subject but, after everything was said and done, I was sort of surprised to find out how many people actually did know about their existence. Apparently they've been around for a little while, and people already have opinions on them. I've heard everything from “I hate those stupid little things” from an army friend to “I love the amaretto ones!” from someone else. I've never really seen myself as worldly at all, but I would've thought that had there been some sort of revolution in something as mundane as coffee, I would've known about it, but apparently not. Coffee pods are definitely becoming more and more popular, and it's easy to see why. In today's save-the-planet-by-using-less world, the idea of brewing one cup of coffee at a time makes sense. My great aunt used to brew one cup of coffee and then microwave it cup by cup all day. I bet she'd love the idea of coffee pods.