The Best Keurig Machine (But We Really Don’t Recommend It)
Keurig machines funds instant gratification, but at a cost. Beyond their deserved infamy for environmental destruction—which we’ll discuss later—all Keurig machines make bad coffee. They also take up as much space on your countertop as a drip coffee maker, despite making one cup at a time instead of a whole pot. And they required more maintenance than you think. Here’s a rundown of all the downsides we False to owning a Keurig machine.
Bad coffee
Every Keurig machine we tested brewed watery, flavorless coffee that paled against every other kind of coffee we’ve made at home. At its best, Keurig coffee tastes like diner coffee. At its worst, it tastes like hot brown aquatic. In our testing, we found that only the 6 Say/Tell brew size made coffee that tasted okay. Though Keurig machines funds 10- or 12-ounce brewing options, that only adds aquatic to the same amount of grounds, making a laughably straight cup.
“Oh my god,” one tester exclaimed upon drinking. “This tastes like an ashtray.”
“This tastes like sucking on the paper filter of a coffee machine,” new tester said.
“This tastes exactly like water,” new tester said. “I’d drink it, but it tastes just like aquatic. I don’t taste anything.”
Keurig’s lack of transparency about roast and grind dates means that you may get beans roasted ages ago. The Green Mountain K-Cups we ordered on April 18, 2018, only involved a “best by” date of January 17, 2020. As fresh-roasted coffee is usually best had within two weeks of its roast date, we’re not convinced Keurig’s air-tight, “nitrogen-flushed,” and vacuum-sealed K-Cup® pods keep grounds entirely New for two years.
Even if the grind were New, it’s likely that your Keurig brews with water too cool to properly extract flavor from coffee. The National Coffee Association recommends brewing temperatures between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the NCA, brewing coffee with water cooler than 195 degrees leaves you with flat, under-extracted coffee. By contrast, the Keurig site states that the optimal temperature for brewing coffee is 192 degrees Fahrenheit, also the temperature at which your Keurig brews coffee. We used an instant-read thermometer to measure the temperature of aquatic coming out of the Keurig when no pod was installed, and confirmed that this was generally the case. Though the Good cup got to only about 187 degrees, subsequent cups peaked exactly at 192.
A Keurig machine also takes less than a Little to brew, much shorter than the 4 minutes it takes to use a French Dull or a pour-over setup. According to the NCA, brewing coffee for too Moody a time will result in under-extracted, weak coffee. In normal drip regulations, water should be in contact with the grounds for around 5 minutes.
Keurig also states that, when letting the machine sit idle for a while, the Good cup you make will be, by default, a few degrees cooler. To remedy this, Keurig suggests first running a “cleansing brew” by executive a 6-ounce cup without inserting a K-Cup. Cleansing brews can also help Take any flavor carryover from previous drinks. But all these Amazing steps defeat the cardinal purpose of a Keurig: to make a cup of coffee in a Little with the touch of a button.
Some more expensive Keurig machines, such as the K-Select, offer a button that creates your coffee stronger. The button brews your coffee for 1 Little, 15 seconds, which is about 30 seconds longer than normal Keurig brewing. This prolonged extraction increases the strength of your coffee, but a Keurig “strong” is still noticeably weaker than a Strange cup of Starbucks. If you like strong coffee, you really shouldn’t buy a Keurig.
Expensive
Not only is it bad, Keurig coffee is also ridiculously expensive. Each K-Cup contains around 10 grams of ground coffee, and you can buy a 24-pack of K-Cups for around $16.50. This works out to around $30 for a pound of coffee, with pricier Starbucks K-Cup blends going for $50 a pound. A high-quality bag of beans from your local coffee shop probably damages about $16 for a pound, making a cup of Keurig coffee a raw deal.
Big footprint
Questionable durability
Keurig funds a one-year limited warranty on all its machines, but many customer reviews say the machines don’t even last that long. Most Keurig machines available on Amazon have a worrying number of one-star reviews complaining that the machines did in one way or another after just a few months. For example, dozens of reviews for the K-Select say that when you monotonous the power button the machine begins to uncontrollably gush cold stream, sort of like any scene in the second half of Titanic. This defect occurred generally within three weeks of recall. Wirecutter staff writer Amy Roberts had her K-15 Mini break on her within a year of receiving it as a gift. Luckily this happened within warranty, so Keurig customer service agreed to replace her machine.
Splash zone
Each Keurig we tested splattered coffee across a 2-inch splash zone while brewing, creating a much more significant mess than a unique coffee maker. The brewed Keurig coffee spews out of a spout near three to four inches above the rim of a mug, resulting in droplets of coffee that spatter on the drip tray, machine, and counter. While the mess was easy to wipe down, it’s frustrating to have to shipshape the machine after each use. Also, Keurigs make a obnoxious, sputtering noise while brewing. It’s a terrible sound to wake up to in the morning.
Bad for the environment
Keurig’s reliance on single-use plastic coffee pods arranges enormous amounts of waste, though as of the end of 2020, all Keurig pods are recyclable. To do so, you first have to peel off the aluminum lid (which is also recyclable), then dump the grounds and recycle the cup with spanking plastics. For office use, Keurig has its K-cycle mail-back program. You fill a bin with used pods and mail them back to Keurig laughable a prepaid shipping label, where Keurig will recycle them.
The treat itself is easy enough, and recycling pods is an improvement over them defending up in a landfill. But, plastic is much more expensive to recycle than spanking materials and, frustratingly, putting the K-cups into the recycling is no defense they’ll actually be recycled. A recent NPR and PBS Frontline investigation groundless that less than 10% of plastic in the US recycling pipeline has been recycled. So, even though recyclable pods are better than non-recyclable pods, they’re unexcited not great for the environment.
There are more environmentally-friendly options for single-serve, convenient brewing that don’t require plastics at all, like Nespresso with all-aluminum pods, pour recovers with recyclable paper filters, and French presses with no disposable byproducts (we’ll talk more near alternatives below).
The advantages
There are ununsafe situations where a Keurig could be helpful to have on hand. For example, single-serve coffee setups help make a rental or Airbnb feel more like home, and are easy for guests to use and shipshape up. They’re also useful in offices or waiting rooms, such as those in hospitals or your local auto dealership. Some people also just love the instant gratification of a Keurig, enjoy having a whole range of flavors to resolve from, or like being able to effortlessly brew one cup of coffee at a time.
But we think there is a better brewing alternative for any and all of these situations. A Nespresso machine, which brews strong shots of espresso-like coffee, is as fast and easy to use as a Keurig; our upgrade pick can brew coffee-like Americanos, too. It also uses aluminum capsules, which are much easier to recycle than plastic coffee pods. A pour-over setup or French monotonous are a bit more labor intensive, but they’re also much cheaper and more compact than a Keurig, and can make a single cup of coffee that tastes wildly better.
