For the past two years… at home, I have had my top-rated OXO coffee maker and Shawna has had her Keurig machine. We had been doing strictly Keurig before I bought the OXO. I went with my OXO coffee maker because the end result is better-tasting coffee.
When I first bought the OXO, I decided that I would not buy coffee beans, but would instead buy good-quality ground coffee. Of course grinding fresh from beans produces better coffee. But it requires a grinder on the counter and additional mess. I settle on Peet’s for my ground coffee, and the results were pretty good. Even without grinding my own beans, the OXO made considerably better coffee than the Keurig.
One of the aspects of switching to the OXO from a Keurig machine was an expected reduction in cost. I had thought that k-cups were probably the most expensive way to buy coffee. However this turned out not to be true. And that’s because my OXO calls for a pretty large amount of coffee each time I brew.
For example… one pot of coffee requires nine scoops of coffee (18 tablespoons). And yes, this makes it strong, as it should be. But because of the large amount of coffee that is called for, I don’t really think I was saving any money over using k-cups.
Based on $10 for a pound of decent coffee and .36 ounces per scoop. Ground coffee runs about $0.22 per scoop. It takes 2.5 scoops to make one cup of coffee using ground coffee ($0.55). Whereas a cheap k-cup is more like $0.35. So, cost is not a good reason to be using ground coffee over k-cups.
Even though the OXO clearly makes better coffee, at some point one might just be ok with “good enough”. If we go with good quality k-cups, the result will certainly be closer the level of the OXO. And honestly, a really good k-cup may well produce better coffee than what most people typically drink.
At work, we buy Starbuck’s k-cups because my boss is a shareholder. Those k-cups actually make a pretty decent cup of coffee. At home, we usually get Costco’s Kirkland brand. They are some of the cheapest we’ve found. And they are acceptable.
There is one aspect of using k-cups that I’ve thought would be nice to avoid. And that pertains to our morning coffee routine. We will typically run through 6 k-cups before leaving the house in the morning. But after thinking about that, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
While it is somewhat of a pain… 6 (actual drinkable sized cups) of coffee is more than a full pot in my OXO. So either way you look at it it’d be a fair amount of effort to get our morning coffee taken care of. I don’t know that brewing two pots of coffee using the OXO is any less hassle than running 6 k-cups through the Keurig.
So the Keurig wins.