Beans vs Machines: What’s the best way to get a single cup of coffee?

Coffee capsules are a popular way to get a quick cup of coffee in the morning, but is there a cost in flavour? How do they compare to coffee grounds?

Some coffee lovers swear by single-serve pods, citing benefits like: Convenience Lower cost Variety of flavours

But do these so-called benefits actually hold up?

Not really.

Ground coffee can be just as convenient, is far less expensive, and boasts a staggering variety of tastes.

Environmental Impact

Coffee pods might be convenient, but that is just a fancy way of saying that they’re disposable. There’s no question that single-use coffee pods have a huge environmental impact: pods are dumped into landfills by the billions.

In fact, if you took all the pods produced by all the different single-use pod companies over the years and lined them up, they’d circle the globe over two dozen times!

Even the recycling programs offered by some companies have a high environmental impact. Coffee pods use more materials, and recycling them takes time, effort, and energy.

Ground coffee, on the other hand, is biodegradable. You can compost coffee grounds or even use them as a natural fertilizer, pesticide, and mulch for your garden!

Price

A single capsule contains roughly 11 grams of coffee. This is really only enough to make one small 6-8 oz cup of coffee. A more reasonable 12-16 oz cup would require two pods. At the cheapest possible sale price, these pods are approximately $0.50 each, meaning that single cup of coffee costs roughly a dollar.

A cup of Aladdin specialty grade coffee brewed at home, on the other hand, costs approximately $0.25!

Quality

Despite slick marketing campaigns and luxurious packaging, the quality of single-use pod coffee simply does not measure up to ground coffee.

The machines themselves are not built to produce great tasting coffee.

To produce the best possible flavour, coffee grounds should be in contact with hot water for about five minutes. Single-use pod machines are designed to brew coffee in seconds, leading to a weak and less flavourful cup of coffee.

By the time the coffee gets to you, it has already begun to go stale. Coffee is freshest right after it’s roasted. When you buy a coffee pod, the coffee is roasted, packed, stored in a warehouse, shipped to the grocery store, then it sits on the shelf before finally being brought into your home.

When you can get a fresh, organic, fair-trade, specialty-grade coffee for less than a pod, why wouldn’t you?

Make the change today with the smooth, robust flavour of this Sumatra Dark roast.

Coffees from this region are appreciated for their robust body and their smooth and earthy flavours. They are considered among the best of the world.

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