POD MACHINES

Whenever we do a trade show, someone is bound to mention that they have “one of those cup machines.”  So, I grin and bear it, explaining to them that if they bought a good one it will have a cup that they can fill with good coffee.  Then they stand there with a blank stare or a puzzled expression because it was probably a discounted Christmas present from a box store and didn’t come with that little empty cup.   I came across this item about pod machines from Erin Meister, who trains baristas and inspires coffee-driven people for Counter Culture Coffee:

POD MACHINES

          “Lured by the convenience of having "coffee," "espresso," or "green tea" at your fingertips without any grinding or effort beyond the push of a button?  Know that the little plastic cups in the lazy Susan are but a pale comparison to their fresh counterparts, since you have very little control over when the coffee (or "cappuccino") was harvested, roasted, or even ground.  Coffee can taste much better than this, especially when you don't need to feel guilty about all those plastic K-Cups you're tossing into landfills.

          “To my mind, these types of convenience caffeine dispensers are little more than an update on the rest-stop coffee vending machine: Sure, the liquid spewed out is "coffee" by the strictest definition, but is it truly good for anything except preventing highway hypnosis?”

I agree. Erin!  Get a good coffee maker and get excellent coffee.  The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company can tell you where all our coffee is grown and, in some cases, can give you the grower’s phone number!

The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company is proud to provide the finest coffee available for you to stuff into that little plastic cup.  You’ll get a great cup of Joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that just might be high octane!   We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society!   If you are a Chai drinker, you’ll love the Coconut Spiced Chai we bring in from Honolulu.  The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company has updated our website with new prices, new products and more!  Go to www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com and look at the coffees.  Go to the “Chocolates” page and find our new Cowboy Coffee Choco-Drops, a coffee caramel smothered in milk chocolate and dusted in cocoa powder!  We have new Mescalero Morning Cowboy Coffee Candles on our “Bath Products” page, too.

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when your only source of nutrition comes from "Sweet & Low!"  So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!

GOT A SINGLE-SERVE COFFEE MAKER?

Jack Groot tweeted an online article that he found in the HuffPost:

If you use a Keurig single-serve coffee maker, or one of its many rivals, to brew your morning coffee, you're being gouged. According to a report from New York Times java expert Oliver Strand, the coffee in the machine's capsules comes out to a whopping $51 dollars a pound. That's more, he writes, than all but the highest-end beans produced by artisanal roasters like Stumptown and Intelligentsia -- let alone Folgers.

Time magazine notes that prices are a little lower if you buy the pods in bulk through a vendor like Amazon. But they're still much more expensive than even high-end beans.

The reason people -- especially young people -- are willing to pay that much is that single-serve makers are very convenient, and are often still cheaper than getting your fix at a coffee shop. They let you brew coffee extremely quickly and with no annoying cleanup afterwards.

The past few years have seen virtually every major coffee company rush to get a piece of the rapidly-growing single-serve coffee maker market. Anyone not marketing its own is probably making capsules for use in the market leader Keurig.  Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, for example, both signed on in August.

One way you can make Keurig coffee using normal-priced beans by using a product called "My K-Cup." It costs $17.95 on the Keurig website and is indefinitely reusable. That makes it good for the thrifty and the eco-conscious. But it's also worth noting that a big part of the reason people use a single-serve coffee machine is that it lets them avoid having to deal with the mess of wet coffee grounds.

The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company can fill up your K-Cup with our four brands of gourmet coffees.  You’ll get a real start on having a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your single-serve happiness during the day.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that will make you positively positive!  We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society! 

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when you go to AA meetings just for the free coffee!  So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!

COFFEE PODS PILING UP IN LANDFILLS

We never tire of complaining about single serve coffee pods that are claimed to be "recyclable" but are just a waste of aluminum and plastic, and, according to a blog at Treehugger,  are piling up in landfills across America. That is the environmental cost, but Smart Planet notes that there is a real financial cost too.   As I mentioned in a previous blog, the price of convenience of the pod coffee is as much as fifty dollars a pound.

The New York Times did the math:  For example, the Nespresso Arpeggio costs $5.70 for 10 espresso capsules, while the Folgers Black Silk blend for a K-Cup brewed-coffee machine is $10.69 for 12 pods. But that Nespresso capsule contains 5 grams of coffee, so it costs about $51 a pound. And the Folgers, with 8 grams per capsule, works out to more than $50 a pound. That’s even more expensive than all but the priciest coffees sold by artisanal roasters, the stuff of coffee snobs.

Cheap coffee can be found for about eight bucks a pound.  Our Café Pinon, a very special gourmet fusion coffee is about $21 a pound, the Official SASS coffee: Cowboy Action Coffee, a special proprietary blend is about $25 a pound and our Paniola 100% Kona, the finest coffee in the world, is about $32 a pound.  Paying $50 a pound for Folgers is just ridiculous. But apparently people under 40 don't notice because they think about coffee pricing differently than their parents; from Oliver Strand's article in the Times:  “Americans under the age of 40 are thinking about coffee pricing in cups,” said Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you asked my mother how much coffee cost, she would have told you that the red can was $5.25 a pound and the blue can was $4.25. If you ask people in their 20s and 30s, they’ll say coffee is $1.75 to $3.75 a cup.”

Next to Tasmanian ice cubes, coffee pods are about the most wasteful product I can think of, costing many times as much to make lousy coffee. Yet their sales are growing like mad, almost doubling in the last year to 7% of all the coffee made in America.

Go figure.

Do you want FREE coffee?  The very first cowpoke who saunters up to the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s Cowboy Coffee Saloon at Buffalo Stampede at SASS Founders Ranch in Edgewood, NM, Tuesday, April 17 through Sunday, April 22, and asks for it will get a free, that’s FREE bag of CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico…our newest fusion coffee made with a proprietary blend of central American coffees and real New Mexico pinon nuts!

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at twitter.com/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when you walk twenty miles on your treadmill before you realize it's not plugged in. So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!