It was at a recent trade show for Specialty Coffee Roasters that during lulls of activity at our booth, I would wander up and down the aisles and talk to the other exhibitors, . It seemed like the attendees could be divided into two classes: those that saw single serve as an opportunity to expand their market and those that wouldn’t touch a pod with a 10 foot pole. When I asked why, the response was something along the line of “you can’t get a good cup of coffee from a pod” or “we would damage our reputation if we offered our coffee in single serve pods”. OK, but wouldn’t it be nice if a quality cup of coffee could be achieved that rivaled a pour-over?
Keurig
Keurig (as a representative example) is selling to a wide audience, and to achieve their price points they necessarily deal with large volumes, much of which will be stored in a warehouse until consumed. Moreover, this coffee is apt to degrade with time so using expensive varietal coffee makes no sense. Clearly the emphasis is on convenience.
Pour-over
In a pour-over, the coffee is ground fresh and loosely packed. The process takes about two minutes to reach the optimum extraction. To achieve that same sweet spot in a loosely packed pod, one must either use more coffee and/or resort to a finer grind. A survey of the popular pods indicates about 8 grams of coffee is used. Our high capacity pods hold up to 14 grams. To further increasing the percentage of dissolved solids, we resort to a slightly finer grind.
Testing and Results
In an informal test, we packaged 94.4 Kenya varietal fresh from the roast and compared it to a pour-over using the same bean. The result was the same with a slight edge to the pod.. This might be explained by the pod being packaged fresh from roast whereas the bean used in the pour-over was perhaps several days old.
While the above test was anecdotal, the results were encouraging. In the future we hope to conduct a more rigorous blind taste test and report the results in a later blog. In the meantime, if you have a favorite roaster who you would like to see package his/her coffee in pods, contact us and we will send them a sample package!
Gorby
(651) 408-5768