I have been making coffee in my Aeropress for 11 years now. Over five years ago I started grinding my own coffee beans with a grinder Mom gave me for my birthday. I usually get Eight o’ Clock whole bean Columbian coffee from Publix when they have it on sale for half off (which is at least once a month). It is really cheap that way, but good I think. Every now and then I try something different to make sure I’m not missing out too much.
I collect rewards points through Kellogg’s Family Rewards program, which lets me get free children’s books sometimes, or $5 Best Buy gift cards, and some other stuff. I eat a lot of cereal so I build up a lot of points. Recently they had a deal where if you bought 3 boxes of Special K cereal (which I buy all the time) you could get a 12-pack of K Cups coffee pods (a $7 value!). I don’t have a Keurig coffee maker and don’t really want one because of the cost and waste of the pods, but it was free. The brand is Green Mountain Nantucket Blend (mostly African and Indonesian, I think) and I have been really anticipating getting the coffee since I ordered it in January. The box arrived in the mail today. I opened one of the pods and put the ground coffee into the Aeropress to make a cup of coffee. Lately I have been making iced coffee with milk and sugar, so I made that. It seemed a little weak. I measured the weight of the empty pod and compared that to a full pod and found out there are 9.7 grams of coffee in a pod (looking later, the box says 9.4 g, so that is about right). The Aeropress came with a scoop for coffee which is 3 tablespoons. I measured the weight of my usual one scoop of beans and it was 14.7 grams. So no wonder the pod coffee tasted weak, it was using about 2/3 as much coffee. I could use two pods, but that would probably be too strong, or at least stronger than I am used to. I might try using 2 pods to fill one Aeropress scoop so I could do a better comparison and toss or save the leftover.
I could probably get a better deal on K cup pods, for instance Eight o’Clock pods are only $5.99 instead of $6.99 for Green Mountain at Kroger. And the 50% off price at Publix is very good (actually it looks like when Publix sells bags for Buy One Get One Free, they do the same for the 12-pack of pods), so if instead I compare the pod price to the current price of a bag at Kroger, $4.99, I get 21 servings per bag or $0.24 per cup using bagged coffee. The Eight o’ Clock pods would be $0.50 each, but I would need to make a smaller cup of coffee to get about the same strength. A more honest comparison would determine how many 9.7 g servings (one pod) are in a bag, which would be 32 or $0.16 per cup for the bag coffee, about a third of the cost for the same kind of coffee (though I pay a few cents for a highly overpriced Aeropress filter). So I don’t think I will switch from the pods, but I am happy to try the Nantucket blend, which uses different beans than I am used to.
For my next cup of coffee, I used about a pod and a half of grounds to fill up the Aeropress scoop and the coffee was fine. Not that different than what I am used to, but by adding milk and sugar and drinking it on ice, the flavors aren’t going to come through and I’m not good at distinguishing subtle tastes anyway. It is easier than grinding the beans like I usually do, which takes a couple of minutes (about the same amount of time to bring a cup of water to a boil in the microwave). I saved the leftover half pod in a small container and used it the next day with another pod. That’s better than wasting two pods on a cup of coffee. One good thing Keurig does is that instead of filling the empty space in the pod with air allowing oxygen to make the flavor go bad, they seal in 100% nitrogen which is pretty much inert.
Kellogg’s has continued to occasionally offer free K-cups coffee, though now they just mail you a coupon and you can pick your own version of Green Mountain coffee. I thought I had tried the variety called Dark Magic before, but when I did my usual thing and used 1 and a half K cups to brew my coffee, it was pretty intense! Looking at the box, each K-cup contains 11.4 g of coffee compared to 9.7 grams in a K-cup of Nantucket Blend. No wonder. I stuck to just using 1 K-cup once I realized that. I am not usually crazy about dark coffees because they taste burnt or sometimes like burnt cigarettes (Seattle’s Best). But Dark Magic was actually really good, although still bitter. I put a lot of milk and sugar and make iced coffee, so it just gives the coffee a little bite. So now I am looking for something like that in whole bean form that doesn’t cost too much. I bought a bag of dark coffee from Amazon and made by Amazon and it tasted pretty mild, but at least no off flavors. My usual brand, Eight o’ Clock, has dark roasts at my local stores, but these are pre-ground and I would rather get whole bean. Aldi has two whole bean options, but they are both medium roasts, though maybe medium-dark. Jeb drinks Don Pablo’s medium-dark which definitely has a little of that Dark Magic kick.