There's no question that if someone asks me what is the best way to make coffee, I am going to tell them with my Chemex. All of the expensive machines in the world can't match this elegant feat of simple engineering.
But I am not a coffee snob. Well, sort of not. When Keurig was still just a leased restaurant machine, they had no home version for their single-cup pods, I bought one from a restaurant sale. It was pretty expensive then but today you can get a home machine for around $150. So I was being a little coffee snobbish avant-garde in buying the machine in the first place but now I am the anti-snob, because single cup machines are gauche and a single cup brew from a pod is what I drink in the morning.
I'm not alone. While coffee revenue is going up, the purists who brew are plummeting. If U.S. coffee sales reach $11.7 billion this year, that will be up 11.4% from 2012 but single-cup coffee sales will have had a whopping 213% boost since just 2011. Roasted coffee, meanwhile, is projected to fall 2.7% during the same period. And actual coffee bean sales are falling. A single cup has no waste whereas lots of people brewed and threw out old pots of coffee they never drank.
But the snobs may not be losing ground, they are just being replaced by other snobs. Well-off young adults, 18 to 34 year-olds earning over $75,000 per year, drink single-cups 64% of the time compared with just 51% for those earning less than $75,000.
What single-cup brewers offer is consistency. While a barista may offer moments of brilliance, there are just as many disappointments.
Sales of single-serve coffee have tripled since 2011 By Quentin Fottrell, MarketWatch
