I love my Senseo single cup coffee maker. For one or two cups, it is more convenient than making a pot of coffee, and the coffee tastes better.
This machine uses coffee "pods", similar to tea bags. At about 35 cents each, they are a bit pricey but a lot cheaper than the popular Keurig K-cups.
It seemed to me that I should be able to construct my own pods using ground coffee and coffee filter paper. My attempts to do this were spectacularly unsuccessful. It appears that this machine is more complicated than it looks. Rather than just dripping hot water through the coffee like a Mr. Coffee machine, it forces the water through the coffee under high pressure. With a less than perfect pod, this can lead to serious unintended consequences.
My next thought was to buy a refillable pod. An Internet search came up with a product called a Coffee Duck. This is a device that replaces the pod holder in the Senseo machine. But rather than holding a pod, it needs to be filled with ground coffee. I bought one from Amazon.
The Coffee Duck worked fairly well, confining most of the coffee to the machine and the cup. But I was not too happy with the taste of coffee made from grocery store ground coffee. It was not as good as what I used to get from the pods, and certainly not as good as Starbucks.
I bought a pound of beans from Starbucks and a burr grinder from Target, and experimented with grinding my own coffee for the Coffee Duck. After some trial and error with the degree of fineness, I got reasonably good results, at least as good as coffee from the pods.
That raised the question of how the cost of Starbucks beans compares to the cost of pods. So I kept a record of how many cups we got from the first bag of beans. (Note: This is research, not OCD.)
We bought the first bag of Starbucks beans for $11.95 on May 4, exactly one month ago, and got 69 cups of coffee from it. That comes to about 17 cents per cup, or about half the cost of pods.
Conclusion: Go with the Starbucks beans.
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