Keurig Coffee Maker - Ultra B50 1-Cup Review

I don't know how it happened, but I ended up being one of the few adults I know who isn't completely addicted to an early morning cup of coffee. It's a freakish thing. When I was five I drank my dad's leftover coffee after he rushed off to work, but somewhere between five and twenty-five, I lost my taste for the stuff as a part of the morning routine. An evening coffee drink? Sure. Mornings? Blech.

I did, however, marry into a coffee addicted household. My husband can't get going without his cuppa joe so we purchased the Keurig Ultra B-50 coffee maker for his morning jolt and my occasional evening brew. We have owned the Keurig for well over a year and it's performing as wonderfully today as it did fresh out of the box.

Designed for at-home use, the Keurig Ultra B-50 sets up in a snap. Making coffee is equally as simple, a blessing for me since I've never properly learned how to brew a good pot of coffee. The Keurig takes special "K-Cups", which are simply cup-shaped coffee pods that you pop into the brewer's flip-up receptacle. Once the K-Cup is inserted, you merely select a cup size from the LCD panel on top of the brewer, press a button and wait for your coffee to finish brewing, about thirty seconds later.

The Ultra B-50 features a water receptacle on the side that lets us brew several cups of coffee before requiring a refill. It also has a timer so that the water is ready and heated for our morning rush out the door. My husband, the coffee snob in the family, finds the coffee drinkable, but not "great". He prefers the darker blends of coffee. I like the quality of the lighter, flavored coffees.

We've only discovered a couple of small drawbacks to owning a Keurig. The brands of coffee that you can purchase in pre-made K-Cups are limited. Recently a "My K-Cup" refillable product has become available, that lets you insert your own coffee into a plastic holder for use with the Keurig. My husband loves it.

The other drawback? This coffee maker does only one thing well: make a single cup of coffee. Which means that we still require another coffee maker in our home for when we entertain or have family and friends over to visit. After three days at Christmas of listening to the Keurig churn constantly between the hours of 7am and 10am while my husband rushed about making coffee for everyone, I had the inspiration to buy my husband a new 10-cup coffee maker to supplement the Keurig for family gatherings. It was a most welcome gift.

Still, for the other 360 days of the year, the Keurig's our "go to" coffee maker, for its versatility and ease of use. If you need just one cup a day to get you out the door, I can highly recommend the Keurig Ultra B-50.