2008 VIP
mrkstvns
Austin, TX

Horrible Coffee, Horrible Waste, Horrible Costs

1 star rating

a coffeeholic, not suckered by stupid marketing, a thinking man
Cons
    cheap construction, WILDLY overpriced, makes thin, weak, watery coffee, generates unnecessary trash, WILDLY overpriced consumables

MAR
25
2008
If you really, REALLY do love a good cup of coffee, run, don't walk, as far, FAR away from any Keurig coffee maker as you can possibly get. They are the worst "innovation" in coffee making to have ever disgraced the shelves of your local cooking store, and the Elite B40 is a case in point.

The Elite B40 coffee maker costs $100 to begin with. And that is for a very small unit that's of no higher quality than your basic $20 4-cup maker sold at any department store in America. It has a sleek black and fake chrome look to it with very simple operation...it's almost just as easy to use as every other basic coffee maker on the market. The high cost is totally unjustified, since the only real difference between this and any other unit is that it uses what Keurig calls a "K-cup system".

If you're unfamiliar with the K-cup concept, it is a way for Keurig to rip-off consumers, charging many, many times what their el cheapo quality coffee is worth. It fools easily fools the weakest minded consumers who don't notice little details like the unit pricing. If you visit your friendly, discounted Target store, you'll notice that a 108-count box of Green Mountain brand K-Cups costs $59.99. Heck, even the basic sampler size pack is $19.99. And note well the net weight of what you're really getting. See it!?!?! That $20 box of K-cups contains a whopping 5.75 ounces of coffee. Just in case you are as math challenged and logic impaired as most Keurig customers, that works out to a mere $60 per pound!!! Or to slice it another way, about 15 times what coffee of this quality level is worth.

A wide variety of flavors are pre-packaged in K-cups, and although some of the flavors are fairly well balanced, they all suffer an amazing ability to produce horrible coffee. Even the BOLD varieties tend to make thin, watery, insubstantial coffee that tastes weak and wimpy. I have yet to taste any variety of K-cup produced coffee that is even CLOSE to the quality of the lightest Starbucks coffee. An easy way to spot the people who don't know beans about good coffee are to look for the people who tell you the Keurig coffee makers produce "good" (or even more fancifully, "gourmet") coffee. The only good thing I can say about Green Mountain, Gloria Jeans, or any other brand of K-cup packaged coffee is, "at least it makes 7-11 coffee good by comparison".

Not only is the coffee bad to begin with and horribly overpriced to boot, it's also the most environmentally hostile way to possibly make a cuppa joe: the whole K-cup concept is nothing but an exercise in waste and pollution. The K-cups are plastic just waiting to be dumped into a landfill. Although Keurig does sell an overpriced reusable cup, most people don't use them because their "convenience" argument is based on just throwing away all the unnecessary plastic crap that they generate. The box looks big, but contains next to no real coffee. It's inefficient and creates many times the trash of coffee sold in convenient-sized 1-pound or 2-pound bags.

Although their Elite B40 coffee maker is one of the cheapest products in their company's lineup, it's a piece of junk that's wildly overpriced, makes thin, weak, nasty tasting coffee, requires outrageously overpriced consumables, and pollutes the planet too. People who buy Keurig coffee makers are wasteful slobs with no taste and no common sense whatsoever. Where I come from, we have a word for Keurig customers, and it rhymes with "schmidiot".

Last edited on Mar 25, 2008



I_thumb_down Keurig Elite B40 Coffee Maker is not recommended by mrkstvns

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SpacemanSpiff wrote on Apr 2, 2009 at 7:52AM

I couldn't agree more! I received one yesterday as a Birthday gift from my wife. I am a coffee addict and enthusiastically anticipated being able to brew a single cup, on demand. If the net cost of the coffee is even something you are interested in quantifying...then don't consider a single brew machine.In my case...not a factor. Then the reality set in..I found I could brew 12 cups of coffee in my Cusinart coffee maker in the same time it took for the "Big K" to pump/heat/brew my 7.5 ounces of deep mahogany swill. That was, arguably, the worst cup of coffee I have ever consummed...and I have enjoyed instant coffee mixed into heated ditch water in some of the worst places on earth. The real reason I am here and leving this comment is because of the unbelievble annoying NOISE emitted from the water pump. As a consultant (33 years) and graduate engineer...I feel qualified to say that Keurig should have NEVER released this product. What criteria could they possible use to determine acceptable performance? My worthless call to Customer Service resulted in a "highly trained" customer service representative suggesting that I place the machine on several mouse pads of a stack of placemats. I closed the the call with free consulting advice..."Tell Keurig CEO Nick Lazaris to add Keurig mouse pads to the already too large shopping guide packed with their machine" Certified "JUNK"

tericuff wrote on Jun 17, 2008 at 8:38PM

mrkstvns's review is very disappointing however everyone has to have their own opinion

Jo wrote on Mar 25, 2008 at 10:00AM

Wow and I've wanted one. Thanks for the review. I'd be better off with a cheapy that one of my friends bought. jo

5 star rating
"A perfect cup of coffee - EVERY TIME!"
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