One of the reasons why we use a Keurig brewer is because of the consistency in the results of making a good cup of coffee. The machines provide a no fuss and no mess approach to making a good coffee, that is hard to beat and certainly cheaper than regular purchases from your local cafe.
So in addition to having great coffee through your K-Cup, and this is very much to taste, what other things can contribute to a great tasting coffee? Set out below are the things we try and get right for our coffee. Now, the list isn’t exhaustive, I’m sure we all have our own ritual.
Heating the Coffee Cup
We like to warm the coffee cup before putting the coffee into it; so we normally run a hot water non-K-Cup cycle through the brewer first. This does add time to making your coffee, but especially first thing in the morning we are potting around the kitchen and doing other things at the same time, like feeding the cat. She does become rather irritated at our distraction from the main function we should be serving in her life and that is feeding her. The heating of the cup does help the coffee keep its temperature once poured in. You will notice at good cafes you visit they do this.
Cleaning of the K-Cup Portion Holder
The portion holder doesn’t get that dirty, but we find that over a period of time a good clean helps to ensure we are getting the best coffee brew from the K-Cup. In particular it is important to pull the holder apart and give the exit needle a good clean. People often don’t realize that Keurig’s have two needles, entry and exit. They generally know about the entry needle as you can see that sitting inside the top handle of the machine. And this seems to get a rather lot of comment online about cleaning, which we find is rather over done as this isn’t the needle that generally needs attention. But rather the exit needle, which tends to be out of sight and so out of mind. We cover the cleaning of both of these needles in our article which you can access here.
Water Quality
We are rather fortunate where we are with great tasting fresh water from the faucet. And we do use the water filter unit in the water reservoir. It is generally recommend to replace the filters inside this assemble every two to three months, this of course does depend on the level of containment that they have to deal with. One thing to note with these filters is to fully submerge them in cold clean water before using them. This is quite normal for any water filter unit and needs to be done with these units to ensure they work properly in your Keurig. Check out our section here for a brief rundown on installing these units.
So we don’t tend to worry about using bottled water in making our coffees. However, friends of ours do and say it makes a significant difference. Mind you the water where they are does have a distinctive taste and this does come through in the coffee.
So these are the three steps that we take in making our regular Keurig coffee drink at home. Let us know what works for you, we would love to hear from you.