JulieCraves

Coffee-related products / K-Cups/Keurig brewers: alternatives

Review: Melitta JavaJig

Yet another player in alternatives to K-Cups market, this one by the century-old German company Melitta.  As the story goes, the company was founded by the inventor of the paper coffee filter. The Melitta Javajig is, in fact, as straightforward, reliable, and effective as one would expect from this well-respected company.

I’ve reviewed other reusable-and-use-your-own-coffee K-Cup replacements. The JavaJig is so simple, easy to use, and easy to clean that you immediately wonder why someone else didn’t immediately come up with this design.

The JavaJig has three BPA-free plastic reusable parts, plus a fluted paper filter that looks like a mini muffin tin liner. You place a filter paper over the upside-down black frame, slip the green outer sleeve over the frame, turn it over, add coffee (Melitta suggests an espresso grind), pop on the cap, and you have a pseudo-K-Cup ready to place in one of the many original style (not Vue) Keurig brewers. You do not need to remove the brewer’s filter assembly as you do with Keurig’s My K-Cup.

After brewing, the coffee and filter can be composted, the other parts rinsed, and you are ready to create another cup. Not only is this nearly foolproof, but it is dead easy to keep clean and there is no hinged lid that might snap off, as has been reported with the ekobrew or Solofill. The package includes two units, and they are inexpensive enough to have spares on hand if you feel lids may go missing.

I was able to get 12 grams of finely ground coffee in the JavaJig with a little tamping, but not packing. This is more than the insufficient 9 grams used in a standard K-Cup. There is space between the bottom of the green filter and the filter paper (thus, it does not get pierced like the bottom of a K-Cup). I tried a little manipulation of the filter to see if I could get it far away enough from the needle not to pierce the paper, but still allow for more coffee. It was too difficult to get the paper to cover the prongs, so grounds would easily leak out. Using a piece of regular coffee filter failed as it was too flimsy. By this time I realized that this amount of farting around spoiled the ease of use of the JavaJig.

Using fine grounds in some other devices causes back-up or overflow, but not in the JavaJig. The finer grounds also allow for more extraction. This is important not only because the older Keurig brewers just don’t have enough room or a long enough brew time for proper flavor development, but because the entire bottom of the JavaJig is the paper filter. Under the pressurized brewing, water goes through the grounds and filter faster than it would in a more enclosed environment, such as in some of the other K-Cup alternatives. I tried the JavaJig with 9 grams of coffee and two filters, with a 6-ounce cup; it worked, but did not slow down the brew time enough to make a difference.

Ergo, the JavaJig makes a cup of coffee comparable in strength and body to a K-Cup or similar substitute. It just suffers from the physical limitations and brewing method of the Keurig brewers themselves.

However, the resulting cup is much cleaner than the alternatives that use metal filters, since the paper filter helps eliminate sludge and small fines (for purists who can taste paper — not that they’d be likely users of this product — the assembled JavaJig and filter can be rinsed before filling with coffee).

The beauty of the JavaJig, and the reason I recommend it over all the other devices I’ve used so far, is its simplicity, cleanliness, and excellent value compared to the others. The starter outfit includes two JavaJigs and 30 filters. The filters are around $0.07 each, versus $0.16 each for the other competitor that uses filters. It can also be used with loose tea with very good results.

Alas, this will likely be my last review of any sort of K-Cup or Keurig brewer alternative. I will post an explanation, as well as a summary, in an upcoming post.

Coffee news and miscellany

Sips: Brain dump from the hiatus

Yes, I’m still around. The last few months I have been not only busy with my real job, but also with buying a house, moving, and selling the old homestead. I’ve still been thinking about (and drinking) coffee; the print on the right is one of the first items I hung in the kitchen in the new abode.

Here is some of the coffee news I have been bookmarking and might have written about, had I had the time.

C&C will be getting back on track with research news, reviews, and the like shortly.

Corporate coffee / Dunkin Donuts

Dunkin Donuts coffee: still not eco-friendly

[There is a 2021 update incorporated into this post]

In 2009, I refuted the false statement made by Dunkin Donuts on Twitter that their coffee was shade-grown, and provided background on their coffee purchases. Let’s see if anything has changed.

According to their 2010 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, Dunkin Donuts purchased nearly 50,000 metric tons of green coffee in 2010. The report states that DD purchased 11,745 tons of Fair Trade (FT) certified coffee in 2010; it primarily (only?) goes into their line of espresso drinks. This amounts to about 23% of their purchases, but as we have learned, FT certification has little in the way of substantial, quantifiable environmental standards. They are so generic that I don’t include FT certified coffee in my assessment of eco-certified purchases.

On their website, DD mentions that a good percentage of Fair Trade coffee is certified organic, but never say that any portion of the Fair Trade coffee they buy is organic. I hate this kind of deceptive fact-dropping.

The report provides another example of resume-padding. It explains that back in 2008, DD provided a $70,000 grant to Rainforest Alliance, which helped three producer groups gain RA certification. There is no mention that DD purchases this coffee or that they intend to, only that they “are exploring additional opportunities to work with the Rainforest Alliance.” Let’s put the Fair Trade purchases and Rainforest Alliance grant in perspective. Dunkin Donuts boasts that as of the end of 2010, their FT purchases have returned just under $1.9 million to producers, impacting 30,000 people — cumulatively, since 2004.

2017  – 2021 update
Dunkin Brands, like many other coffee and restaurant companies, has undergone management reshuffling and changes in ownership over the past decade. The most recent sustainability report was dated 2017-2018, and is no longer available on their website, perhaps because as of the end of 2020, Dunkin was acquired by Inspire Brands.

This report noted:

  • A goal of sourcing 100% Rainforest Alliance certified coffee for their (one single variety) Dark Roast by the end of 2018. This variety was introduced by Dunkin in 2014 as 30% Rainforest Alliance certified, and the report indicates that it was still only 30% certified. Given that Rainforest Alliance’s allowing only 30% certified beans was highly criticized and appears to now not be permitted under RA’s new use-of-seal (and in fact, the seal no longer even uses the word “certified”), one wonders if Dunkin will bother sourcing any Rainforest Alliance associated coffee for this variety if they can’t promote it as such.
  • They announced a new goal of mapping their global coffee supply chain by the end of 2020. It’s never a good sign if a company doesn’t really know where their coffee comes from.
  • They noted having donated over $400,000 to Rainforest Alliance since 2010 (e.g., an average of $50,000 a year), and that they were now donating a percentage of the sales of each pound of Original Blend to World Coffee Research, and expected to donate $2 million to them through 2022 (e.g., an average of $400,000 a year). The WCR donation is the only goal the company commits to in their Sustainable Coffee Challenge profile.

Let’s put their financial contributions in perspective: their 2020 proxy statement shows that the 2019 salary of their CEO was $900,000 and his total compensation package was nearly $5.5 million! Total compensation of the top 6 executives for the year 2019 was over $13.2 million.

Nothing has changed, little effort has been made by Dunkin Donuts to source, sell, or meaningfully support sustainably-grown coffee. Furthermore, Inspire Brands is owned by the private equity firm Roark Capital, and therefore it’s likely we will not see much in the way of transparent metrics if we even see any sustainability reports in the future.

America, run from Dunkin.

Coffee-related products / K-Cups/Keurig brewers: alternatives

Re-purposing used K-Cups

Well-established fact: K-Cups are wasteful, and are difficult to and usually are not recycled. While there are many alternatives to them if you must use a Keurig brewer, some people will continue to use them.

I’ve provided instructions on how to refill used K-Cups; not a truly tasty option in my opinion, but no worse than the original. In that post, I even came up with an unusual use for them once you’ve decided they have no business being filled with coffee again.

I recently came across a post on “Can I Recycle This?” which had many ideas for re-purposing used K-Cups, including tiny freezer Popsicles,  bead storage, and many craft items. If nothing else, the whole site is worth a look for ideas on how to recycle or repurpose just about anything, from eyeglasses to medical tubing.