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

Refilling Keurig K-cups

(Update: I have published a summary of all my posts on Reusable alternatives to K-Cups, which includes a detailed table of the features of the Keurig My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter, the Ekobrew Refillable Cup for Keurig K-cup Brewers, the Solofill Refillable Cup For Keurig K-Cup Brewers, the My-Kap Kaps for refilling K-Cups, and the EZ-Cup refillable cup for Keurig brewers).

Keurig single-cup coffee brewers are handy for certain applications.  I work in a university building where lots of staff and volunteers have access to the coffee pot.  Certain times of the year, my crew and I spend about 15 minutes of every hour in the building.  If we brew a pot of coffee, someone else inevitably drinks most of it before we get back at the kitchen, or our stints in the field result in coming back to cold or over-cooked coffee. The Keurig is a perfect solution — brew a very quick, fresh single cup when we have our little interludes.

The issue we have is with excess packaging. The used plastic K-Cups are not recyclable.  I wrote to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which owns a large share of Keurig Corp. and manufactures K-Cups, regarding plans to make the K-Cups recyclable. They replied:

“We are not satisfied with the current environmental impact of the K-Cup packaging used with the Keurig system.  We have signed an agreement with one of our materials suppliers for the Keurig K-Cup product to jointly fund research on the application of renewable materials for the K-Cup.  One option may be to develop a brewing system that uses a photo-biodegradable K-Cup with a non-metalized lid.”

Bravo to Green Mountain that they are actively pursuing a solution! But then, this company does so much for sustainability, their efforts don’t surprise me.

Reuse is a form of recycling, so I decided to find out if I could refill a used K-Cup with my own coffee successfully.  It’s pretty straightforward — just make sure that the product used to reseal the cup is Glad’s Press and Seal.  This stuff is not like regular plastic wrap, and works like a charm.

Here’s how you do it:

  1. Get all the foil off the rim of your used cup, and make sure the rim is dry before applying the Press and Seal.
  2. Try to rinse as much coffee out of the filter in the cup as possible.  It doesn’t really seem to matter too much whether the coffee is rinsed out when it’s still wet or if it’s dried out.
  3. Grind the coffee very fine — there is not much time for the water to soak the grounds and you need as much surface area exposed as possible.
  4. Fill the cup to about 3-5 mm from the top with ground coffee — you can tap the cup to settle the grounds, but don’t pack it down. I tried it and it created overflow due to the force of the water going through the grounds. This amount of coffee is probably similar to the extra bold K-Cups,which have more coffee in them than the regular K-Cups; I personally find most of the regular ones produce pretty insipid brew.  Likewise, although I prefer light roasts, they come through as weak in the Keurig, so darker roasts are best.  But experiment — your tastes may vary. Overall, I use the Keurig for convenience — it’s not for outstanding coffee, no matter what you use.
  5. Cut two small squares of Press and Seal per K-Cup.  I’ve tried both one and two layers, and two work better.  The squares only need to be large enough to overlap the edge and stick to about 10 mm of the sides of the cups.
  6. Holding a square taut, place it on the top of the K-Cup so it is nice and tight, and press along the rim.  Then seal it along the underside of the rim and the side of the K-Cup.  Repeat with other square.
  7. Viola! Ready to use.  Important: when you place the refilled K-Cup in the brewer, make sure to line up the hole on the bottom with the pin in the brewer.

The limiting factor in the number of times a K-Cup can be refilled is clearly the inner filter. Eventually, it will get too clogged with fine particulates; I suppose it might also rip or get a hole. Mis-aligning the bottom hole (step 7) will also retire a K-Cup.  So far, I have reused a single K-Cup 5 times without any noticeable change in the flavor of the coffee.

Refilling K-Cups in some ways defeats the convenience of the Keurig system, but since I grind coffee daily at home, refilling a couple of cups is no big deal.  Green Mountain also sells a product called My K-Cup, a plastic and mesh filter assembly for ground coffee that is used in place of a K-Cup.

Finally, my spent K-Cups are also repurposed, seeing a new life as filter cups for my pitfall traps, where insects collected in fluid-filled containers inserted flush with the soil must be strained and dried before being examined and identified. K-Cups work perfectly for this, as the bug-containing cup at left shows.  Samples can even be stored in them, as the cups are also easily labeled with a felt tip marker.

I imagine you could also start seeds in the K-Cup (the space between the bottom of the filter and the bottom of the cup could hold some water which would wick up the filter, and the hole in the bottom would provide drainage). Creative types could find other uses for old K-Cups.  Feel free to post them in the comments!

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews

Coffee review: Higher Ground Roasters

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #23.

Higher Ground is an Alabama roaster that carries only certified Fair Trade, certified organic, and shade grown coffee. Shade coffees are not labeled certified, although some do come from Smithsonian (SMBC) certified sources; unfortunately the fee to use the seal can sometimes be cost-prohibitive to a small roaster in the same way that the certification fee can be unaffordable for farms and co-ops. Because so few Rainforest Alliance certified coffees are also certified organic and Fair Trade, as well as the company being uncomfortable with some of RA’s certifying practices, these have not been on the offering list.  Instead, Higher Ground partner Alex Varner visits source farms (and knows his birds, by the way!), or relies on his importers to evaluate shade. He is actively working to find ways to improve this system, and is surely one of the most committed-to-sustainability and candid roasters I’ve ever corresponded with.

Higher Ground is a member of a number of environmental/sustainability organizations, including 1% For The Planet. Among other initiatives, they also offset their energy usage by purchasing renewable energy, use 100% recycled materials and biodegradable corn plastics as often as possible, and donate their waste as compost to local organic farms (I presume that means coffee waste!). They partner with a number of non-profit organizations, donating a good chunk of the proceeds from special-label blends for fundraising. I am extremely impressed with this company! (More on Higher Ground: Cup of coffee with a conscience — Birmingham Business Journal.)

We tried three of their coffees.

Bolivia. This medium roast is from the familiar CENAPROC co-op in the Yungas region. This co-op has twice won the Cup of Excellence, and grows on land once used for coca production on the eastern slopes of the Cordillera Occidental. The co-op has fewer than 90 members, and farms are typically about nine hectares.

Remember that our most highly-rated coffee was Bolivian, the beautiful Cup of Excellence winner Calama Marka, from Paradise Roasters. We’ve yet to find a coffee that really holds a candle to that, but it seems most Bolivians we try are real winners, as was this one.  It had awesome chocolate tones not only in the French press, but even when brewed in our crappy office pot. The first sips were quite bright, then it settles into a mellow medium-bodied cup, with a lingering sweet candy-like aftertaste.  Can coffee be yummy? This is. 3.5 motmots (one person scored it 4.5!).

Mexico. A light roast, hailing from the ISMAM (Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla) co-op in Chiapas, made up of over 1200 Mayan farmers. Average coffee plot size is less than four hectares.  Fair Trade and organic certification has made a huge difference in the lives of farmers in Chiapas, an acutely impoverished region.  The higher prices paid for their beans has paid for schools and other community projects, not to mention boosted personal income. Benefits to the environment include improved soil conditions, as well as protecting the forest, because traditionally coffee in Chiapas is grown under native trees.

Mexican coffees are usually pleasant and enjoyable, and this was typically simple and smooth, with mild caramel and vanilla undertones. While not complex, a couple of us found it evocative, bringing to mind a bright, fresh spring morning filled with soft bird song.  In fact, this is our new gig — to match a bird song to the coffees we review. My immediate response to this was House Wren — but not the energetic full song, but the gentle murmurings of a contended wren rummaging through the fresh spring shrubbery. A perfect breakfast coffee, 3 motmots.

Peru. This was a dark roast from the CACVRA co-op (Cooperativa Agraria Cafetalera Valle Rio Apurimac), grown in the Apurimac River valley. The Apurimac is one of the headwaters of the Amazon, and this is considered the southern zone of coffee growing in Peru. This coffee comes from the co-op’s higher elevation farms, at 1300 to 1800 meters, from mostly small holders (less than five hectares), grown under mixed shade which includes various fruit trees.  I’ve cautioned that even organic Peruvian coffee may lean toward shade monoculture, but farmers in the Apurimac Valley are said to use an average of nine shade tree species on their farms. When Varner visited, he found some farms growing coffee under fruit and cacao trees in typical mixed family plots and others growing under various native tree species.

This coffee illustrated to me my complete transformation from a dark roast lover to a light roast fanatic. A year ago, I would have been crazy about this.  Today, I enjoyed it but my tastes have changed so much that I know I didn’t appreciate it fully. However, the folks who are into darker roasts were enthusiastic. The final tally: 2.75 motmots, higher from dark roast fans.

Higher Ground exemplifies the situation with sustainable coffee today. They are trying to minimize their own impact on the environment; striving to work with a hodgepodge of seals and lack of seals and searching for ways to improve transparency in this system; fostering relationships and understanding at the source; and providing great coffee.

Background information

Top 5 Indicators of Sustainable Coffee

Coffee is grown in over 60 tropical countries, with most of it still produced on small family farms, but adding up to tens of millions of acres. Coffee growing supports 25 to 100 million people around the world. In the last decade, a huge worldwide surge in demand for coffee has had two profound consequences.  It caused a rapid worldwide expansion in production, largely of cheap beans that flooded the market and contributed to plummeting prices. And in the rush to increase production, it caused a shift from traditional, sustainable coffee growing methods (with coffee plants grown in the shade of diverse native trees) to intense monocultures that require large inputs of fertilizer and pesticides which bring about a loss in biodiversity and quickly deplete the land.

If choosing sustainable coffee was easy for consumers, there would be no need for a blog like Coffee & Conservation. Here is a look at the top five indicators of sustainable coffee:

1. Certification. Because of the substantial costs of certification — to the farmer and/or the roaster — not all sustainable coffees necessarily carry a seal.  And if they do, it could be one of several. Here at C&C we have an excellent guide to the environmental standards of the five common coffee certifications. It includes links to more information and on the standards used by biodynamic farmers, Starbucks, and Nespresso. Meanwhile, here are three common certifications associated with sustainably-grown coffee:

  • If a coffee is certified as Bird-Friendly by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, it is grown under the most stringent environmental standards of any certification system, and it is also required to be certified organic. If you see this seal, it is one of the best assurances that the coffee was grown with biodiversity and sustainability as top priorities.
  • Organic certification, by the USDA and its accredited agencies, is an important indication that many (but not necessarily all) chemical inputs have been eliminated or reduced. Generally, coffee that is organic is grown under at least some shade cover (which preserves biodiversity).
  • Rainforest Alliance also has environmental criteria, but the standard has been seriously watered down in recent years and this certification is no longer assurance that coffee was grown under shade or in a way that is beneficial to birds or wildlife. Also, coffee may carry the seal and only contain 30% certified beans.

2. Country of origin. Some countries still grow much of their coffee under shade, preserving native forest and biodiversity and using few if any chemicals.  Other countries have removed shade trees or cut down areas of native forest and planted sun-tolerant coffee varieties.  These countries are more likely to grow shade coffee:

  • Mexico (also largest area in organic coffee in the world)
  • El Salvador
  • Nicaragua
  • Guatemala (Huehuetenango has the most diverse shade cover; other regions, especially Antigua, do not use as much high-quality shade)
  • Honduras
  • Bolivia
  • Papua New Guinea
  • Ethiopia (large percentage grown organically)
  • Peru (second-largest organic origin)
  • India

These counties are more likely to grow sun coffee, and unless they are Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certified, it’s probably best to avoid them:

3. Botanical variety. There are two species of coffee used commercially: Coffea arabica or arabica coffee, and Coffea canephora, or robusta coffee.  Arabica is high quality. Robusta coffee is nearly always low quality, mass produced in deforested sun coffee monocultures with lots of chemicals, and is used in most supermarket coffees. You won’t see “robusta” on the label, so look for “100% arabica.”

There are also many different cultivars of arabica coffee. “Bourbon” and “typica” are older types that need at least some shade, so seek those out. “Catuai”‘ and “Caturra” are varieties that are often grown as sun coffee.

Learn more about botanical varieties of coffee.


4. Roaster. Buy coffee from a small, specialty roaster. A good roaster develops a relationship with the farms and co-ops that grow their coffee — it’s in everybody’s best interest for the coffee to be grown sustainably. The farmer gains by having a reliable buyer and a safe, healthy environment, and the roaster gains by having a reliable source of quality coffee. A conscientious roaster will have very specific information on the precise origin of each coffee it sells, and you can determine how the coffee was grown to guide your purchase.

My list of recommended providers of sustainable coffee is at the bottom of every page here (click to refresh, there are more than what shows at one time; criteria for inclusion is here), with more on my interactive map of roasters. A list of online retailers that regularly sell Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center Bird-Friendly®-certified coffee is here.

5. Price. This is nearly a given: cheap coffee is not sustainable. Not for the farmer, not for the environment. People who are used to paying less than $5 a pound for grocery store coffee shudder at the idea of paying $10 or more for a pound of coffee from a specialty roaster.  Ounce for ounce, it’s still cheaper than a good bottle of wine or scotch or many other beverages.

The farmers that grow grocery store coffee get less than $0.25 a pound for it; obviously this is not a living wage. Impoverished farmers are more likely to exploit the environment, convert their coffee to other less ecologically-friendly crops, or abandon their land altogether (contributing to illegal immigration into the U.S. from south of the border). Coffee is often the most important source of income for nations that produce it; if it is no longer profitable, it creates social and economic crises, and impacts governments and democracy. (Read more about how cheap coffee contributes to poverty and why you should care here.)

And trust me when I tell you — you get what you pay for! A year ago you couldn’t have told me that there were so many incredible, distinctly unique coffees out there, an entire world to explore! We’ve only scratched the surface in our reviews.

Learn more in the corporate coffee category, in particular about the coffee crisis and why you shouldn’t buy coffee from the big commodity coffee providers.

~~~

Coffee drinkers have the potential to make a huge impact on the environment and economies of coffee growing nations. If we understand the stakes, we can make a significant difference, and enjoy our favorite beverage at the same time!

Certifications / Coffee news and miscellany / Organic coffee

Organic coffee safe for now

Last week I posted about the recent U.S. Department of Agriculture ruling which will require every farm in a cooperative to be inspected annually in order to receive organic certification. It was feared this would make organic certification too expensive for small farmers and reduce the amount of organic coffee on the market.

Yesterday the USDA issued a statement that the rules for organic certification will not change at this time, but that the matter will be discussed further in the fall and amendments to the rules are a possibility in the future.

Hat tip to Samuel Fromartz, who authored the original article at Salon and has been keeping up with the issue at his blog Chews Wise.