Pods of Perfection

You can add Breakfast Blend and 10% Kona coffee to the choices for your Senseo single serve coffee maker. The ground coffee packed in pods offer an easy and quick way to brew a fresh cup of coffee anytime.

The 10% Kona Blend gives you just enough of the precious Hawaiian Kona coffee to make a memorable dark but not too strong brew that just might help you start your day. Or try the new Breakfast Blend—bright and at the same time mild. Either way, you can have fresh coffee one cup at a time and the pods are usually available in grocery stores.

Sensational Senseo

If you really enjoy drinking fresh coffee, every time, you may have considered buying a single-serve brewer. They do make sense. With this relatively new appliance, every time you make a cup of coffee you are getting a fresh, just-brewed cup, as opposed to a regular brewer that makes a pot or partial pot at a time and just sits there, festering, until you or the next person empties the container.

There are several choices out there so how can you find the one that best suits your needs, wants and desires?

Senseo (Say it slow…ly ) is one. The Senseo Supreme single serve coffee maker came on the market in Holland, 2001, and was introduced in the U.S. in 2004. Senseo was the first to offer a widely available, in-home single serve coffee appliance in the US.

It still is the single-serve coffee brewer of choice if you want to be able to easily find the coffee pods, as they are called—the little pouches filled with intoxicating ground coffee. You can also have them sent to you and the price for a subscription is less than for some other single-serve coffees.

Senseo is different from the other single-serve coffee makers in that it uses these pods--little compact (and non-messy) filter pouches that hold the coffee. Only Senseo offers coffee blends selected and roasted by Sara Lee’s Douwe Egberts brand, one of Europe’s premiere coffee brands for more than 250 years.

The elements of a perfect cup of coffee are all controlled within the Senseo system-- Water Temperature, Coffee dose, Amount of Water per coffee dosage, Optimal coffee extraction (primary extracts only) the time water is in contact with coffee grounds and Coffee grind size for optimal extraction.

The pod selections include the Sumatra Blend, an intense premium blend of Arabica beans selected from the mountainous regions of Sumatra; Brazil Blend, a subtle taste and soft finish provided by beans from Sul de Minas in Brazil, also known as “the coffee mecca”; Kenya Blend, composed primarily of slightly sweet beans with a soft finish and hints of fruit from the hills of Kenya; Espresso, a smooth and strong coffee with a fine crema layer; Cappuccino--a delicious cappuccino with a rich, creamy, frothy layer at home..to name just a few varieties.

There are two festive offerings for the holidays, in conjunction with Godiva: Godiva Chocolate Crème, a decadent pairing of rich Godiva chocolate with bold coffee taste, and Godiva Crème Brulee, a delicious marriage of sweet caramel and vanilla with the smooth taste of fine coffee. Both of these lavish coffees are perfectly delightful and add an exotic touch to the day.

The Senseo brewer has a slimmer, sleeker profile than some of the other single-serve brewers. And it is easier to clean, as well. In brief, it the single-serve coffee brewer of choice for the serious coffee drinker.

“For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”

The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/prufrock.html

Have a little more optimism than Prufrock. Don’t measure out your life in coffee spoons. Measure out your days with Senseo pods and Senseo delicious coffees.

http://www.senseo.com/

Coffee: By the Cup or the Pot?

What is the best way to prepare coffee? It may depend on how many servings you need at a time. If two or more people are going to be having a cup or mug or two at the same time, then it make sense t make a full or partial pot with a counter-top coffee maker or other full-pot at a time appliance.

But if you find you are wasting more coffee because only a cup at a time is consumed, (reheating cold coffee is okay once in a while and saving the excess to make iced coffee is fine up to a point) then perhaps a single cup coffee maker makes sense for you.

Yes, the trade-off is that you will have to buy one kind of single serving coffee pod –the one that matches your brewing machine. Keurig, Tassimo and Senseo all have specific coffee pods that go with their appliance.

But once you make the commitment there will be no regret.

We will running a comparison of the three brands.

Kaffe, Café, Coffee

There is little else like that first waft of fresh coffee in the morning. There are many excellent coffee brands to choose from and many methods of preparation—drip, cone filter (Melitta) single-cup servers (Tassimo, Keurig, Senseo).

We will discuss the different methods of preparation later but first, there recently was some slightly jarring news from Colombia: Coffee consumption is starting to outpace coffee production.

What does that mean for consumers? Will we be paying more? Will there be fewer choices? Visit http://www.coffeeresearch.org/market/coffeemarket.htm for a bit of a primer on the coffee market:

"There are two markets for coffee: the cash market and the futures market. The cash market is the market today. It is the price you would pay for coffee today if you could receive it today. The futures market is used to help determine the price for future deliveries. It is used to purchase a contract today to guarantee a future shipment of coffee. More importantly, however, the futures market for commodities like coffee is used to help protect against the wild variations that occur due to coffee market speculation."

Now about the recent news, according to Bloomberg.com http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601013&sid=aXxEc.GuoUb4

"Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The world coffee market will swing to a deficit of as much as 10 million bags next year from a surplus as demand growth outstrips production, said a growers group in Colombia, the third-biggest producer.
Global coffee output will exceed demand by 6-7 million bags this year as Brazil, the largest producer, is in the more productive phase of a two-year cycle, said Juan Lucas Restrepo, commercial manager at the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia. Lower Brazilian output and demand growth of 2 percent next year will cause the shortfall, he added. A bag weighs 60 kilograms (132 pounds).
'Overall consumption is growing faster than production, and global inventories will decrease further next year,'' Restrepo said in an interview in Tokyo Oct. 17. ``Growth is not coming from mature markets but from emerging markets.'

When Colombia completes a tree replanting program, the amount of coffee hopefully will increase.