The Next Keurig Will Make Your Coffee With a Dash of "DRM"

FuzzNugget writes "Apparently seeking to lock competitors out of the burgeoning single-serve coffee market, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, maker of the popular Keurig coffee machines, will make their new machines work with licensed pods only. GMCR's CEO confirmed this in a statement: 'The much-anticipated ‘Keurig 2.0’ single-cup brewing system with ‘interactive readability’ (that doesn’t work with unlicensed/copycat pods) will offer such “game-changing functionality” that consumers - and unlicensed players - will want to switch.'"

Comments

Why?

[B33rNinj4]

Is it really so hard to just grind the beans and brew it yourself? I do this every morning.

Re:Why?

[jxander]

Downside : a normal coffee brew process generates 6-12 cups of Joe.

I guess we could all switch to a press ... but that's a bit messy and requires a stand alone heating method (I've not the space to keep a proper tea kettle on my office desk)

Keurig provides a clean single-cup solution

Re:Why?

[jratcliffe]

I can't imagine the people using Keurigs are actually saving any money over just going to a place like Dunkin' Donuts.

Keurig machine is about $120. The pods are about $0.65 each (less if you buy in bulk, or on sale, etc.). Small coffee at DD is $1.49. So, you're saving about $0.85/cup. You cover the cost of the machine after about 140 cups, so you definitely are saving money, even more if you're comparing to buying at Starbucks.

Re:Why?

[alphatel]

Downside : a normal coffee brew process generates 6-12 cups of Joe.

I guess we could all switch to a press ... but that's a bit messy and requires a stand alone heating method (I've not the space to keep a proper tea kettle on my office desk)

Keurig provides a clean single-cup solution

Are you on crack? We boil water in an electric kettle in 2.5 minutes, then pour into a press, and blammo, coffee. Keurig provides stupid, bland, watery goop that doesn't leave you with a bunch of grinds to clean up. However, it is neither greener, nor more efficient or even easier really.

Re:Why?

[EMG at MU]

Every coffee maker I have owned in the past 8 years has had a 1-4 cup option.

Re:Why?

[roc97007]

Downside : a normal coffee brew process generates 6-12 cups of Joe.

I guess we could all switch to a press ... but that's a bit messy and requires a stand alone heating method (I've not the space to keep a proper tea kettle on my office desk)

Keurig provides a clean single-cup solution

It creates a lot of waste, though. Trendy, but not very green. Kind of like the personal electronics industry.

Re:Why?

[carlhaagen]

It's about the cost, not the coffee or the effort. High price tags attract people who suffer the "spender syndrome" - dishing out a lot of money on something even plain or generic gives these people a feeling of being above the average, being set aside from the rest of us, of enjoying something that is "exclusive" only to their kind.

It's like when you find the exact same piece of generic furniture sold at (but not designed by) IKEA in some upstreet furniture shop - IKEA would call it "ROBUST" (or whatever) and sell it for $89, while the other "boutique" will call it "Multimedia bench in Nordic pinewood" at thrice the pricetag. People with money will buy it, and they will feel like they did a better deal than paying $89 at IKEA. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book of retail.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Starbuck's Via is also a clean single-cup solution. It is cheaper, smaller and more dependable than the Keurig machine. It is also a format that would be very hard to add DRM, etc.
Since Keurig wants to punish its customers, I will forgo their stupidity.
Keurig, like Beta, sucks.

Re:Why?

[wisnoskij]

Coffee makers make a little or as much coffee as you want. If you want one cup, only put one cup or water and a proportionate amount of grounds. And you have the added benefit that while brewing many cups of Keurig is a linearly hard problem (meaning that it takes 20 times longer to brew 20 cups), conventional brewing is not.
When you actually in a situation where you are brewing a lot of coffee, the conventional method becomes more efficient per cup.

Any computer programmer should be able to tell you which is the overall more efficient solution for the general situation.

Re:Why?

[jxander]

Does caffeine count as crack?

No electric kettles in the office. Fire hazard (also no space heaters, or various other personal electronics). They probably shouldn't allow coffee pots either, but YOU try to tell a hundred or so office monkeys that they can't have coffee. Good luck. I suppose I could get a nice tea cosy to disguise the kettle... but like you said, then there's the grounds to deal with. Shaking the press doesn't really get much out of it, and the fire marshal REALLY frowns on my compost pile in my office.

Keureg is hardly a perfect solution, but it's self contained and low maintenance.

Re:Why?

[CanHasDIY]

Plus, Coffee is high in antioxidants and good for your heart.

You realize that some antioxidants are actually carcinogenic, and that increasing your intake of antioxidants may not have any healthful benefit, but may in fact be harming you?

Re:Why?

[Charliemopps]

Um... Keurig sucks. I've had their coffee, it's expensive and tastes bland.

I've been using this for nearly a decade: http://www.amazon.com/Melitta-...

Taste great, 1 cup and I can use actual REAL coffee in it!
also, in a pinch you can make one of these out of a paper cup by poking holes in it and sticking in a regular old filter. The key is not to make the holes too big so the cofee steeps in the hot water for long enough.

Re:Why?

[Jarik C-Bol]

There is no cholesterol in coffee. Coffee does contain the molecule cafestol at about .06% by weight in each coffee bean, and cafestol has been correlated with increased 'bad' cholesterol, (but other positive health effects) and there has been no evidence that paper filters removes cafestol.

Re:Why?

[ynp7]

Any computer programmer should also be able to tell you that programming computers requires at least one full pot of coffee, making a Keurig the worst possible solution ever.

Re:Why?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

However, it is neither greener, nor more efficient or even easier really.

The "Green Mountain" in their company names refers to the piles of green dollars that they are making with this crap.

Re:Why?

[NikeHerc]

Keurig provides a clean single-cup solution ...

Keurig coffee costs about $30/pound in the local big-name grocery store. I don't know which is worse: DRM or hideously overpriced coffee. I would avoid Keurig like the plague for either reason.

Re:Why?

[ttucker]

I brew my coffee in a press every morning. It takes about 3 minutes to boil, brew, and clean, an AeroPress.

http://aerobie.com/products/ae...

Re:Why?

[ttucker]

He probably has a conical burr grinder, which requires no cleanup at all.

Re:Why?

[serviscope_minor]

Your forgetting the grinding of the fresh beans to put in that press.

I outsource the grinding of my coffee. I like to think it's brocken up into small pieces by an army of underpaid 3rd world seratshop labourers equipped with tiny mallettes. However, the blurb on the back of the many packets of ready-ground coffee do not confirm or deny this.

Re:Why?

[AmiMoJo]

I have not tried the Keurig but other coffee pod machines I have used and owned produce single cups of pretty damn good coffee, complete with frothed milk, and there is basically zero mess. No mucking about with filters and pots and grinding up beans and aerating milk and all that crap.

Okay, if I could be bothered I could brew a slightly better cup the traditional way. But with pods I have variety and almost zero effort, ideal for work. It's a very small compromise for a very big gain.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: Aeropress.

Re:Why?

[Greyfox]

Telling me I can't have my coffee in the morning is more of a fire hazard. I'll let you figure out why.

Re: Why?

[lecoupdejarnac]

Not only is it less green, but it seems most people don't think about the fact that these machines inject hot water through cheap disposable plastic cups. Lots of coffee machines have plastic parts that the hot water passes through, leaching endocrine-disrupting phthalates as it heats the plastic, right into your coffee cup. I'll stick with my metal water kettle and glass French press.

Re:Why?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

The way to avoid getting busted for having a coffee maker in your office is to put the coffee maker in an old computer case and run the plug out the back. One of my foreign coworkers has this setup in the server room he works in and in the 6 years I have known him no one in management or facilities maintenance has found it and no one else in the office will turn him in as they have started doing the same thing.

Horrible coffee

[Tough Love]

Coffee from pods is an affront dignity anyway. Get a proper espresso machine, or use a press.

Re:Horrible coffee

[sunderland56]

The regular Keurig machine makes filtered coffee; it is not an espresso machine. It makes coffee under pressure - more pressure than a drip machine, obviously, but much less than a proper espresso machine.

Yeah, I used to be a coffee snob too. The convenience of having a fresh, hot cup of coffee within a minute of stumbling downstairs every morning is worth a lot; not having to clean the grounds out of a french press is worth a lot too. Tastes vary, but with 50 or more varieties, there's usually something worth drinking. And, hey, convenience is what sells today; otherwise people would wait to get home to make their phone calls.

Re:Horrible coffee

[Ambvai]

Unless you hate the beans yourself and picked them out of the toilet before roasting them...

Well. You might also have to be a civet.

Re:Horrible coffee

[hey!]

It follows that blind people have never tasted proper coffee.

Re:Horrible coffee

[Adriax]

How about we just skip to the end of the chain?

Unless you created a pocket universe, started a creation event, formed stars from the resulting big bang cloud, fused a solar system worth of hydrogen into heavier matter, collected the matter into a planet in the perfect orbit, formed a primordial soup, created life from the soup, evolved the life to create coffee bean producers, harvested the beans, processed and roasted the beans, ground them, and finally pressed them yourself, then it's not proper coffee.

Re:Horrible coffee

[ebh]

You forgot all the steps it took to evolve the civets.

Re:Horrible coffee

[GreyWolf3000]

Cleaning the grounds out of a french press is awful. The aeropress completely fixes that problem.

That $30 Mr. Coffee Espresso maker...

[Anonymous Coward]

That $30 Mr. Coffee espresso maker that breaks down after two years actually makes better economic sense. I amortized the busted unit over two years (sometimes longer) and achieved $0.57/shot espresso. Keurig can suck it.

And just like Sony ...

[Jumperalex]

they deserve to fail miserably and go down in flames.

Really?

[Spad]

How much "game-changing functionality" can you really work into a fucking coffee machine?

Re:Really?

[nurb432]

To be fair, i think including DRM IS game changing functionality, just in a bad way. Lets hope it fails in the market and others dont follow down that path.

( I dont drink mud water and even i know this is a bad precedent )

Re:Really?

[jd2112]

How much "game-changing functionality" can you really work into a fucking coffee machine?

It turns into a coffee fucking machine. See how I did that?

So that's where the cream comes from...

Re:Really?

[CCarrot]

How much "game-changing functionality" can you really work into a fucking coffee machine?

To me, it sounds like they're planning on emulating Tassimo and their bar-coded brewing system, so the user can use 'milk' pods, tea pods, etc. and the system will brew them differently depending on the scanned and recognized contents (temperature for sure, pressure maybe? size? IDK)

What they seem to be 'forgetting' is that it was the flexibility and simplicity of the K-Cup system that actually gained them the dominant market share in the first place. Sure you can brew cappucinos and lattes with the Tassimo...but you can use your own favorite coffee brand with the Keurig My K-Cup reusable filter, freshly ground if that's your thing, or spooned out of a Maxwell House container to save money / env. wastage on each cup. Heck, I use my My K-Cup to hold loose tea leaves when I feel like a specialty cuppa...and they're good for two to three cups, too.

Nope, if they disable their whole BYO ability, I predict that they will wind up in a small corner of a niche market. If they relent and provide a My K-Cup equivalent for the 2.0...well, it's just barely possible that they could survive this bone-headed move, although people will grumble about not having cheap generics available. Either way, watch for stock prices to plunge.

Keuring coffee? No thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

I only drink certified genuine OEM HP inkjet printer ink. It's much cheaper than Keuring.

Not my cup of tea

[sideslash]

Reminds me of when Microsoft attempted to make their own (proprietary, locked in) java.

close the pod bay door, HAL

[Thud457]

Sorry Dave, I can't let you brew that.

I'd damn sure reprogram his memory banks with an very large axe for that kind of insubordination.

Re:Not DRM, just an old business model

[nurb432]

Not quite the same thing. This would prevent a 3rd party from making a cheaper cartridge for your razor.

Re:Anti competitive

[climb_no_fear]

That coffee is so bad, that it isn't legal in Europe anyway.

Re:Keurig patents expired...

[Macgrrl]

I'm really surprised to have gotten this far down the thread without anyone mentioning the parallels to ink jet cartridges with DRM. I'm looking at you Epson.

Re:Attention, MODS!

[Chysn]

> It is spelled *expresso* not *espresso*. I am from Italy. I would know.

The letter X isn't used in Italian. Seems like the kind of thing you would know.