Coffee Pods and Machines: Are They Really Worth It?

We're coffee snobs around here. My husband and I have been known to drive fifteen miles out of our way on road trips to find a good cup of coffee; gasoline station coffee just won't cut it. Even in a snow storm on I-80 a few years ago we bypassed the Mobil station on the interstate and instead wandered off course to find a coffee shop where we could get our good drinks.

With our coffee snobbery firmly in place, we decided to try a coffee pod machine at home. In the end we tried two single serving coffee machines--The Senseo single service machine, and the Mellita One coffee pod coffee maker, and have settled down into coffee bliss with one, while the other found its way to my mother-in-law's home.

I found the Mellita One machine on sale at Target last year, for $9.99, and was able to buy a large box of clearanced One coffee pods on Amazon.com for an outrageously cheap price. The Melitta One was fairly complicated, and the pods--even those made by Mellita--never quite fit easily into the pod holder. When you use a coffee pod machine, you're making one cup of coffee at a time, and the machine is designed to quickly heat the water (which you pour into a holding tank, just like a regular coffee maker) and push it through the coffee pod, to brew a fresh cup each time. No coffee filters, no mess--just a perfect cup of coffee, one serving at a time, with a pod you throw away in the end.

The quality of the Mellita coffee was average; we weren't impressed. However, my mother-in-law, a woman in her 60s who isn't afflicted by coffee snobbery, loved the coffee and the machine, and readily took it when we acquired our Senseo coffee pod machine.