CHAPTER 14

What’s Next for Coffee for One?

Ensuring Quality Control

Nothing stays the same and this is certainly true of how coffee drinkers brew their coffee and the form that coffee can take. Ensuring that the quality of single-serve coffee continues to improve is something that Coffee Enterprises’ Spencer Turer knows about firsthand. “I think over the years we’ve probably tested dozens of brands in the single-serve category,” he said. He referred to a project that Coffee Enterprises did for the National Coffee Association. They tested a 100 percent Colombian product in every single-cup brewer that was on the market at that time, doing a compare and contrast. Every month, Turer commented, there are new products coming online. There are numerous roasters getting into Nespresso-type pods and Coffee Enterprises has been doing a lot of testing for products in that platform. “I would be surprised if there’s any respected brand or respected coffee brewing platform that we have not tested in the past,” he said.

As for different uses that could be in the future for single serve, Turer said they are under confidentially agreements, but he can say that advancements are being made in brewing technology on the single-cup platform. “There [are] new developments in different types of brewers,” he added, “and there’s also a lot of interest in the single cup for high quality tea as well as cold brew products and trying to figure out how to capture the iced coffee, cold brew coffee trends, into consumer appliances and single cup machines.”

An Unexpected Side of Single-Portion Coffee

Just because something is a bit unusual or unfamiliar doesn’t mean that someday it won’t be a part of everyday life. Remember all the gadgets that seemed preposterous in any number of movies about the future? For example, enough of the then-futuristic devices seen in Back to the Future are now in use that we should keep an open mind about ideas or breakthrough products that might seem too wacky at the moment.¹ Sometimes the outlandish prototype evolves into something more manageable, like how designers view what they show in fashion shows as being more directional than what will actually be worn.² Sometimes, a translation is involved. There are, of course, always exceptions. Here is a look at some coffee- centric products in various stages. How about chewable coffee? Not those dry, chalky coffee tablets. The Mintel 2017 Trends Report said: “For those who are extremely short of time in the morning, Go Cubes are gummy coffee bites made with real cold-brew coffee.”³ As the chewable coffee option’s website says, “GO CUBES are the future of coffee. GO CUBES combine the kick of coffee with the relaxation of green tea. And instead of putting your coffee in a cup, you can put it in your pocket, for performance on the go.”

Each single GO CUBE has a half a cup of coffee (50 mg caffeine) and nootropics, so you know how much caffeine you are getting. Each pack comes with an assortment of three flavors: Mocha, Pure Drip, and Latte.^{4, 5}

How many GO CUBES should you eat at a time? The site recommends going by how many cups of coffee you usually drink at a time, and over time. The caffeine charge from a serving should last between four and five hours.

For another take on coffee as a beverage, there is Cafe from Soylent™ (Yes, like the portmanteau word—from soy and lentil—that appears in Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! But Soylent Green, the film adapted from that novel, has a more sinister definition of the concoction).

This Soylent is a food technology pioneer that produces “convenient, complete foods designed to provide maximum nutrition with minimal effort.”⁶ In the case of Soylent Cafe, you can have your breakfast and drink your coffee, too, all at once—in one bottle. Their Cafe Coffiest and Cafe Vanilla, for example, contain real, lightly roasted coffee, according to their website.

A new venture by the name of Goat Story has designed a smart coffee brewer that combines traditional coffee brewing methods with the newest technology. The Gina has a built-in smart scale that ends the impreciseness of getting just the right amount of ingredients. This coffeemaker is connected to a mobile app. It tracks your brewing data and pilots you through the brewing routine. When you have finished, you can save your brew recipe and share it with your friends and family and other coffee lovers.

With Gina, you can choose from three different brewing methods—pour over, immersion, or cold drip. All you have to do is point the control to the correct amount of water flow. They also have an unusual-looking vessel, shaped like a goat horn, for carrying around and drinking your coffee. The company’s website says this is in honor of the goat that discovered coffee.⁷

Here is a bit of an unexpected coffee-centric product from the United Kingdom, courtesy of the 2017 Trends Report, the Barisieur. Try to envision this. It is an alarm clock, yes. But it is an alarm clock designed to wake up the sleeping individual with the soothing sound of boiling water and the invigorating aroma of coffee (or tea, if you swing that way). The product is still in the design stage but it seems like it could definitely be an option for those who want to open their eyes and other senses along with the much-needed preparation of coffee. Everything would, of course, have to be prepared the night before, but that is not so difficult. There is a place for the beaker of water and siphon, the coffee cup, and the coffee-filled filter, all atop a timepiece that looks something like a clock radio from the 1970s.^{8, 9} Sounds like a very pleasant way to wake up. As long as you don’t absentmindedly try to hit a snooze button. Ouch!

As if automated coffee brewers weren’t enough, there have recently been several stories about Robot Baristas. There they were in January 2017 at the Consumer Electronics Show, a Bosch cappuccino robot and a Denso coffee robot rivaling at a battle of the barista robots to see which could make the best coffee drinks. They did rather well. These do not seem to be electronics show gimmicks. San Francisco has a Robotic Café, Café X, which was started after the now CEO realized that much of the work that baristas do could be done by a robot.¹⁰ It all seems to be working.¹¹

Reconciling Single Serve with Brewing by the Pot

But back to the human way of brewing coffee. There seems to be a place for many brewing methods. After all, who has the luxury of a completely controlled or set-in-stone day or night? Sometimes we need and/or want one option for brewing coffee, and other times we need or want another method. Sometimes you feel like a single serve, sometimes you feel like a pot. Sometimes you want a quick fix and other times you want to be immersed in a more complex preparation.

For coffee drinkers who want a brewer that gives them more of a choice about not only what constitutes single serve, but also adjusts to the way they want to make coffee on any given day and in how large a quantity at a time, there are different types of brewers, from lower tech to ultra tech. Some brewers are giving coffee lovers the option of what method to use to brew a cup of coffee. Or a pot of coffee. From the same machine.

Spinn and BUNN coffeemakers offer a choice of brewing methods, serving coffee pods or ground coffee. These are two very different types of brewers, even just considering price point.¹²

BUNN’s Single Cup My Café brewer takes single pods of various forms, yet it also allows the coffee lover to use ground coffee.¹³ The brewer comes with separate drawers that work with either ground coffee, pod, or plain hot water for any other type of beverage, such as tea.

Spinn, which invites you to “Elevate Your Coffee,” is a bit more complicated. And, according to their website, a lot more rewarding. The brewer grinds the beans, makes a pot of coffee, a single cup, or an espresso, and uses Wi-Fi so the coffee drinker can control everything with their phone. According to their site, Spinn has connected features and a worldwide network of coffee roasters. The proprietary app allows users to precisely control every aspect of the brewing process or they can allow Spinn to handle the details with preprogrammed recipes and brewing methods recommended by professional roasters and baristas around the world.

When it comes to coffee, some folks like to make a pot of coffee because there is the potential for more people to enjoy it and it is available if someone else stops by. That same person will have a single-serve brewer and can honestly tell guests when one asks for regular coffee, and another has to have decaf, and still another can drink only tea, that it is no problem—they can have any of these selections and it is no bother.

As long as the people behind the single-serve method keep working toward a balance with the environmental issues, and everyone makes the conscious decision to choose fair trade, direct trade, and any other means of providing fairness to the coffee producers as well as the environment, choosing how we brew our coffee can safely and simply be a matter of personal preference.

The National Coffee Association’s 2017 Coffee Drinking Trends report indicates that the coffee market is responding to the needs of a new generation and the impact of advancements in technology and coffee brewing. Keep finding new ways to brew and enjoy coffee. Life happens, as the adage goes, but coffee helps.

Tom Squitieri is an award-winning foreign correspondent, educator, father, poet, and star gazer who has enjoyed, brewed, been fueled by, and delighted many with coffee on all seven continents.

“One of the favorite stories I wrote from the Bosnian war was when the coffee houses of Sarajevo started coming back to life,” he said. “Then the people knew the war was over.” As one person told him:

Coffee without fear is the best in the world.