Good… Great Specialty Coffee K-Cups
TL;DR: They hired me for a couple of hours of testing their product, but I have no skin in the game. I’m not an investor, I don’t get a percentage of sales, or have an affiliate link. If you have any interest in offering your customers K-Cup style pods for them to use at home, but you have concerns about coffee quality and the environment, you should check out https://yourbestcup.com/
The Longer Story
Who is “Best Cup”…
Khristian Bombeck got in contact with me not too long ago to tell me about one of their products called “Best Cup,” and testing these pods has been an interesting flavor journey for me. For those unfamiliar, Khristian and his brothers run a company called St. Anthony Industries. Their specialty is making high-end products for baristas and home baristas… in their own words, they:
“lead a team of coffee industry experts, artisan woodworkers, and award winning industrial designers to create beautiful, tangible solutions for the world’s finest baristas and coffee enthusiasts. Designing from core principles of simplicity, ease-of-use, and aesthetic excellence, the brothers of Saint Anthony supply the world with the finest tamps, distributors, and coffee accessories in the industry.”
Best cup is an extension of their work with St. Anthony Industries, where they seek to bring quality, excellence, and sustainability to the coffee pod industry. In their own words:
“We didn’t just want to make another pod. We wanted to fix everything wrong with them—from the weak flavor to the plastic waste. BestCup was born to change that.”
Me and K-Cups
General feelings about K-Cups overall: They damage the environment, they are low-quality coffee, they brew poorly, and they put microplastics inside people’s bodies.
I’ll admit first of all that I have limited experience with K-Cups and coffee pods in general. While I was working at Nossa Familia Coffee, we only very briefly took a look at doing it… But at the time, the intersection of environmental consciousness and quality simply was not there. This led us to investigating a number of other products to reach the single-serve convenience market, which ultimately weren’t the right fit… but that is a story for another day.
What I noticed primarily from my R+D work with pods was that they were extremely hard to do well. For one thing, I struggled to get good extractions from our coffee… everything was weak and under-extracted. As a result, all of the flavors were off… The only coffees that came out somewhat palatable were the darker-roasted coffees, which made sense since they were much more soluble than the lighter-roasted coffees. Ultimately, after dedicating work toward it for a week or so we decided it wasn’t for us.
I do have experience drinking less-than-desirable K-Cup hotel coffee… not a lot of experience, but enough to know what a baseline coffee typically tastes like from the pods. These are usually the result of me being on a trip with family, and needing to feed my caffeine addiction and desire for coffee aromas to get me moving in the morning. That said, the experience leaves a bit to be desired.
So… when Khristian approached me and asked if I would try their product, I was both excited and nervous. Excited because of the reputation of excellence I have come to expect from them and their products, but a little nervous that I had just agreed to ingest a decent amount of coffee through a Keurig machine.
Tasting Part 1
The testing I asked Khristian to help me do on the best cup product was as follows:
I wanted to taste the coffee from the roaster whole bean, with the pods made with the same coffee so I could compare them side-by-side.
I wanted to taste other roast levels as well so I could see how the pods did with various levels of roast (and differing amounts of solubility).
Khristian and Best Cup came through by sending me a Keurig brewer and a box of their pods for me to use with it. They sent me a bag of whole bean dark roast from one of their clients, dark roast pods to match it (made from the same roast batch), medium, and light roast pods as well, featuring a few different coffee roasting companies who are already their clients.
Here are the unedited tasting results:
K cup - Dark Roast Guatemalan
Aroma: chocolate, savory, full
Sip 1: Bitter, chocolate, savory, heavy body with slightly silty texture
Sip 2: Bitterness is a little lower than hot taste, chocolate, flat, heavy-bodied. Caramel and a little silt
Sip 3: Chocolate, bitterness is going way down. Flat, savory, chocolate, good body. Overall, very enjoyable.
Sip 4: Chocolate, a little acidity starting to come out, still slightly silty, but the body of the coffee is great.
Brewer
Aroma: mildly floral, subtle fruit, chocolate
Sip 1: Brighter acidity, chocolate, savory characteristics,
Sip 2: Bright acidity (citrus - grapefruit), chocolate notes, savory nutty characteristics, caramel.
Sip 3: Some bitterness (connected for me with the acidity/grapefruit notes), milk-chocolate, savory, caramel, sweet.
Sip 4: Chocolate, acidic, a little lower in body than the K-cup.
Overall Thoughts
In this testing, I actually prefer the coffee out of the K-cup because of the lower acidity, and higher notes of chocolate… as this is definitely my preference for a darker roasted coffee
Light Roasted Colombian Coffee:
Aromatics: Coffee… slight fruitiness, caramel
Sip 1: Thinner, slightly acidic (tropical fruit, juicy - citric). Moderate to tea-like body (milky tea?).
Sip 2: Slightly woody (cedar) with some papery characteristics, still tropical fruit (much more than I expected there to be)
Sip 3: Tropical fruits, cedar, sweet, good body.
Sip 4: This coffee is low-key really good tasting. It cools really well.
Sip 5: on cold pass, the coffee is more papery and thin which very well could be a roast issue and not a brewing issue.
Medium Roasted Coffee:
I didn’t take diligent notes here, but just drank it for fun. I do have to say that I think it is nice to drink and very well done.
Tasting Part 2
My first rounds of tasting were really promising, and I told them as much… but I wasn’t totally happy with the tasting I had done just yet… Part of that was because I wanted to see if some of the flavors that I was getting out of the Light Roasted Coffee (primarily the woody, and papery characteristics) were due to extraction issues, or they were an issue with how the coffee was roasted.
I asked for another round of samples, because I am needy like that. For this round, I specifically requested a light-roasted coffee be sent to me, both as whole-bean and as a pod. I also wanted to get a sense of how coffee ages in these pods, since shelf life can be a real concern. So they sent me some of the pods they had set aside for aging experiments, 5 months post-grinding/processing.
The second round of tasting was centered on a light roast, natural-processed Brazilian coffee, and a Light-roasted Colombian coffee (same one as before) + 5 months.
When it came to the side-by-side comparison of the light roast Brazilian coffee as a pod vs. me brewing it at a 16:1 coffee-to-water ratio using my trusty V60, Timemore grinder, etc., it was really interesting. While the pod was slightly less complex than the freshly ground and brewed coffee, both were delicious. The coffee was remarkable too, as it was a pleasantly fruity Brazilian coffee without booziness, the V60 brew, but the pod was still remarkable and something I would have been happy to have been served when sitting down at a coffee shop.
When comparing the coffees for the aging experiment, I found that the coffee had some loss. Overall, it was more muted and bland than its fresher counterpart, but it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it was more like someone had turned the volume knob down on the coffee overall. That said, it was still a decent cup of coffee, and if I had gone to someone’s house and they had served it to me, I would have been pleasantly surprised.
Overall Thoughts
Is Best Cup going to supplant manual brewing and brewing fresh coffee? No… but it isn’t meant to. What it is meant to do is to provide great coffee quality, with less environmental impact, and less plastics to those who choose to use a K-Cup format coffee brewer. And, to that point, had it been around all those years ago when I was working to see if a compostable quality k-cup was possible, I would have probably bought into it.
Is Best Cup always going to taste amazing? No. It won’t fix issues with your green coffee sourcing, or bad roasting practices. If you foul up… you’ll have fouled up tasting coffee pods. But, from what I have seen they will do a respectable job of transmuting the qualities, flavors, and essence of your coffees into a convenient K-Cup format. The soul of the coffee feels like it is still there.
Closing
So, Best Cup and I have been intentional about our work with one another. I do not make commission or money on sales they make. They paid me for the time I took to taste their coffees regardless of what my thoughts and outcomes would be. What I am trying to say is that my motivation in sharing about my overall positive experience with the quality of the product is genuine and not reflective of a quid-pro-quo or financial gain. I want people who use K-Cup brewers to have better quality coffee, hurt the environment less, and have happier lives because their coffee is good. I want people who look to me for advice to know that there is an option they should investigate that seems to check all the boxes. That’s all.
Check out their website: https://yourbestcup.com/, order some samples, try it for yourself, and make up your own mind :-). If you end up going with them, send me some samples, and I’ll be happy to drink them :).
