Senseo

I have a serious recommendation for you: the Senseo coffee maker. For the few that don't know the genre, it's a smallish coffee maker that holds water in a 3 or 4 cup reservoir. The coffee is in "pods," simply circular pockets of filter paper with coffee inside. The machine forces water through the coffee and right into a cup or mug. It's not espresso, it makes coffee. So you have to avoid listening to the naysayer reviews about low pressure on the water and all that. The simple key is ease and speed. Lots of both. And there's the obvious advantage for those who want one cup and who share space with caf and decaf people. A colleague recommended this to me a year ago. I didn't do anything until my old coffeemaker died. My delay was foolish. Senseo is cheap and does the job well. I've never tried to price drip coffee by the cup, but Senseo is certainly a small fraction of Starbucks and the like.

The key caveat (sorry Senseo) is their own brand of coffee is poor. Forunately, pod sizes have standardized so there are tons of producers and distributors. More than you'll ever be able to evaluate (unless you start your own website to keep you in free coffee like SingleServeCoffee.co m!). I didn't evaluate them all either, but I tried enough that I can point you to PremiumPods.com, Coffee and Tea Warehouse, and Better Coffee where you won't go wrong. To be a total contrarian, I'll even mention that when desperate waiting for an online order, I tried buying at a Safeway. They only had Senseo and Folgers. Not liking the former, I took the latter. It wasn't as good as the ones above, but drinkable. It'll even taste good if you think of corporate breakroom coffee. I'm tempted to slip it into a blind tasting. If you have a cube, office, home office, etc., Senseo a no-brainer addition. And hey, it comes in colors, so it's practically an iPod.