I saw this coffee maker at the top of the list when I searched for coffee makers on Google Squared, so I figured I'd go ahead and do a quick virtual review on it. Keurig calls it the "Special Edition Brewing System", but I don't know what makes it a special edition. When I first visited the Keurig website, I wasn't sure it was the right one. When I right-clicked to save the image, the title included "B60", so I'm fairly confident it's the right one. Without further delay…

Features

The Keurig Special Edition B60 has three brew size choices: 6 ounces, 8 ounces or 10 ounces. It has a removable 48 ounce reservoir, which means you don't have to refill it until you've made at least four cups of coffee. It has a programmable LCD message center, but I can't fathom why anyone would need to reprogram it. It has a removable drip tray, blue backlit LCD and water reservoir, chrome accents and a quiet brewing technology.

This Keurig coffee maker is about 13 inches tall and weighs about 12 pounds empty. It seems to be a little taller and a little heavier than most "full pot" coffee makers. It comes with a complimentary 12 K-Cup variety pack of coffee and tea.

Pricing

The suggested retail price is $139.95 and you can buy it directly from the Keurig website. I found it cheaper, at $129.95 ($10 cheaper) at Amazon.com and with free shipping.

That still seems a little steep to me since I usually go for coffee makers that are less than $100. The redeeming features are that it can produce a perfect cup of coffee in less than 60 seconds and, of course, the included coffee pack.

Would I buy the Keurig Special Edition B60 Gourmet Single Serve Coffee Maker (whew, that's a long description)? Not where I live right now because I wouldn't be able to get more K-Cups. Would I buy it in the US? Yes. I used to heat up hot water in a microwave oven and it would take two minutes for just that step. If I had one of these, I wouldn't need to make a pot at a time and risk part of it going bad (getting cold or burned) before getting consumed.

((Image source: Keurig)

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Actually, "closet coffee drinker" probably isn't correct. My son, Jon, isn't hiding and drinking coffee. I just didn't find out, until very recently, that he's a regular coffee drinker although he rarely drinks it at home.

Fast Food Coffee

I noticed Jon drinking a cup of coffee in his bedroom a few days ago and I started asking questions. It's not that he was doing anything wrong; it's just that I never saw him drinking coffee. He usually drinks water, bottled tea, bottled soda, or fruit juice. I asked him how much coffee he drank on a regular basis and I was surprised that he drank one or more cups per day.

Jon doesn't give himself enough time to have a cup of coffee in the morning, after he showers and eats breakfast. I haven't figured out why he doesn't have coffee with his breakfast, but there may be more to it than meets the eye.

After he dresses in his school uniform (he's pursuing a nursing degree here in the Philippines) and heads out, he rides a jeepney with a classmate to the main gate of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone and then has to wait for a shuttle bus to take him to the college at Cubi Point.

He and his classmate each get a cup of coffee at one of the fast food places while they're waiting on the shuttle. His classmate is a neighborhood girl he's fond of (but not his girlfriend) and I suspect he treasures the time spent with her over a cup of coffee in the morning.

Regular and Irregular

Jon only drinks coffee in the morning. He never drinks coffee when I'm drinking it a night. He also doesn't drink coffee on the days in which he has no classes to attend. The fact that I saw him drinking coffee in his bedroom should make me out to be a liar, but he was up early in order to attend duty in another province and he hadn't had enough sleep. This was something irregular in his regular schedule.

My wife doesn't drink coffee every day either and she has no place she needs to be on a regular basis. I guess I'm the only REAL regular (drinking two or more cups every day) coffee drinker in the family.

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When you hit the middle age years, like I have, you start to take things for granted. One of those things happens to be hot coffee. I like my coffee hot, even though I've consumed iced coffee on occasion. In Japan, iced coffee is way more popular than it is in the US, or just about anywhere else. In the US, however, hot coffee is preferred by the average coffee drinker. Keeping coffee hot can be a challenge, depending on what you use to make it and where you intend to drink it.

A thermos is not necessarily a Thermos

The first vacuum flasks were made by the Thermos Company in Germany in 1904. Over the years, the word "thermos" became a generic word to mean any kind of vacuum flask. In fact, the US declared it as a generic trademark in 1963 and now the word can be used alone or as "thermos bottle" and it means the same thing.

I thought it was a just an American thing, like so many things I've become accustomed to since I was a child. For instance, when I was a kid, my siblings called every kind of soft drink a "Coke" because Coca-Cola was the most popular brand at the time. One of my older brothers would send me to the neighborhood market to buy him a Coke and I would have to ask him "What kind of Coke?" because he didn't always mean Coca-Cola.

My in-laws here in the Philippines share the same hot water dispenser, from my mother-in-law's house. Trekking back and forth to her house can be a pain, so they don't do it often. One day, one of my brothers-in-law came out of his house with a hot cup of coffee and I knew he hadn't been to her house in hours. I asked him how he was keeping his water hot and he told me he was keeping it in a thermos. Obviously, thermos has become a generic word in the Philippines as well as the US.

How a thermos is used

Despite what you may think, I'm not talking about how to add and remove beverages from a thermos. I'm talking about how they're used in certain environments, based on what I've seen.

When I was young, I saw my father packing a thermos in his metallic lunch box before heading off to work each day. It was kind of vacuum flask that had a screw-in stopper that was covered by pop-on/pop-off metal cup. The thermos had a metal exterior as well. Nowadays, you can find a thermos made of mostly plastic.

When I was in the military and went to certain functions (where a conference table came into play) as well as after the military and working for various companies, multiple thermos bottles were kept nearby in order for hot coffee to be available at all times and without having a coffee maker in the room as well. Some of these functions took place in rooms where it wouldn't be a good idea to have a coffee maker area set aside. Rooms with computer equipment, for example.

Using a thermos can save you money

I don't have a thermos bottle yet, but I plan to get a large one. A hot water dispenser uses a lot of electricity due to the heating coil involved. Maybe not as much as a hot water heater, but still more than I like to pay. If I just want hot water, it would be so much more economic to boil water or make hot water through a coffee maker than to use a hot water dispenser. A thermos can keep hot water hot or hot coffee hot for up to eight hours, but by the 8-hour mark, it's usually just a little warmer than lukewarm. That's still better than cold, especially in a cold environment.

I wouldn't be storing hot water in a thermos. It makes more sense to store hot coffee in the thermos unless I'm intent on drinking instant coffee and that doesn't work well unless I'm in the house. I sometimes spend a few hours outdoors with relatives, in the early morning hours after daylight appears. Having a thermos nearby would keep me from having to go back and forth from the house for refills because I usually drink two or three cups of coffee during that part of the day.

I definitely need a thermos.

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I spotted a news article and read various sources to discover that Starbucks will be rolling out with a new instant coffee called "Via Ready Brew" in the US and Canada during September. The price? While there is no firm price set, they plan to charge USD $2.95 for a "book" of three or $9.95 for a box of 12. Come again? There is no way on Earth I would spend that much for instant coffee, regardless of what brand it is.

A Mistaken Assumption?

Apparently, Via Ready Brew had a successful introduction in Seattle (the home of Starbucks) and some places in the state of Illinois. Each packet is equivalent to one cup of Starbucks coffee, making each cup of "instant coffee" more expensive than people pay for the current top brands.

I personally think they're assuming too much. After the novelty wears off, I'm guessing they'll have excess product on the shelves and will start putting it on sale just to clear their inventories. Even if they sell it in the regular Starbucks coffee shops, I predict sales will be lukewarm at best.

Why do I think this way? Most people who can afford to drink coffee at Starbucks are looking for hot coffee prepared in a unique way. They're not looking for instant coffee which won't be any better than the best instant coffee already on the market. Now, I don't know what the "best" instant coffee brands on the market are, but I'm willing to guess they're the most expensive brands found at grocery stores. I speak of brands like Folgers and Nescafé.

Folgers Coffee Crystals

I don't pay attention too much to names on the labels, but I can't help remembering the commercial advertisements on TV. Things like "it's mountain grown, the freshest kind" and "we've secretly replaced their gourmet coffee with Folgers coffee crystals" readily come to mind.

I don't know what the current price is, but I guarantee you it's a jar for less than $9.95 and a lot more than 12 cups.

Nescafé Taster's Choice

My parents always drank Taster's Choice instant coffee, long before I knew it was a label from Nescafé. They marketed it as freeze-dried coffee to seal in the flavor. Ho-hum, it doesn't taste any better than Folgers, but it's around the same price.

When I buy instant coffee, I buy Nescafé Classic, which is a coffee powder. It's around 30 cups for about $4.25 a jar. One of my relatives gave me a jar of Nescafé Red Cup, which is coffee granules instead of powder, but I really couldn't tell the difference in taste.

A Huge Instant Coffee Market

Who can blame Starbucks for trying to get a chunk of the $17 billion in annual revenue generated by instant coffee sales? I don't, but I think they're going about it the wrong way. Going up against the longtime favorites, two of which I mentioned, is going to be a difficult task at the prices they're planning to charge.

I'm no expert, but I believe most instant coffee buyers are grocery shoppers, not coffee shop regulars. Only time will tell, but I believe we'll see the results of their efforts within six months. Prices will either come down or sales will stop. That's my prediction and I'm sticking to it.

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I usually don't follow a nationally syndicated newspaper column to its source, but this time I did. After reading a blurb, "Have a Java", I felt compelled to do so. A few hours later, I responded to a comment on that post about coffee and GERD (acid reflux disease) and I'll expound on that in a minute.

Coffee May be Good for You

I was pointed to "Coffee won't hurt you, research finds", followed it back to the first newspaper referenced and then finally to the author's own website where she had written "Good to the last drop" (an old Maxwell House slogan).

With decades of journalism experience and more than 50 journalism awards, I trust that Judy Foreman is a responsible journalist. According to her sources, the coffee and caffeine parts of the coffee beverage can be examined independently of each other and each has its own attributes. The coffee part can be beneficial for some things while the caffeine part can be beneficial for others.

The research, although not completely conclusive, is mostly positive. It indicates that coffee itself lowers the risks for type 2 diabetes and liver cancer. Although it can't be determined whether it's the coffee or the caffeine, coffee seems to protect the liver against cirrhosis, especially cirrhosis caused by alcoholism (although telling someone to drink more coffee is NOT how to help an alcoholic).

The caffeine part appears to lower the risk of Parkinson's Disease, but not for women who use post-menopausal hormones. For athletes, studies suggest it helps muscles release calcium, allowing muscles to contract with more force. In both cases, only a single cup of coffee per day is needed to show a measurable improvement.

The Vinegar Trick

The commenter (MacBros) said he doesn't drink much coffee because he suffers from GERD (acid reflux disease). I pointed out that I haven't suffered from acid reflux symptoms since 2006 as I wrote in my heartburn and vinegar article in 2007. That particular article isn't very long and you may want to take a minute to read it even if you only suffer from a mild form of acid reflux. I won't repeat it here.

I hope MacBros (his real name is John) takes care of his own acid reflux problem so he can enjoy drinking coffee as much as I do.

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It seems that all of the coffee drinks in US coffee shops start with espresso as the base. It may not be true for all coffee shops, but it's certainly true for Starbucks and Seattle's Best.

Unlike most people who come and go and pay little attention to anything but what they're doing at the time, I observe everything that goes on around me. I have seen how both of these companies make coffee drinks — I purposely observed every facet from start to finish.

What Exactly is Espresso?

Espresso is sometimes referred to as espresso coffee and it's often mispronounced and misspelled as "expresso". Invented in Italy, as were most coffee beverages, it's a concentrated form of coffee, up to three times as strong as a regular cup of coffee.

You can't make espresso with ordinary automatic drip coffee makers. You need an espresso machine which brews the coffee under extreme pressure. Most people don't have one at home.

When served as espresso, the coffee is normally served in espresso cups of one kind or another. In most coffee shops, they use cheap containers that can be thrown away. Restaurants use fancy cups designed specifically for espresso. The cheapest espresso cup is usually more expensive than expensive coffee mugs.

Observations

I don't normally buy coffee at Starbucks or Seattle's Best (which has been owned by Starbucks since 2003). It's good coffee (at least in the US), but it's just too damned expensive. Of course, I won't buy coffee from fast-food joints either and that's because it usually tastes like they made it with my dirty socks.

On rare occasions, when I really needed my coffee fix, I bought coffee at both Starbucks and Seattle's Best. In March of 2008, while I was picking out books at a Border's bookstore, I succumbed to the smell of the coffee brewing nearby (within the bookstore). The aroma is what caused me to buy coffee at Starbucks on previous occasions.

I always ordered cappuccino. I like cappuccino a whole lot more than the other coffee drinks. Whenever I ordered a regular-sized cup, I noticed they used one shot of espresso. Whenever I ordered a large-sized cup, they used two shots of espresso. No wonder I always got a quick caffeine buzz after drinking the cappuccino (I never really thought about it until now).

Espresso Experience?

Other than being used for the cappuccino I drank, I have never tried espresso as a stand-alone coffee drink. With cappuccino, it's diluted by the added milk. I picture acid reflux coming back to haunt me if I try espresso straight from the cup, therefore I will probably never try it.

I know a few people that only drink espresso. It's not for me. I love the smell and flavor of coffee as it's normally brewed at home. I don't need a caffeine buzz every time I drink coffee, thank you very much.

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You're probably scratching your head and asking yourself "What the heck is Postum?" It would be more appropriate to ask yourself "What the heck WAS Postum?"

I originally wrote this article in February of 2007 and placed it on my main site. Little did I know at the time that Kraft Foods would be discontinuing the production of Postum in the fall of 2007. Although the article drew quite a few visitors then, and received a few comments, I believe it's better suited to be archived on this site instead of my main site because this site is about coffee and that one is not. Simple enough right? Anyway, this is the first of two articles I'll be moving over here. Enough with the explanation and on with the story — bear in mind that it was written in February of 2007:

My One and Only Experience with Postum

Earlier today, I mentioned to my son how I was tricked into trying Postum, sometime in 1977 or 1978. One morning, I was looking to make myself a cup of coffee, but there was no coffee brewed yet, and there wasn't any instant coffee in the house. One of my sisters offered to make some coffee for me. I left and returned in about an hour and she handed me a cup. My mouth, my tongue and my mind were all prepared for the soothing taste of fresh coffee. When I took a sip from the cup, I was mentally and physically assaulted by a taste that was completely foreign to me. After complaining with a loud "Yuck!" and asking what was wrong with the coffee, she confessed that she had made a cup of Postum instead because there wasn't any coffee roast in the house either. I left to get coffee from a local restaurant. That was the last time I ever saw Postum in my life.

According to Wikipedia and other confirming websites, Postum is a cereal beverage invented by Charles William Post (founder of Post, Texas) in 1895 and marketed as a coffee substitute. Yes, the same Post that makes breakfast cereal. It's still sold to this day, but you won't find it in many supermarkets. Unlike decaffeinated coffee, Postum is naturally caffeine free, consisting of mostly wheat and molasses. After visiting a few websites and stopping at one in particular (Jeff Werner) and reading the comments, it seems there are some near-fanatical lovers of Postum. I may have actually liked it, had my sister prepared it the right way.

While Postum is made of grain and other innocuous stuff, it contains more carbohydrates than coffee, especially after you doctor it up with other sweeteners and creamers. Coffee, on the other hand, can cause problems for some people. It you drink too much at a time, you can get severe heartburn. That leads me to my next post, so I won't expound on it here.

They don't sell Postum here in the Philippines. I don't know if that's a blessing or a curse.

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I've already made it plain that I like coffee. In the US, coffee and donuts (doughnuts for you purists) go together like white on rice or ugly on an ape. It's not quite like that for Filipinos in the Philippines, but it is for Americans like me. What's even better than a cup of coffee and donut? A cup of coffee and a coffee cake donut!

Dunkin' Donuts in the Olongapo City Mall

I make it a point to avoid coffee and donut shops in the city. It's really pretty easy to do since parking next to one is nearly impossible. There are numerous "Mr. Donut" and "Dunkin' Donut" coffee and donut shops throughout the city.

I was walking through the Olongapo City Mall a week or so ago, looking for the ATM. The sign on the ATM said "Out of Funds" and I thought that was that and I was ready to head out. Lo and behold, a Dunkin' Donuts shop was between me and the exit. Not really, but I spotted it nevertheless while en route to the exit.

One of my brothers-in-law was eyeballing the place, so I had him accompany me inside the shop. I was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of fresh-brewed coffee and the sweet odor of freshly-baked donuts. I ordered a dozen of the "coffee cake" donuts, paid for them, and then hurriedly headed out the door before ordering something else. I can't drink coffee while driving in the demolition derby known as downtown Olongapo City anyway.

Coffee Donuts and Coffee Cake

I need "fat pills" called "donuts" like I need a hole in my head. I rarely eat sweets (other than coffee candy) of any kind, so treating myself to donuts is an extremely rare event.

The "coffee cake" donuts taste almost exactly like coffee cake would. In years past, I had plenty of opportunities to sample coffee cake and when I say the taste is almost the same, I mean it.

Unlike relatives of mine (on both mine and my wife's side), I don't like most types of cake. I always avoid the cakes that everyone else seems to like. I like coffee cake and pineapple upside-down cake and that's about it.

Now that I've found out that Dunkin' Donuts carries coffee cake donuts, I may have an extremely difficult time avoiding those coffee and donut shops.

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What's the difference between a coffee cup and a coffee mug? While the terms are used interchangeably, there actually is a difference. A coffee cup, per se, holds one cup of coffee. A coffee mug, on the other hand, holds more than a cup. How much coffee a coffee mug can hold depends entirely on the design of the mug.

Coffee Mug Collectors

There are a whole lot of people who collect coffee mugs, just like numismatics collect coins. I don't know what special term is used for coffee mug collectors, but I've know quite a few of them over the years. Many of the people I've known to collect coffee mugs were in the military, just like I was for 20 years.

These were people I knew as well as people I worked with. I never specifically collected coffee mugs, but I built up a collection nonetheless. It seems like I obtained a mug for every military unit I was with, for every Marine Corps birthday ball, for every recruiting function and everything between the gaps.

Some of the people I knew were fanatics about their collections, displaying them in special display cases in their homes or even at work.

A Dirty Coffee Cup is in the Mind of the Owner

Early in my military career, I cleaned a coffee mug for a senior enlisted fellow and he freaked out on me. Literally. I learned, and quite quickly I might add, that people like that wanted that nasty looking brown color on the inside of the mugs. Don't ask me why. I was constantly cleaning the coffee mugs I used.

The only time I ever saw one of the fanatics clean a coffee mug was when he left coffee in the mug, sitting out on a desk over the weekend. When he returned to work, there was green stuff floating, growing on the top of the liquid. I don't know what that stuff is, but it looks disgusting.

I'm a fanatic about coffee, but not about coffee mugs. Any coffee mug will do the trick for me. In fact, I only have four coffee mugs in my house here in the Philippines and I'm using one of them right now.

The Night Market at Subic Bay

Next to a carnival attraction called "Millennium", which is open for months out of the year, there's a night market. On the Christmas before last, one of my sisters-in-law bought a huge coffee mug from that night market and had my name "burned" onto it — "Richard" in some kind fancy writing. It held two times what a normal (if you can call any mug normal) coffee mug would hold. Now, since I'm the only Richard within a one-block radius, nobody could swipe my mug to use as their own without being seen by someone.

Alas, about two months ago, my younger son decided to make coffee for me. I was upstairs in my bedroom (where I am now) and doing my thing on the computer. By the way, my master bedroom is huge; it's big enough to hold two king-sized beds side by side. Anyway, he took my mug downstairs to get me coffee. While he was filling the coffee mug with hot water from our water dispenser, the bottle emptied. The mug was sitting on the spot where the water spillage goes, whatever you want to call it. He didn't move it before changing the water bottle and the jostling of the dispenser caused the mug to fall off and onto the floor. It's a tile-covered cement floor, I might add.

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Or, in this case, my coffee mug. I don't know when I'll ever get another one quite like that.

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After watching the employees at one of the Starbucks locations in Phoenix, Arizona, my wife decided to do an experiment to see if she could make coffee that tasted as good as Starbucks coffee. More specifically, she wanted to reproduce the taste of their lattes.

Latte is Italian for Milk

Lattes were invented in the US. In Italy, latte means milk. It's probably okay to order a caffè latte in Italy now, after all the publicity of the drink, but years ago it would have fetched you a glass of milk.

In the US, a latte is quite simply a cup of coffee made with milk instead of water.

It Starts With Espresso

Starbucks has machines which produce espresso, a concentrated coffee beverage brewed by forcing very hot water under high pressure through coffee that has been ground to a consistency between extremely fine and powder. Espresso, which was invented in Italy, is used as the base for lattes, cappuccinos and mochas.

My wife noticed that two shots of espresso were added to the large drinks at Starbucks, while they added only one shot to the smaller drinks.

How to Mimic a Latte

It's easy to do if you have your own personal espresso machine. What if you don't? Here's how my wife did it:

She filled a cup with milk (whole milk, not 2%, 1% or skim milk), heated it in the microwave oven for 2 minutes, added two spoons of coffee power and stirred. I'm talking about the spoons you eat with, not teaspoons for measuring.

What you end up is a strong cup of coffee, a simple latte. If you want to turn it into a cappuccino, add whip cream to the top. If you want to turn it into a mocha, add a spoonful of sweetened, powdered chocolate.

Why Starbucks instead of at home?

If it's so easy to make coffee that tastes like Starbucks coffee at home, then why don't people do that instead of spending much more money at coffee shops like that? I could never afford to regularly stop at Starbucks and probably wouldn't make it a point to do so even if I had a Starbucks gift card.

People are always "on the go" and don't take the time at home to enjoy the simple pleasures. They stop by coffee shops on the way to work or on the way home. It's the fast-paced societies that keep companies like Starbucks in business. They can keep their business. I'll drink my lattes and cappuccinos at home.

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