Black Powder now has single serve pods that have 35% more coffee per pod and 100% recyclable. Works in all k cup brewers except the Keurig 2.0.
Black Powder was struggling for the past 4 months to make a great cup o’joe out of a Keurig machine. We tried many refillable cups, every brand of k-cup on the market, and many tricks to get a powerful cup. Couldn’t get anything that was less than BROWN WATER. The technology for standard k-cup only allows 9.2 grams of coffee to be loaded. Most people don’t realize that the k-cup was designed for a 6 oz cup of coffee so all these coffee machine tricks with “strong” settings is all an attempt to get more leaching (of the bad oils) from coffee grinds. We evaluated a few co-packers (send our coffee to them and they send us k-cups), but the pricing was challenging, large lot sizes would challenge coffee aging, and most importantly, the taste was BROWN WATER. Additionally, the standard k-cups are not recyclable nor biodegradable thus going against Black Powder’s brand values of eco-friendly.
Coffee is supposed to be brewed at 200 deg F and the Keurig machine falls way short of that with 186 F in my best run. One trick to get the water hotter was to waste an initial 4 oz run of hot water after waking up the machine from sitting for more than an hour. That provides an additional 15 F in temperature in the cup using a 10 oz flow setting. The other problem is many k-cups are manufactured from a material with a melting point of 195 F. Not sure which accountant decided that is was wise to do that…… In any case, we have found a brewer that can perform to the 200F mark and with the technology we will share below it elevates the cup quality even more.
Black Powder has chosen to use iFill Cup technology for it’s single serve pods that are k-cup compatible. This is not currently compatible for Keurig 2.0 brewers unless a FREEDOM CLIP is used. Keurig 2.0 is another stroke of marketing genius to reduce the market share loss of Green Mountain in the k-cup space. A photo eye looks at the lid which has patented ink to only brew with Green Mountain packaged k-cups. American ingenuity is already at work with many big k-cup manufactures breaking the code but that still leaves us local and small companies to find a solution. Rogers Coffee Company has created a FREEDOM CLIP that is easy to install in your 2.0 Keurig brewers to allow you the FREEDOM to use any k-cup. Black Powder will be trying to buy a few hundred of these for those customers that received this 2.0 brewer by accident not knowing of the evil plan by Green Mountain to regain it market share position. Too bad they couldn’t have competed with product quality and taste to earn customer loyalty.
iFill technology uses 100% recyclable polypropylene #5 plastic. But, the real TASTE advantage comes from the ability to load 12.5 grams of coffee, 35.6% more than a standard k-cup, in each pod. This is done by using polypro mesh plastic instead of paper for the filter medium in the pod which is not pierced by the needle in the bottom. K-cups have an air gap at the bottom so the needle doesn’t rip the bag pushing grounds in the cup. The other thing that air gap does is allow channeling of the hot water through the cup resulting in many grounds are not equally leached of the valuable coffee.
Black Powder will have a dark roast – Italian Blend, a medium roast – still in development, and decaffeinated Peru SwissWaterProcessed as our standard product offering. Additionally, Black Powder will load the iFill with ANY of our single origin beans, blends, or flavored coffees at customer request. Minimum order of two boxes which is 24 units.
We are still dialing in the machine right now but we will soon be adding nitrogen to the grounds to extend cup quality time even further. The current cup should be really great for 45 days without nitrogen and hope to get to 180 days with it. Sorry, no plans to compete with the 2 yr shelf life advertised on mass production k-cups…..we could label it that way like others but the cup quality degrades in all technologies by day 180.
