Single-serve "pod" coffee makers

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: December 26, 2021.

If you love a good cup of coffee but you can't be bothered with all the fuss of grinding beans, spooning out ground coffee, or boiling a kettle, a pod-coffee maker could be just the thing you're looking for. These truly idiot-proof machines pack all the mess and fuss into a simple, disposal plastic pod—as easy and convenient as a tea-bag—and they can deliver excellent quality coffee in a couple of minutes. Although they're quite expensive, they can quickly pay for themselves if you're in the habit of buying your drinks at the local coffee shop. Let's take a closer look at how they work!

Photo: The futuristic-looking Nescafé Dolce Gusto® Eclipse pod coffee maker. It looks great in my dentist's waiting room, but I wonder how many people use it? It's much less intuitive than any coffee machine I've ever seen: where do you put the water and the coffee? What do you press to start things off? Not a problem at home; more of an issue in an office or workplace. My dentist has had to write a long page of instructions...

How to make a perfect cup of coffee

However you choose to make your coffee, you'll know there are two essential ingredients: water and the coffee itself. To make perfect coffee, the water must not be boiling hot: it needs to be slightly cooler, at a temperature of about 88–96°C (190–205°F); the exact temperature depends on the type of coffee you're using. As for the coffee, as most people surely know, coffee comes off the tree in the form of beans, which have to be processed in various ways, then roasted (cooked) and ground to a powder to release the flavor we all love.

Photo: Another popular pod coffee maker: the Braun Tassimo™ coffee pod machine. Rival machines are sold under Nespresso™ and Senseo™ brands. On this machine, the water tank is at the back, under the circular black lid. The pod fits into the silver compartment at the front, on top. Once you've load up the water and the pod, you press the large black button on the bottom right to deliver your coffee. That's all you have to do: fill up with water, insert your pod, and press the button. Nothing could be simpler!

To turn ground coffee into drinkable coffee, you put the water and the coffee together—but different coffee-making techniques do this in different ways:

• Cafetière (French press): You simply spoon ground coffee into the pot and pour hot water over it. The water slowly releases the flavor from the coffee grounds, as convection currents swirl them around. It takes about 5 minutes to make a decent pot.
• Filter coffee: You put the coffee inside filter paper and pour boiling water over it. A "pour-over" as this is sometimes known, can make excellent coffee, but it's also a bit of a fiddle and it can be messy.
• Percolator: Hot water is endlessly bubbled through a metal coffee container at the top of the machine to make very strong coffee. The trouble here is that you have to clean out the percolator and its mechanism when you're done.
• Instant coffee: The easiest coffee of all. You put a spoon of coffee powder (containing concentrated coffee essence) into the bottom of your cup and pour near-boiling water over to make it dissolve. There's nothing to clean beside your cup, but the coffee usually tastes diabolical.
• Coffee-shop machine: The espresso machines you see in coffee shops usually make the best coffee. They work by heating water quickly to the perfect temperature, before forcing it at high pressure through a metal vessel containing ground coffee. But professional machines are expensive and it takes great skill to use one properly. They're also a pain to clean.

Photo: Coffee-making methods. Clockwise from top left: French press, filter, Aeropress, percolator, instant (center photo).

So... lots of coffee-making methods but ultimately one simple choice: you can either have quick-and-easy, bad-tasting coffee or you can have decent coffee but suffer the time and trouble of making it. In the last few years, however, ingenious coffee companies have hit on a way to let us enjoy coffee-shop quality at instant-coffee speed: the coffee pod machine.

From K-Cup® and Tassimo™ to Nespresso™, Senseo™, and Dolce Gusto™, there are quite a lot of different pod machines available. Even so, the basic principle is pretty much the same in each case. You start off with a pod (ground coffee inside a plastic container lined with filter paper and sealed with foil) and place it inside your machine, which breaks through the foil automatically. The machine heats the water to almost boiling (probably about 90°C or 190°F or so), then forces it at high pressure through the coffee in the pod into your cup, in a similar way to a traditional espresso machine. Machines such as the Tassimo have separate coffee and milk pods (typically containing UHT milk), although you can always leave out the milk pod and add your own fresh milk (or frothed milk, if you're making a cappuccino) later.

Photo: Making coffee with the Braun Tassimo. You take a pod (t-disc) like this one, loaded up with ground coffee, and insert it into the machine. The machine reads the barcode on the top and figures out exactly what to do. Different coffee pods will make the machine behave in different ways, pausing longer before they start forcing the water through, using different amounts of water, or whatever. The point is that the machine does all that for you. All you have to do is press a single button to deliver a great cup of coffee in a minute or two.

Pros and cons

Photo: In marked contrast to the Tassimo (above) and the huge Eclipse (top photo), this slimline Krups Nespresso machine is only slightly wider than the cups it holds. The water tank, which is very compact, sits around the back.

Pod coffee sales have seen explosive growth over the last two decades. According to market research firm Euromonitor, they represented about a third of the total coffee market in 2014, up from just 0.06 percent in 2000. By 2019, according to the National Coffee Association, some 40 percent of Americans owned a single-cup, pod-coffee machine, and their use has soared by almost 50 percent in the last five years alone. What's so good about them? Single-serve coffee-pod machines are amazingly easy to use and they can make a passable cup of coffee, if you're not too fussy about how good your drink tastes. They're quick and convenient and do away with all the fiddling about that you'd experience with a more sophisticated espresso machine: you don't have to weigh out the coffee, tamp it down, heat the water to an exact temperature, or worry about extracting the coffee at a precise rate or speed—all that's done automatically.

Unfortunately, there are numerous drawbacks. First, the range of coffees is limited. Compared to the almost infinite variety of blended and single-estate coffee you can buy for a traditional espresso machine, you have quite a restricted choice. Second, with a traditional machine, you'd probably use freshly roasted beans ground just before you made your coffee; with a single-serve machine, you're not only using pre-ground coffee but pre-ground coffee sealed inside a plastic container that may have been ground as much as a year beforehand! Third, although the coffee-making process is completely automated, a skilled barista would consider that a positive disadvantage: normally you would expect to be able to vary the "parameters" of your coffee-making method (the water temperature, extraction rate, weight of coffee and so on) to suit a particular coffee and your own personal taste—but you can't do this with single-serve machines. Per kilo or pound of coffee, pods can work out twice as expensive as freshly roasted single-estate beans, though it's still far cheaper to make your own coffee in a single-serve machine than to get a cup from your local Costa or Starbucks.

Photo: A typical Kenco coffee pod made for the Tassimo machine. There's a selection of coffees for most of the pod coffee makers, but the choice is much more limited than if you were buying ground coffee or beans. Pods made for one machine will generally work only in that machine.

Finally, most single-serve machines are anything but environmentally friendly. You're wasting a plastic pod, metal foil, and filter paper with every single cup of coffee you make. That might not sound significant until you consider that Keurig®, the market-leading US brand, sells about 10 billion of its K-Cup® pods every year. There are some environmentally friendly pod systems, however; Nespresso pods are made of easily recyclable aluminum, for example, which sounds great. The only trouble is, there's a big difference between "recyclable" and "actually recycled": Keurig's "100 percent recyclable" pods have to be split and separated into paper, metal, and plastic for effective recycling, so most people are likely to just throw them away. A classic example of greenwash? If green credentials matter to you, check out companies such as Kienna Coffee, which makes a plastic adapter for Keurig brewers that take compostable and biodegradable pods. You can reuse the adapter and throw away the coffee. Or there's Moving Beans, a British company offering capsules that are both biodegradable and compostable.

Photo: Most coffee pods are made of single-use, disposable plastic.

Having said all that, coffee pods are clearly here to stay—and some of the world's most accomplished coffee makers finally now seem to accept that. In the UK, for example, respected coffee aficionado and champion barista Maxwell Colonna Dashwood has tried to solve the problems above by offering compostable pods that contain expertly measured doses of high-quality, origin coffees: "It is a brewing method that many people are using. The exciting thing here is the opportunity to display amazing coffee in another way." In other words, if you can't beat 'em...

Who invented pod coffee makers?

Single-serve coffee makers might seem a recent development, but they were originally pioneered about 40 years ago by Eric Favre, who invented Nespresso for Nestlé in 1976 before founding Monodor, another pioneer of capsule-based coffee, in 1991. Tassimo machines were not patented until 2010.

Artwork: The original Nespresso capsule design, developed in 1976 but not formally patented until 1979. The key parts numbered here are: 1) Outer aluminum foil cone container (around 80 microns thick); 2) Extended rim at the base; 3) Tapered cone top; 4) Cylindrical recess through which the machine pierces the capsule and injects water; 5) Thinner aluminum membrane (around 40 microns thick); 6) Metal or plastic filter, such as a polypropylene sieve; 7) Weakened section of base; 8) Opening, pressed out, through which drink exits; 9) Ground or instant coffee, tea, or other beverage. Artwork from US Patent #4,136,202: Capsule for beverage preparation by Eric Favre courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Find out more

On this website

• Chocolate: The science behind one of our favorite foods!
• Hydraulics: What else can you do with pressurized liquids beside making coffee? Power a digger or a crane!

Books

• Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying by Kenneth Davids. St Martin's Press, 2013.

Articles

• How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down by Ed Cumming. The Guardian, July 14, 2020. Convenient coffee—but at what environmental cost?
• One Thing You Can Do: Brew a Greener Cup of Coffee by Tik Root and Somini Sengupta. The New York Times, March 27, 2019. What are some greener ways of making coffee than using single-serve pods?
• Guilt-free coffee pods? Meet the 100% compostable answer to your caffeine fix by Alison Moodie. The Guardian, April 13, 2016. How coffee suppliers are slowly switching to compostable pods.
• America's favorite coffee trend may be coming to an end by Roberto A. Ferdman. The Washington Post, February 3, 2016. Why have Keurig's sales started to stall?
• Capsules by Maxwell Colonna Dashwood, Maxwell's Blog, 23 December 2015. Why has a champion barista decided to embrace coffee pods?
• Is my coffee pod machine eco-friendly? by Lucy Siegle, The Guardian, 21 June 2015. Some good tips on reducing the environmental impact of your coffee maker.
• A Brewing Problem by James Hamblin. The Atlantic, March 2, 2015. The story of K-Cups—and the controversy over their environmentally unfriendly coffee pods.
• With Coffee, the Price of Individualism Can Be High by Oliver Strand. The New York Times, February 7, 2012. Coffee made by pod is about twice as expensive as high-end single-estate artisan coffees.

Patents

• US patent #4,136,202: Capsule for beverage preparation by Eric Favre, Societe D'assistance Technique Pour Produits Nestle S.A., granted January 23, 1979. The original Nespresso capsule patent.
• US patent #7,673,558: Insert, a machine and a system for the preparation of beverages by Satwinder Singh Panesar and Steve Carter, Kraft Foods, Inc., granted March 9, 2010. The original Tassimo machine patent.
• EP 1,646,305 B1: Device for the extraction of a cartridge by Antoine Ryser et al, Nestec S.A., granted September 12, 2007. A controversial Nespresso patent that was revoked by the European Patent Office in 2013 following protests from rival companies.
• WO 2009113035 A2: Apparatus and capsule for making a drink by Eric Favre, Monodor S.A., granted September 17, 2009. An improved capsule maker invented by the Nespresso pioneer.