Great Coffee Cups

Why glass coffee cups?  Aren’t regular coffee cups good enough?  I mean, all they’re supposed to do is hold coffee, right?

Even from a completely utilitarian point of view, glass coffee cups make sense.  After all, it’s a lot easier to tell if your coffee is made right if you can, you know, see it.  This is especially important with espresso coffee cups where there’s only a tiny amount of  coffee, but the layers are very specific.  But this likely isn’t the main reason that people purchase glass coffee cups.

The main reason is probably for their looks.  Although a drinking glass looks fairly normal, a glass coffee cup somehow looks more elegant than your standard porcelain or ceramic.  Even the cheapest glass coffee cups look as if they’re made of crystal when sparkling clean.  At home, having glass coffee cups can truly add to the decor of a kitchen.  A restaurant owner might use regular coffee cups most of the day, and then switch to glass coffee cups when he turns the lights down for dinner, adding a touch of elegance.

Most of the perceived drawbacks are misconceptions.  Glass coffee cups are no more breakable than ceramic or porcelain.  Think about it.  You knew that.  I think it’s because we’re all brought up using plastic cups as kids that we automatically assume glass equals breakable.  However, compared to ceramic, glass is probably actually stronger.

Glass coffee cups are no more expensive than a normal coffee cup, if you know where to look.  They sell at various online outlets for around $20 per cup, which is pretty standard for a quality coffee cup of any material.  They definitely look more expensive, though.

Some feel that glass coffee cups won’t keep their coffee warm for as long as porcelain or ceramic.  This might be true if not for the huge hole in the top of every coffee cup.  With the exception of disposable coffee cups, or travel mugs, you can’t really count on your container keeping the coffee warm.  A material merely has to not conduct heat well to be good for coffee cups – that’s all.  Otherwise, any time you grabbed the handle, you’d burn yourself.

Probably the biggest downside is spotting.  If you don’t use drinking glasses, odds are pretty good that you don’t even know if your method of washing dishes is leaving spots on them.  Glass coffee cups will tell you real quick, and you may have to change how you do things.  There are additives for dishwashers that take care of this, but success may be limited depending on your dishwasher.  You might finding yourself washing your glass coffee cups by hand.

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Are you considering a one cup coffee maker?  One cup coffee makers are starting to make more and more sense as they come down in price, especially when you consider how many entire pots are brewed for the sake of filling one coffee cup.  There are a few different types of one cup coffee makers, and you have to be sure that you use the right coffee pods with the right 1 cup coffee maker.

K-Cups coffee, for instance, only works with Keurig’s K-Cup brewer.  No one else makes the K-Cup brewer.  These are not so much coffee pods as individually sealed packages of coffee intended to fill only one coffee cup.  If you have multiple coffee cups to fill, look further because as far as I can tell, Keurig only deals with one coffee cup at a time.  Keurig licenses the K-Cup coffee to other coffee producers, including Green Mountain Coffee.

T-Discs are something else entirely.  Their disc shape allows them to be used to make things far more complicated than just coffee.  They’re a bit pricier, but if you want things like mocha cappucino with froth on a daily basis without going to a coffee shop, they’re worth it.  The company that makes T-Discs is Tassimo, or actually Bosch, but they use the Tassimo name.  Like the Keurig, it won’t fill multiple coffee cups, but since you’re saving a ton of time and money on specialty coffees by avoiding the coffee shops, it might just be worth it to run a Tassimo twice, or three times.  Only a few companies make T-Discs.

Then you have your generic coffee pods.  They also go by the name Home Cafe.  It’s ironic that these use the term “Home Cafe” since it’s the Tassimo T-Discs that make cafe type drinks, but whatever.  Regular coffee pods are good if you’ll need to regularly fill up to four coffee cups as some machines can brew that many pods at once.  The neat thing about those 4-cup brewers is that they can usually brew just one as well.  Used in an office, that kind of efficiency can help offset all the waste created by all those disposable coffee cups everyone is always using.  Pretty much everyone that makes coffee makes regular coffee pods, except those few that are making K-Cups instead.

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I remember back in the 80’s and 90’s when McDonald’s was getting attacked by the media for still using Styrofoam.  Everyone was talking about how it wasn’t biodegradable, and would sit in landfills for umpteen bazillion years, etc.  I think that just might have been my first experience with “going green”.

It seems, though, that no matter how much people complain about products not being environmentally friendly, it always comes down to convenience first.  Take disposable coffee cups, for example.  Imagine how much waste is created from disposable coffee cups.  Much of it is unnecessary, too.

Most offices could do away with them entirely, as could convenience stores.  In fact, if a convenience store offered really good coffee, like so many of them advertise, they could easily sell non-disposable coffee cups.  Especially if they offered a discount or something on refills.  Seems like a no-brainer to me, but yet there’s still disposable coffee cups being handed out all over the place. Offices could give out cups with company logos, or something similar on them.  If you have your own desk, there’s no reason you can’t keep your own coffee cup there.

People love their coffee, and I doubt they would let a little thing like lack of disposable coffee cups stop them from getting it, and those who want their business aren’t about to let it go just to save the environment.  Luckily, it seems those make disposable coffee cups have initiated a bit of a change on their own.  Looking at the packages for various disposable coffee cups, you’ll notice that almost all of them are 100% biodegradable.  This means that, when confronted with the elements, these coffee cups will pretty much disintegrate, given time.  This is great, as it means people can have their coffee cups and eat them too!  Wait…nevermind.

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