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.

I suppose it was just a matter of time before people decided that they needed to improve upon something even as traditional and cherished as coffee. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. These latest single serve options are the best things to grace some people’s coffee cups since, well, the invention of coffee. Although coffee pods are probably the more popular version, there are a few more proprietary brands out there that promise even better quality by using only certain coffee along with only certain brewers. K-Cups coffee cups are a prime example of this phenomenon.

K-Cups coffee makers are made by a company called Keurig (hence the K). Interestingly, they don’t seem to make their own coffee, relying instead on third party providers. This strategy actually provides K-Cups coffee cups with a few additional perks (pun intended). If someone is interested in making the change to a one cup coffee maker, they can do so without having to change the brand of coffee they drink. In fact, if someone who already drinks Green Mountain coffees, for instance, were to make the switch over to K-Cups coffee cups, the only real difference would be in freshness. Imagine every cup tasting like the first one of the package, and you get an idea of why one cup coffee makers are all the rage of late.

There are some downsides to using K-Cup coffee cups in comparison to the more widely used coffee pods. For one thing, it’s not too terribly difficult to make your own coffee pods. They’re basically a filter wrapped around some coffee, and there are how-to articles all over the web for making your own. This sort of defeats the purpose of one cup coffee makers, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do, and with those you can at least make coffee when you’re too poor to buy pods, if that’s an issue for you. That being said, there are also ways to make your own K-Cup coffee cups by injecting old K-Cups with new coffee, but that’s not nearly as simple as making your own coffee pods. Having to make your own may not even be a concern for you, though.

K-Cups coffee cups are also a bit more wasteful than traditional coffee since there is trash produced for every single cup. If you recycle, that’s probably not a big deal in the long run since it won’t end up in the landfills. However, if you don’t, that could be a significant amount of additional waste compared to using one container of coffee for twenty or more cups. This same downfall applies to every type of single serve coffee out there, though.

All things considered, if you’re looking for the freshest coffee that money can buy, made in your own home, than K-Cups coffee cups are just as good as any other single serve option. Just be sure that your favorite brand of coffee also makes K-Cups before you buy your first 1 cup coffee maker!