Should I buy the Keurig B40?

There are a huge variety of coffee machines on the market today, a quick search on Amazon.com in the Home & Garden section for 'coffee maker' reveals 1,830 results, now I know that a lot of those results are not actually coffee machines, I can see now lots of other related items seeping their way in, but there are still probably hundreds mixed in there.

At the moment the Keurig range are the most popular, they provide a no fuss, great tasting cup of coffee, it looks like people are going more for convenience than control, they want a good cup of real coffee but they want it fast. With the Keurig range you pay more for the coffee as you have to use the k-cup system, but you don't have to fiddle with filters or cleaning out bits of ground coffee from everywhere.

If you want to make a batch of coffee rather than a single cup like with the Keurigs, then the most popular one at the moment is probably the Cuisinart DCC-1200 which will make you 12 cups at a time and you get to use whatever coffee in it you like.

Or you could go for the really popular Black & Decker DCM18S Brew 'n Go which is for people who want to brew their coffee then run out of the door, it is small, very inexpensive, and you get a travel mug with it so you can grab it and stick it in the car once it is done.

Or you might be a fan of espresso so you can get something like the DeLonghi EC155 which is a dedicated espresso maker and will churn you out two perfect cups of espresso at a time.

Whichever one you choose then make sure you think about what you really want from your coffee maker before you make the plunge, ending up with the wrong one can be more of a pain than making it yourself!

Most people love a good cup of coffee, now I've known a few people who hate it, but with an estimated 400 billion cups of coffee consumed worldwide every year (source: bbc.co.uk), then they are in the minority. Some people happily swig down their instant coffee and others wouldn't even let a jar of instant coffee into their house and they want the fresh and intense taste of using real ground coffee beans, that is where the coffee maker comes in.

Coffee makers are pretty much all about convenience and consistency. If you don't use one of these machines then the usual method is to use a french press where you put in the coffee grinds, then add water and leave to brew, then you press down the plunger to separate the grinds from the coffee and you can pour it out.

This works and people around the world are perfectly happy with this, but for others then it is a pain in the behind to have to time it while it brews and clean up the french press afterwards, they want the great taste of fresh coffee, but without the fuss, enter the coffee maker.

As we discussed in the earlier section then there are a wide variety of coffee makers out there and they provide different features that you might or might not like. For instance the Keurig that is the feature of this page provides a lot of convenience by giving you pre-packaged little tubs of ground coffee to pop into the machine, but you lose some of the control over the process as you use a set amount of coffee every time and don't has as many ways to change the brewing process.

Or there are machines which give you more control over the amount of coffee you use and the type, but then they require more work to get a brew going and more cleaning afterwards.

So overall you get convenience, you can set some of them to turn on at specific times and brew your coffee, so you can have it waiting for you as soon as you wake up, heck I've even seen someone who has a coffee maker in their bathroom as they are that desperate for their morning cup of coffee! Plus once everything is in then you can leave it to brew and not have to babysit it like with the french press.