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Well, that didn't take long!
Last year, after Coke took 10% stake in the company, Keurig started shipping a new version of their instant coffee machines. The primary 'improvement' was the addition of DRM designed to exclude any coffee not approved by Keurig. It is a scheme very much like the ink cartridge DRM of IBM/Lexmark.
One coffee maker has decided to crack that Keurig's DRM and are now shipping a device you insert into the maker that lets you spoof it into thinking any coffee is 'authorized.' They are capitalizing on their new Freedom Clip by giving it away along with free samples of their coffee.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02 2015, @07:41PM
> As for the vacuum sealing thing, Folgers is vacuum sealed, it's just the can sizes are different.
That's like saying a bicycle and a cat 797 [landofmachines.com] are basically the same, it's just the tire sizes are different.
> Also, I would note that "ripeness" is not the right term because coffee is roasted.
I grew up in a coffee growing region and I can assure you that roasting immature beans makes for shit coffee.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday February 02 2015, @11:30PM
I should have said this: Folgers must be vaccum sealed because it is produced on an industrial scale, and without the technique, it would be even worse. The fact that K-cups are vacuum sealed is a sign not of subjective quality, but of manufacturing standards employed to offset the quality damage caused by the mass manufacturing process. In this context vacuum sealing is a positive thing, but that doesn't mean the coffee is good. For example, chicken nuggets are processed, stored, and cooked in ways to minimize spoilage. That doesn't mean chicken nuggets taste as good as a fresh roasted chicken made at home even though the fresh chicken is not pumped full of various things, flash frozen, nor stored at 0C.
As for unripe beans, I have no doubt you are right, but I would be surprised if unripe beans are intentionally exported to the US. Unripe beans if used in coffee in America, are most probably to found in industrial coffee production because of the massive amount of coffee processed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03 2015, @03:42AM
> The fact that K-cups are vacuum sealed is a sign not of subjective quality
I never said vacuum sealing was an indicator of quality, merely that it was a means of preserving the quality of beans that have been ground at the most optimal time for the intended desired taste. Similar to the way vegetables are picked at the most optimal time for nutritional content and then flash frozen to preserve that state. K-cups are a significant increase in both taste and convenience compared to all prior technologies. If you want even better taste than a good k-cup then you have to put in a lot more effort, a lot. See the guy who got +5 touche upthread.
> I would be surprised if unripe beans are intentionally exported to the US.
Geeze what is it with geeks and binary thinking? There are varying degrees of ripeness, in fact you can select for different tastes by choosing to roast beans at different levels of ripeness. Franky I don't give a fuck about your ignorance anymore. say whatever you want in return, arguing with someone who is deliberately obtuse is just too draining
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:23AM
I'm skeptical. Tomatoes for instance are picked green -- they are much easier to handle being much harder to bruise, easier to store, easier to ship. Of course they end up tasting like cardboard compared to the ones picked from your own garden. I would suspect that many vegetables aren't actually picked at the peak of anything except ease of processing. Food is an industrial process.
As for the ripeness, I can see that for artisan coffees, like the type where the beans are processed inside a bird's digestive system and then collected once the bird ... expels ... them ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak [wikipedia.org] ) -- it is said the bird, a civet, only picks the perfectly ripe cherries -- but I would be totally shocked if Keurig was sending reps to coffee producers and telling them "we want a blend of 50% a day before ripe, 25% a day after, and 25% close to rotten." At that scale, they're just looking for coffee that is made from mostly ripe beans.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:58AM
sorry, not a bird, a mammal. I need some coffee or maybe to just go to bed.