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Some of our customers have asked how this product
came about - actually it is a very simple (as most of these
stories are).
One Christmas, I received a Pod Coffee Machine from some
immensely thoughtful good friends. My friends KNEW that I really
like coffee. When they presented me with the Coffee Pod Machine,
they also provided a supply of coffee pods. They explained that
while Coffee Pod Machines were very popular in Europe, they were
not as popular yet in the United States. They had found themselves
to be a limited both in terms of availability, variety and quality
of the coffee pods that they could purchase. It did not take long
to burn through that the initial supply - especially since I like full
cups of coffee and that requires using TWO pods to make a cup of
coffee.
Indeed, it did not take very long to determine that the supply
was limited and it would be difficult to find pre-packaged pods
that produced coffee at a quality level that we liked. The ones
that we did find were fairly expensive and brands of coffee that
we did not prefer. Given that and with the Internet at our
fingertips - we went on a search!!! We found a larger variety of
coffee pods available online but they had some concerns. One
needed to order fairly large quantities of coffee pods. There was
the question of what do you do if you ordered a bunch of coffee
pods that you did not like? And of course you had to make sure
that you planned ahead to avoid running out.
My background is engineering based so it seemed that we should
be able to come up with a fairly straightforward solution. To that
end - took apart some of the pods that we had, ones with coffee
that I did not particularly like, and looked at how they were
made. Seemed straight forward ---
The first approach was to develop a machine that would heat
seal the coffee into a filter - but after several design cycles,
doing research on sealable paper filters, sealing technologies
(heat, pressure, etc) - it just seemed that the resultant machine
would be more complicated than was necessary. Additionally, it had
a fairly large potential concern - the filter paper to make the
Pods would have to be custom ordered (at least for what I wanted -
natural paper etc.) and in ordering "short quantity
amount" - it was fairly expensive.
Next, it became apparent that I had some other constraints that
I had not verbalized - the solution had to be
-
Inexpensive - the lower the cost to make a coffee disc, the
better.
-
Able to use MY favorite coffee - in reality, at home, I like
a very particular brand of coffee (which is not available in
pods as I write this) and I also like to mix different beans
/ aromas of this brand of coffee. For example sometimes I
like to mix a regular blend and a French Vanilla (sometimes
a lot of French Vanilla, sometimes only enough to give it an
aroma but not a lot of flavoring).
-
Use FDA compliant materials and use NO additional materials
for fastening the Discs closed (such as an adhesive etc).
-
Something I could share with my friends and colleagues who
also truly enjoy coffee.
In thinking this through - it seemed that the best solution
would be one that placed the coffee into an existing standard
filter paper size. This would allow any coffee to be used and the
coffee to be purchased at a significantly lower cost than the cost
equivalent of the coffee in pods. What was needed was a way fold
the standard filter paper around the coffee - without
"sealing" but with enough containment to allow the Disc
to be placed into the Coffee Machine Pod holder and maintain it's
integrity.
Over one of the holidays my brother and I were discussing this
dilemma while waiting to have our favorite coffee brewed in the
pod maker. He's a coffee guy as well. We were using a process that
I had developed but was clearly not as user friendly we would have
liked. After several minutes of discussion, we went into the
cellar workshop and came up with our first prototype, the Coffee
Disc Maker. After a fair amount of experimentation - the
Coffee Disc Maker was finalized - there were several different
designs and prototypes of this product produced before settling on
the final one. With this simple to use product, several of the
original objectives were met:
- Your favorites coffee is used.
- Coffee Discs are inexpensive.
- Filter paper to make Coffee Discs is widely available.
- NO additional processing requiring heat, pressure or sealing
is required.
- There are no messy parts to clean - Coffee Discs are as
disposable as pods.
- Materials are FDA compliant for food applications.
- NO coffee machine modifications were required to use the
Coffee Discs.
Several copies of the prototype were made - and given to the
folks that had help spur on the thought process. Well one of them
said - you know, you should sell these!!!
So here we are --
We hope that you find this product as easy to use, and as
satisfying as we do. For us, here at BREW-YET, the most
satisfying thing is being able to brew coffees with blends and
beans the way we like them - of course we find the fact that
we can do this at a fraction of the cost also satisfying but that
is a story for another day!!.
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New Hampshire
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