K-cup Paper Coffee Filters Review

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If you have a Keurig single cup coffee maker you know about the challenge of finding affordable K-cups. The grocery store K-cups can cost as much as a dollar each. You can sometimes find them on sale for 50 cents each when you buy in bulk. My Keurig machine came with a reusable filter insert. The filter is made with a fine stainless steel mesh. The idea is that you can use your own ground coffee in this filter instead of buying pre-filled K-cups. Unfortunately, even the finest mesh filters allow a small amount of coffee residue into your cup. In worse cases, you end up with grounds floating around in your freshly brewed coffee. But the thing I hate the most, is cleaning the old coffee grounds out of the mesh filter.

There had to be a better way to use my own coffee without the messy cleanup. I decided to give paper K-cup coffee filters a try. These are tiny paper filters that you put inside the reusable mesh filter. I found several varieties on Amazon. Most came in packages of 2 or 3 hundred. I found one brand that had a 100 pack for $9.95. You can get 300 for $15.95, but I wanted a smaller package so that I could try them out. I decided to go with unbleached filters that had an attached paper lid. Bleached filters are white and unbleached are tan. I’m not a coffee brewing expert, but I suppose some people don’t like the taste with a bleached filter. There was no cost difference between the bleached and unbleached filters. You can get paper filters with or without lids. I thought maybe the lid would provide a little extra containment for the grounds and make cleanup easier.

In my first test, I filled the filter about half full of ground coffee and used the small cup setting. The coffee came out kind of weak, but the clean up was easy. Some reviewers stated that the filter fell apart when they tried to remove it, but I didn’t have this problem at all. For the second test, I filled the filter so that the grounds were about 1/4 inch from the top. You want to leave some space for the grounds to expand. This time the coffee was much better tasting. For clean-up, all you have to do is pull out the used filter and rinse the reusable mesh filter and insert. The cost of a cup of coffee goes down to about 20 cents by using your own coffee and a reusable k-cup with a paper filter. I only drink one cup per day, so 100 filters will last me over 3 months. The cost savings over that period of time will be about $38.

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