There’s like 15 different communities for coffee! Nice!
Like many of us, I survive largely on the break room coffee pot. Our grounds are running low again and the hospital doesn’t stock it, so it’s on the employees.
Our taste in coffee is driven mostly by cost, so we go through a lot of Costco-sized buckets of Folgers, but Folgers famously tastes like dirt. Still, it’s cheap and it’s coffee, so that’s usually the winner.
I’m not a connoisseur by any means, but… any good options that taste less like dirt while still being cheap / available in large quantities?
I prowl the bargain shelves of all varieties of supermarkets for sale coffee: Sprouts, Grocery Outlet, Safeway, Walgreens, Target, etc.
Whole bean is preferred, but ground will also work.
My expectations are low, and I never feel like I’m getting ripped off.
Hard to beat Costco prices. That said, try Cafe Bustelo, it might fit your needs nicely.
Cafe Bustelo
That’s my go to for cheap coffee.
The biggest improvement would be to get your colleagues to agree to buy a grinder and write out a simple set of directions for the amount of beans to grind for each pot. Since this is just drip machine or a large percolator, the quality of the grinder is not hugely important like it would be for pour over or espresso. A basic Baratza Encore would be more than good enough.
Cafe Bustelo, Eight O’Clock Coffee, plus the Costco and Aldi brands mentioned by others should all be a big step up from pre-ground Folgers.
The key is to grind before each brew instead of using pre-ground.
Aldi’s Beaumont Classic Roast is cheaper than CostCo’s options. It’s not too bad.
Anything you make in a cheap filter drip coffee machine is going to have an upper bound of how well it can taste. It’s a convenient method to brew larger quantities of coffee at once, but not really an ideal way of getting the best tasting coffee.
You might want to try a more medium roast instead of a dark roast and see if that tastes less like dirt to you, but a lot of cheap coffee is going to be dark roast because it hides the taste of the (shitty) beans used.
I have found that grinding cheap coffee to a finer grind, often creates the taste illusion that it’s much higher quality.
My method with cheaper coffee is brew it stronger, but water back down to the normal concentration.
I will try that! It makes sense as the tail end of the brew is the most bitter part
