Senseo HD7890/75 Coffee Pod System with Holiday Gift Pack--PARENT (Review)
Senseo HD7890/75 Coffee Pod System with Holiday Gift Pack--PARENT
| Average Customer Rating: 4.0 |
| I brought this item as a birthday present for my husband to use at his office. We gave it a test run at home and it was really easy to use and you get a great cup of coffee with a bit of foam on top. I also found that I can purchase the pods at discount chain stores where there are variety of flavors to choose from. My spouse is currently using it at the office at finds it very convenient, easy clean up and gets a tasty cup of coffee with each use. At home I'm a hardcore Saeco fully automatic espresso maker user. I bought the Senseo for our weekend house a year ago and am very happy with it. Pros: - Extremely easy to use. Guests get a 10 second training and can then make their own coffee. - Very convenient if different people get up at different times - everybody gets fresh coffee. - Also convenient if you have decaf drinkers in the group, or people with mild / strong coffee tastes. - It seems indestructible. We had much trouble with people breaking our Saeco due to wrong handling, but nobody managed to break the Saeco yet. - It's very clean. No messing with grounds. - It makes very yummy coffee. Everybody staying with us comments on it. Which leads me to my first con: Cons: - IMHO the Senseo pods suck. Don't know why they call it coffee, it's bad. - Am flying my pods in from Germany: Every visitor from Germany is asked to go to Aldi and bring me a bag full. Am living on the West Coast, we have no Aldi here. It may be worth checking on the East Coast. Their coffee is the best! It's also cheap, at 1.50 Euro for 20 pods. Pods in the US are very expensive. - It's a bit of a hassle if you have a big group and they all want coffee at the same time - but since they get to stay at our house I have no problem teaching them how to make their own. I was a happy Brew Station user for 2 years, until the defective wiring in our old rental house blew it out. So I was back to using my back-up Mr. Coffee pot (which makes terrible coffee, but has been in service for 15 years so I can hardly complain), and was on the search for a replacement. I got an offer for a "free" Senseo pot, so I decided that it was probably worth the overpriced shipping cost of $15 and I ordered it. I've been using it almost daily for several months, so here is my comprehensive review. Pros: In some ways it is very convenient. It heats water up incredibly fast, and it very easy to use. The disposable pods are quick and not messy at all. Works great for tea, since the water heats up nice and fast. Cons: For all of it's convenience, it is also a huge hassle. For one thing, the cups it brews are teeny tiny. My regular coffee cups need to be filled on the 2 cup setting, and then need another cup after that, or another 1/2 cup to fill the mug. It really annoys me that I never get a full mug of coffee. You also can only make one mug of coffee before having to refill the water tank, since there isn't quite enough for 2. And furthermore, you need to use 2-3 pods just for one cup of decent strength coffee. So even though it does heat water up fast, and the pods are easy to use, I find myself having to start the brewing process over for every. single. cup. of. coffee. It turns out to be a huge time drain. The coffee just tastes BAD. It's pretty sad when I am buying Folgers coffee for the darn thing, but the pod selection at my grocery store is seriously limited, so I'm stuck getting Folgers since Senseo doesn't make decaf, or at least it is not available to me. It's bad enough that pregnancy has forced me to switch to decaf, now I have to endure Folger's coffee on top of that. The quality of the Senseo pods are, well, think gas station coffee at 2 am. I bought the Ecopads for it, and while the idea is nice, it doesn't deliver. I have been grinding the coffee to a very fine powder as recommended, but it takes four pods to make one cup of very weak coffee. No one should have to mess with a coffee maker this much. In general, it is probably worth the $15 I paid for it. But not worth all the $$ I have spent trying to find pods for it. And I would feel rooked if I paid retail price for it. It is probably an OK pot for someone who only wants one cup of coffee, or who is into the gadgety-ness of it. Or maybe they jut like the foamy stuff. I think it's a bit weird to have foam on coffee that wasn't created with some sort of dairy product, but who am I to judge? I am going to go back to my trusty Brew Station. It always made good coffee, it never burned the coffee, and I can hold a kid with one arm and dispense coffee with the other. And as any mom knows (especially moms of more than one) that is a handy little feature. I think Senseo is going to Goodwill. I wish it luck, and happiness, and hopefully someone will love it. Because I sure don't. |
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