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Moderately priced hotels, medium-size offices, car dealerships that claim to offer excellent customer service: These are the places I typically pod coffee in the wild. And yes, the machines are also ubiquitous among a not-so-picky set of coffee drinkers that range from recent college graduates to hurried, older professionals, but the bottom line is that single-serve coffee machines do not have a great reputation, either for coffee that tastes good or coffee that is environmentally friendly to make. But I’m always ready to try machines that bring pod coffee convenience while working to change that reputation.
When it came out late in 2022, Bruvi hit the market making three big promises: coffee that tasted better than other pod-based machines, a wider variety of drink options than most other pod-based machines, and pods that you could throw right in the garbage after using with fewer negative environmental consequences than the pods we’ve come to know.
The first two are straightforward and are the kind of testing we do all the time at Epi. And after drinking through the range of what the Bruvi can do, it really does deliver. The problem I’ve always had with pod coffee makers is that the coffee, if it tastes like anything at all, tastes burnt. The Bruvi’s solve for this is to use much more precise temperature control, adjusting temps, along with other brewing parameters like pressure and brew time, to make more flavorful coffee. I don’t want to get carried away and say it can duplicate what you could make with carefully brewed pour-over or a high-end espresso machine, but if your main exposure to single-serve coffee makers is the inexpensive Keurig in someone’s waiting room, this is a huge step up in quality.
The Bruvi does a nice job with different coffee drinks as well. The cold brew really is smoother and easier drinking than the other options. Note that what Bruvi calls cold brew is actually coffee made with their precision heater, which heats up rapidly and then quickly cools to 120°F for brewing. They claim that anything brewed below 170°F gives the coffee that lower acidity that people love in cold brew—and, upon tasting, I think they’re right. This is the only single-serve brewer that can make coffee at such a low temperature, and it only take eight minutes.
The espresso shot really does have a nice head of crema on it. And the machine also makes nice tea and Americanos. As I mentioned above, the Bruvi has a wide temperature range, able to brew between 120℉ and 200℉, automatically detecting what temperature and pressure to use based on the pod and settings you choose. Again, for methods like cold brew this isn’t an idealized version, but the point of the Bruvi, like all pod machines, is speed and convenience. The results are fast, easy, and better than what we’ve been conditioned to expect.
All of this functionality gets put together in a smart, clean looking package with bright whites and light wood accents alongside an intuitive and easy to use touchscreen, making it the rare coffee maker that could actually enhance your kitchen decor.
Now, as to the environmental claims, I don’t have the means or the years to independently verify them all, but here’s what we do know. The company treats its coffee capsules, called B-pods, with a bio enzyme that allows them to break down significantly faster in a landfill than the typical untreated coffee pod in a way that leaves no microplastics behind, saying that a B-pod breaks down 63% in 577 days whereas an untreated pod breaks down just 2%. It lays out its test results here. The upshot of all that is that rather than a recycling process used by the likes of Nespresso that requires users to bag up and mail their pods out for processing, B-pods are designed to be chucked in the garbage, delivering on the promise of convenience that has always been the raison d’être of pod coffee machines.
A pod machine will never truly duplicate the coffee you get from freshly grinding beans, manually measuring water temperature, and precisely dosing it, either from a taste or an eco standpoint, but the Bruvi comes closer than any other I’ve used. And this is just the opinion of one meticulous coffee brewer (and other people at Epi have different opinions), but so far, it is the only one I’d recommend.
