Review (5/5): I Like I-Fill
This is my review of the Ifill K-Cup user fill system. All in all, the system delivers a steady clean means of filling K-Cup bodies with coffee. Below I will compare my experience with 4 different scenarios for drinking coffee from a K-Cup system
1. A standard dark roast K-cup cartridge. This was a non-Keurig brand that contained 10.76 grams of coffee. The coffee was of reasonable flavor, very convenient to use, and with no mess to make, the capsule is too complicated to recycle. Most expensive system to use $0.50 to more than $1.00 per serving.
2. Re-usable Echo Cup Screen. - User filled screen capsule. Somewhat messy to fill, brews reasonable tasting coffee, but will leave a little sediment of ground in your cup. Holds 10.20 grams of coffee. The system is a pain to clean out. Least expensive system as the screen cup may be reused many times over.
3. Re-usable Echo Cup Screen with added paper filter – User filled screen capsule with disposable paper filter that fits inside of the plastic screen capsule. Takes a while to get the hang of fitting the filter into the capsule. The system holds a little less coffee at 10.06 grams of coffee. The drinkable coffee produced has very little sediment in your cup. This system is a little bit easier to clean up, but not much. The filter cup removes fairly easily, but there is still a fair amount of rinsing of the plastic capsule to get rid of the coffee grounds that are on the top of the capsule lid. Slightly more expensive due to having to purchase filters.
4. The IFill Cup - The is a user fillable cup single use system. The cup has a preinstalled filter that does well producing sediment free coffee. The attached lid is made of foil that is supported by a plastic ring that is hinged to the IFill cup body. Each lid has a very effective gummy seal that works well during the brewing process to keep coffee ground contained within the IFill Cup. After filling with grounds, the caps stay sealed to the cup body and seem to be shelf stable for more than a week. So just fill a bunch in one session and you off to caffeine heaven for another week. There is some potential mess when originally filling new cups, but the ability to simple toss the used cup without any mess is a great plus. A lightly filled cup held 10.86 grams of coffee. At this fill there seem to be very few leaks when the brew process is working. A very densely packed and somewhat overfilled cup held 14.72 grams. In this situation there was some leaking from the cup lid at the water insertion point, but this cup was fill to the point of abuse. I believe this system is more expensive than using an Echo Cup but is much less hassle to use. The system is less expensive than using factory filled K-cups. So if you want to know what is in your KCup every morning, and don’t mind setting down and filling new capsules with coffee every once in a while – this is your system!
Can you reuse an IFIll cup? I guess you could, but I am not sure that hassle of cleaning out, drying, and hoping that the single use gum seal would work well would be worth the bother.
Can you recycle the product? The company says yes, in reality I would guess that being most other KCup devices are not recyclable when the cup finally gets to the recycle guy for sorting, they are going to “Think KCup” and sort it directly into the trash.
All in all, the IFill seems to be a great user fill KCup system. Nice flavor from your own beans, easy setup, use and disposal of the product. – I will be reordering more soon!