If you have owned your Keurig for longer than a year, I almost guarantee that you have been at the receiving end of brewing issues resulting from the machine building up too much residue internally. I’ve owned just about every model and make of Keurig’s in existence, and every single one has been the bearer of this message at some point or another.
This issue of scale does not solely apply to Keurig’s either; rather, I’d say just about every type of single-serve coffee machine runs into this issue at some point or another, but regardless of universality, the issue is bloody irritating, and it only seems to occur at the most inconvenient moments, naturally.
If you Google what to do when your brewer has a scale issue, Google will likely direct you towards these descaling pods you can purchase from Amazon. Please hear me when I say these pods are positively useless in my own experience, and I’ve tried them probably three times at this point. They don’t work, and as it turns out, there is a far cheaper and more accessible remedy to this coffee machine conflict – vinegar.
The minute I notice anything funky with my coffee machine, I fill the water reservoir container with white vinegar and let it sit, undisturbed, in the machine, for a few hours. After the vinegar has had a chance to break up any gunk inside the water reservoir itself, I then run at least three cycles with the vinegar and no pod in the machine. Once the vinegar has worked its way through the device, I thoroughly rinse the water reservoir, brew one cup of straight hot water to remove any vinegar residue, and then I’m good to make and enjoy a cup of coffee.
Perhaps the cleaning pods work for some machines, but vinegar, in my opinion, works a hell of a lot better.
Photo by Zack Xavier on Unsplash
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