March 15, 2006

Review: Vanilla Nut Coffee Pods from Pod Pack International

Review from Single Serve Coffee.com - Coffee Pod Reviews We've been in a furious round of coffee pod testing all week not letting the new Grindmaster GPOD Single Serve Coffee brewer get a free moment and decided to run a round of the new Pod Pack International coffee pods through it this week as well. Pod Pack International makes over 10 flavors for your for Senseo, Bunn My Cafe, Krups Home Cafe, and simplehuman single serve coffee pod brewers.

Pods are sold 18 per dispenser carton with 4 dispenser cartons in a shipping case and you can choose up to 4 different blends for each shipping case. Minimum order is 1 shipping case but pods are reasonably priced at $3.95 for regular flavors and $4.95 for flavored and decaf .

The following flavors are available in 9 gram single packed pods:

House Blend Regular
House Blend Decaffeinated
100% Columbian
Breakfast Blend
French Roast
Hazelnut
Vanilla Nut
Guatemala Antigua
Irish Cream
Sumatra

We decided to go with Vanilla Nut for this review as we've had a craving for something other than the dark coffee we've been testing with all week. The first thing we noticed was the attractive packaging of the One Cup coffee pods from Pod Pack. Each comes individually wrapped and weighs in at 9.3 grams per pod according to our scale. That makes sense as Pod Pack claims 9 grams of coffee in each pod and with the filter you could easily add the other .3 grams into the overall coffee pod weight.

Upon opening the Vanilla Nut coffee pod from Pod Pack International you get a great nose of vanilla - sweet vanilla. We've often found a pod with a great nose however can not have a great taste - it's all smell and no coffee flavor. How would these pods fair?

We then fired up the Senseo and new Grindmaster brewer and proceed to make a cup of Vanilla nut.

Grindmaster GPOD Brewer: Single Pod Holder - Medium Strength - ~7 ozs of water
Senseo: Single Pod Holder - Double cup at ~8 ozs of water

Both the Senseo and the GPOD made a great cup of coffee from the Vanilla Nut coffee pods. The coffee is very rosy and has a sweet finish. We added a little sugar and cream to it and the flavor only increased. Overall this is a very good cup of Vanilla Nut coffee - a nice cross between the vanilla and the lingering taste on your tongue lasts for a good 10-15 seconds.

What we like about the Vanilla Nut as well is how comparable the coffee produced from the Senseo and the Grindmaster GPOD brewer are - sure they're different, but they do have similiar notes in the taste and that's refreshing to see in the pod world.

We're going to give these a solid 3.5 out of 5. Overall this is a very good flavored coffee pod and we'll also be testing some of the other Pod Pack One Cup pods over the next few weeks.