Now there is a new product that you can make with your single serve coffee maker from Keurig. A California company named Brewbuds is putting marijuana and coffee in k cups and selling them in Nevada where recreational pot is legal. Business Insider discusses the marijuana-infused coffee pod.
This week, Brewbudz debuted a line of coffees and teas spiked with marijuana flower and encased in single-serve, fully compostable containers. Each pod costs about $7 and is available at select dispensaries in Nevada.
Kevin Love, director of product for Brewbudz parent company Cannabiniers, said the company wanted to crack the marijuana edibles market with a low-calorie product that uses a socially accepted delivery mechanism. When they read the stats on coffee consumption, Cannabiniers (whose name combines “cannabinoids” – chemical compounds found in marijuana – and “pioneers”) knew they found a match. Nearly two-thirds of Americans drink coffee every day.
These folks are not the first to come up with a pot and coffee k cup but what makes them unique is their totally biodegradable packaging.
The pods are made from bio-based mesh, skins of roasted coffee beans, and other organic materials. When disposed of correctly, the pod breaks down in as little as five weeks, according to the website. By comparison, Keurig generates billions of pieces of plastics every year.
Perhaps other k cup makers, of just coffee, will follow this example and come up with totally biodegradable packaging. Perhaps that would forestall the death of the k cup.
We wrote recently about k cups in our article, Does Organic Coffee in a K Cup Make Sense? There is a basic contradiction in the equation of selling organic coffee in plastic containers that will fill up landfills and not decompose for thousands of years! However, the more likely case is that single serving coffee is a fad and fads run their course. So, is this the death of the k cup or simply a retrenchment into a smaller market?
Where Do K Cups Make Sense?
This writer loves it when he travels and there is a coffee maker in his hotel room. Here is a case where k cups make sense although we would like to see biodegradable cups. Single adults do not make large or need large quantities of coffee so biodegradable k cups make sense there also. For the family that makes coffee for several people at once give me a pot of boiling water, a cloth filter and freshly ground healthy organic coffee in the right quantity.
But how do marijuana and coffee work together? Live Science says this.
The combination of the two will likely make the user feel wired and tired at the same time, he said. But taking caffeine with marijuana would not cancel out the high induced by the drug, he noted. And it would be a mistake to think that someone could get high and then sober up, thanks to the caffeine, Krakower said.
The best approach to this product is to consider it a way to take marijuana and not a way to enhance your healthy organic coffee experience.