If you have a Tassimo single-serve coffee brewer and can't get enough of Starbucks coffee, now those little TDisc pods are available with four different varieties of Starbucks brew. Tassimo has teamed up with Starbucks to offer Breakfast Blend, House Blend, Caffé Verona and Africa Kitamu coffees in pod form. We went to our local Starbucks and got a steaming cup of Breakfast Blend coffee, while our comely assistant brewed up a cup of the same blend back at the office in this Braun Tassimo brewer. Let's do a taste test.
It's Not Cheap: An equal amount of this coffee at Starbucks will cost you $1.74, while these TDiscs are $9.29 for a pack of 12 single-serve pods, or $.77 each. However, you'll need to buy one of these single-serve Tassimo hot beverage systems made by Braun, which will cost you about $130 at Target. A bit of quick math tells us you'll need to drink 134 cups to make up the price difference.
Noisy: If you're going to be making coffee early in the morning before anyone else wakes up, this Tassimo brewer is as noisy as a motorcycle sitting outside your front door.
Easy: It's convenient. Pop in a pod, push a button and your coffee is ready in just a minute or two. Might be easier than driving to Starbucks and putting up with all those crowds of poseurs with their pseudo-hip herd behavior.
Taste Verdict: Excellent. The coffee brewed with this little TDisc tastes exactly the same as the coffee you'd get at Starbucks.
All this fuss about Starbucks, and we're not too crazy about its coffee, anyway. It's as strong as a shot of popskull, has a slightly burnt, bitter taste and is way overpriced, but if that's your jones, now you can perfectly reproduce all that at home. If someone could just figure out how to accurately and easily create a Starbucks Frappuccino à chez moi, then we'd be really stoked. [Tassimo]