These 3 Products Are Changing How I Drink Coffee at Home

Jot Coffee is sort of like cold brew concentrate turned up to 10. Instead of diluting at a ratio of around one part concentrate to one part water, it takes just one tablespoon of Jot for a full 8 ounces of hot water, or a ratio of one to sixteen. Just heat your water, measure it out and stir in the concentrate. Jot says its coffee is brewed at 20 times the strength of regular coffee and encourages you to treat it like a shot of espresso. 

Jot tastes great, though I found my ideal cup required straying from the suggested recipes. For hot coffee, I used one tablespoon to 7 ounces instead of eight. For an iced latte, one tablespoon to a bit more than the recommended six ounces of milk. Jot encourages experimentation, and it's one of the product's strengths. It lends itself to fine-tuning a recipe, even in a house with diverse coffee tastes.

I tried Jot's Original, Dark and Golden Hour (the latter is no longer available). You can order enough Jot to make 14 cups of coffee for $26, or as a subscription for $19.50

Cometeer instant coffee isn't like anything I've had before and it works well. Cometeer sources coffee from respected craft roasters and freezes them in Keurig-style pods. To make Cometeer at home, you'll run the pod under warm water for a few seconds to loosen the frozen coffee inside, peel back the foil lid and melt the coffee the rest of the way in a cup of hot water. For cold beverages, melt the coffee all the way and add it to iced water or milk. It's also compatible with coffee makers that use pods.

I tried several of Cometeer's offerings and they all ranked among the best cups of coffee I've had at home and from a lot of coffee shops. While all the coffees I tried for this article were delicious, Cometeer's were consistently my favorite. With coffee from 11 different roasters on offer, it also has the most variety.

The process is also simple, though technically a bit more complicated than pouring a liquid from a bottle as you do with Jot. The pods are aluminum and recyclable, as is the box Cometeer is shipped in. Shipments come packed with dry ice on a schedule of every one, two or four weeks. You can get 32 cups of coffee for $44.

Steeped Coffee brings the convenience of a cup of tea to coffee drinkers. Simply dunk a sachet of coffee into hot water, wait 5 minutes and enjoy one of four roasts (or a decaf). Steeped Coffee is the only one of the three that sends you actual coffee beans (ground and inside large tea-bag-like filter bags) instead of something that just needs diluting. The cups I brewed at home were robust and tasty. Each of Steeped's coffees tastes a bit more roasty than the other instant coffees I tried. Each cup did have a few coffee grounds escape the bag and settle at the bottom, but it's no worse than drinking French press coffee.

Steeped says its coffees are ethically and sustainably sourced. And, while Steeped might have more packaging than others (the interior filter bag, the exterior single-serve packaging, and the bag it shipped in), none of it needs to be sent to the landfill. Almost all of it is compostable in a home composting bin and the rest (just the single-serve packaging) is commercially compostable. 

You can get a pack of five Steeped coffee bags for $10, or eight for $15. If you opt for a subscription, you can get 24 delivered weekly for about $40 (down from $45). You can set your delivery schedule from once a week to once every eight.