Does your office run on coffee? For many, coffee is analogous to the gasoline of the workplace, always necessary to keep moving forward. Whether you are a coffee drinker yourself, or your colleagues or employees are avid coffee drinkers, you probably want to have a coffee maker handy around the office.
Even if in the rare case that you have a staff totally free of coffee drinkers, it might prove useful to be able to demonstrate your hospitality to a guest by serving them their favourite beverage.
There are plenty of coffee makers available on the market, so there is surely one to suit the needs of your office. But which one? We’ll help you analyse your requirements, get a handle on the options available, and hopefully leave you ready to find the perfect coffee maker for your office.
Coffee and the Office Environment
Depending on how many coffee drinkers you have on staff, and on the general culture around your office, coffee may either be prone to getting devoured as soon as the latest brew has dripped its final drip, or prone to going stale in a neglected pot. The way to solve both of these issues is by selecting the right modern coffee maker!
The insulated stainless steel carafe coffee pot is perhaps one of the best investments an office can make in its coffee making equipment. Replacing thin glass coffee carafe pots with high quality, durable double wall vacuum insulated stainless steel, these more formidable containers provide the ability to keep your coffee warm for hours after it has been brewed.
In the office, this can mean saving time, money, and coffee! Instead of throwing out a cold or burnt pot of coffee and making a new one (wasting coffee, electricity, water, time, and money,) the insulated carafe keeps the coffee as warm and drinkable as it was fresh brewed. This brings additional savings by alleviating the need to use a warming feature on the coffee maker, which has the potential of scalding your coffee, wasting electricity and can even pose a fire hazard.
Thinking Efficiency – Size Matters
How many people in your office really drink coffee? It is a vital question when selecting the office coffee maker, as you’ll need to take a good look at the amount of cups you can brew at once.
If you only have a small office or a few coffee drinkers, you can probably get away with opting for standard 12 to 14 cup options available on most standard coffee makers. If you really have only one or two coffee drinkers to tend to, you might even be able to get away with a single serve coffee machine.
Coffee machines are also available which incorporate a single serve brewing station with a traditional sized carafe option also integrated on the same machine, letting you get just a single cup for yourself or whip up a pot for visitors.
On the other side of the token, if you have a particularly large office (or some seriously heavy coffee drinkers,) it might be worth looking into commercial coffee machines. Even the entry level models for commercial coffee machines are capable of brewing multiple gallons of coffee per hour, and storing and keeping that coffee warm for long periods. High end commercial coffee machines, like the ones used in airports and restaurants, can provide enough coffee to meet even the largest offices requirements, and are probably well beyond the needs of most coffee fuelled office places.
Go Big, or Diversify Your Coffee?
If you have a large office space with a lot of coffee drinkers and are thinking of investing in a large coffee maker, consider the possibility of diversifying instead by purchasing multiple smaller coffee makers.
You might be able to get multiple high quality smaller coffee makers which better serve the needs of your office for less than you would have spent on a single large unit. In some situations, your office might be more at home with multiple smaller units, especially if there are multiple areas around the office which would make convenient spots for a coffee maker.
Aside from that, it is sometimes preferable to be able to make multiple pots simultaneously, and always have coffee brewing. But most of all, with multiple coffee machines on hand, you’ll be sure to never run into a catastrophic coffee crisis when a malfunction strikes.
Of course, the convenience and quality offered by large capacity commercial coffee makers can be enough to outweigh these (potential) benefits. It all really depends on the specific needs of your office and its staff.
Step Up Your Office Coffee Game
The most important part of your office coffee machine selection revolves entirely around how well it can serve the coffee consuming demands of your office’s staff. However, if you have all those logistics sorted out, you can take a look at some of the more interesting offerings! One especially well suited to the needs of offices is the freshness timer or last brewed timer available on some coffee makers, which provides a timer telling you how long since the pot was fresh.
If your office doesn’t have the best water quality, coffee makers which incorporate built in water filtration are definitely worth taking a look at and can do quite a lot for the taste of your coffee. For those really obsessed with the taste of their coffee, there is nothing like having a coffee grinder on hand to get fresh ground beans whenever it is time to brew a new cup, so consider splurging for an electric coffee grinder, or even take a look at some advanced coffee machines which incorporate grinders into the design.
If your staff likes to drink coffee throughout the work day, don’t skimp on your office coffee set up. Happy employees breed productive businesses, and with just a few simple steps (and some attention to your brand of coffee,) you can be remembered as the office with the best tasting coffee around town!