The flavor profiles of three of the four of these were somewhat redundant. Sort of like reading a description of the flavors touted on a bottle of Riesling Wine… you really have to use your imagination to convince yourself that there’s something reminiscent of “Pink lemonade” for example. A little more diversity would have been welcomed. Still, enjoyable all the same.

Overall I quite like the machine, which I use for my afternoon coffee at work, now that I've learned some of its peculiarities:

1. Curdling

I always have light roasts, and a small amount of shelf stable half and half (5-7 ml of half and half in a 200 ml pour -- what comes out with a 255 ml standard pod). Pretty much every time I do this I get curdling, across multiple xPod types. Now, I make a 1 g sodium bicarb in 1 L of water solution to reduce the acidity and curdling. Currently testing 5 ml of this in my cream before slowly adding xbloom coffee from a small carafe. That works reliably, and I'll be testing with less solution to see what the minimum is. I should add that the curdling happens with both tap water (Evanston IL) and with a 5g jug of 'Spring Mountain' water I use in Tap Mode.

2. Temperature

Coffee is not hot enough unless you first fill the receptacle with hot water from the machine. I suppose that's a personal preference issue, but I find even with this step, the coffee is less hot than I like it to be (I use an aeropress XL for my morning coffee at home, and with preheating it is a LOT hotter than what I get out of the xBloom). I don't know any way to fix this --- it's going to happen with pour overs intrinsically --other than maybe having the brew go into an Ember mug, which I'm considering.

3. Using your own beans

The dripper setup works well. The only issue I've had is you need to make sure there is no filter poking up from the dripper, particularly on…

The Be Bright coffees were amazing. I especially enjoyed the one from Flower Child as I was able to taste the florals in the coffee. My 2nd favorite was Tropical weather which was also fantastic!

A great variety pack especially if you like lighter and fruitier roasts. My pack included Flower Child - Edwin Carvajal, Boxx - Rwanda Inzovu Peaberry, Onyx - Tropical Weather, and Heart - Ethiopia Danche. The Flower Child was the most interesting with the Onyx coffee being predictably mid.