Originally Posted by Mike Rivers

Maybe coffee pots aren't sufficiently high tech to be discussed here, but I can't think of a better place to piss and moan than this forum since I'm having a problem with what hotels seem to think is an advance in technology.

I like a cup of good coffee first thing in the morning. At home, I make a cup of coffee, take it to my computer, and sip while reading the morning's junk and real mail.

In my continued efforts to make my hotel rooms a little more home-like (I bring my own unclogged shower head, too), for the past several years I've been bringing some filters and coffee from home. Since for quite some time, hotels, at least the ones I stay at, put coffee makers in the room that used the common 4-cup size flat bottom filters (Mr. Coffee, Hamilton Beach, Black & Decker brands - they all work about the same), so it was easy to use my home brew system rather than use the pre-measured filter-packed crummy coffee provided by the hotel.

A while back, I started finding in-room coffee makers that have the filter basked, filter, and coffee integrated into a single disposable rectangular tray (I think I first saw these at a Courtyard) and attempts to rework those to use my own coffee have resulted in a mess and about half a cup of bad coffee.

More recently, I've been encountering another fiendish version which uses a single serving pre-packaged pod-sized portion of coffee that drops into a small version of the standard filter basket. This also makes a poor cup of coffee, and I've been unsuccessful in attempts to use my own coffee and either my own filter or by disassembling the supplied filter. That also makes a mess.

I acknowledge that this style of coffee maker is attractive to the hotels since it doesn't use a carafe (the coffee goes directly into the cup) so that's one piece they don't need to wash, but it sure makes for bad coffee.

What to do? What to do? I've had rare success by asking at the front desk if housekeeping can find an old style coffee maker for me. Generally they don't understand, though, and just shrug and say "well, this is what we have."

Once this year I stayed in a hotel that had a Keurig instant one-cup coffee maker that wasn't too bad but still kind of weak. This was a fancy resort-like place that I only stayed in because I had some points with the chain due to expire and no other reason to use them.

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency between properties in a chain, or even the "grade" of the property that determines the kind of coffee maker they have. I think I first encountered the integrated rectangular basket/filter/coffee makerse in an Embassy Suites (that previously had the Mr. Coffee pots to which I had become accustomed). The cheap Comfort Suites in Las Vegas that I stay at when attending trade shows switched to the little round weak pods last year, and what prompted this post was a stay at the Hotel Indigo in Baton Rouge (an Intercontinental) last week.

For a while I was bringing a filter cone and appropriate filters and heating water in the microwave oven in the room, and I've also used that approach with a French press travel mug, but I could (because I'm that kind of a person) easily go overboard bringing way too much stuff along with me to cover various possibilities.

Can anyone sympathize with me here? Or should I just change my ways, put on my clothes first thing, and go out for a decent cup of coffee?