Drinking Coffee In Everyday Life

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From what I have learned so far about lean, which is likely just grazing the surface of the concept, there are a few activities in my everyday life that are easy to examine through the context of lean processes. One activity in particular, making coffee for myself, straddles the line in having elements that are in line with the lean ideals, and parts that are completely contradictory to the concepts introduced in this class. I drink a lot of coffee at home, and have tried many different ways of preparing coffee for myself. The way I currently am settled on is brewing a pot at a time, pouring it into a mason jar, and putting the jar in the fridge to cool down. I do this because I only drink iced coffee, and pouring hot coffee directly over ice causes it to quickly become diluted and watered-down (ends up with a very weak taste). By refrigerating the brewed coffee, I can enjoy a cup of perfectly chilled drip whenever I feel like it, without having to make the coffee stronger to counteract the dilution of melting ice. On the other hand, brewing a whole pot in advance violates the main principle of lean, reducing waste, because I am creating a large WIP inventory before it is needed (I am never sure if I am actually going to drink the entire chilled pot before it goes bad, so I am likely overproducing), it is waiting in the fridge until I need a cup (goes against the “pull” method), and it has a large setup time (I have to get a filter, place it, fill it with grounds, fill the maker with water, wait for the brew to finish, find a mason jar…). In contrast, I used to use a Keurig machine, which fixes a lot of those issues. With the Keurig machine, coffee is made just-in-time, so a cup of coffee is not made until I need it. This also enc...

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...sible is easier with my whole-pot brewing method, because I keep the grounds container until it is empty, which makes it very easy to track the quantity of coffee grounds that is used to produce X# of cups, whereas with the Keurig maker, if I am using pre-filled pods, they are thrown away as soon as they are used, so it is harder to track how much input is being used to produce the amount of output (although, unless I get a pod flavor I don’t like, it is usually 1:1 – 1 pod to one cup of coffee).
Although I am not switching back to the Keurig system (because I prefer cold coffee over ice) even after I have learned about how it is a more lean system, I still think it is important that I at least learned why and how it is more lean. As I learn even more about lean principles, hopefully I can continue to apply them to my life, and even if I don’t necessarily follow al

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