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Take Your Caffeine Addiction to the Next Level with K-Pod Coffee

ByAlistair Clarke Hours

Bear with me, coffee aficionados, as I find myself in uncharted territory with this one, swimming through dark and somewhat milky waters. Here’s my admission of guilt: I don’t drink coffee, or tea, or even alcohol of any kind. I am the world’s least interesting man. But don’t think for a second that I don’t know how much people love their coffee and rely on it in the morning (and afternoon, and evening, and perhaps during the night for the terminally addicted). With that in mind, it’s time to wake up, do some stretches, and get ready for a new Kickstarter, because today we’re looking at K-pod Coffee (not to be confused with K-pop, this has nothing to do with Korea).

The Refreshment Format Battle

Now, we’ve all been to hotels, right? I certainly have—admittedly not for anything exciting—but still, I enjoy the hotel experience, with its snack packs, tiny towels, swipe cards, and alluring smorgasbord of single-serving K-cups. If you’re not familiar with the name, a K-cup (K standing for Keurig, the creator) is a foil-topped thimble-sized portion of milk, team, cocoa, coffee, just about anything from the usual rotation of popular beverages. The idea is that you grab a K-cup coffee and put it in a Keurig brewer where it is punctured and has its innards hosed out with hot water in what sounds like the tastiest and most refreshing kind of torture.

What if you don’t have a Keurig brewer but an alternative to Keurig? What if you’ve made your coffee production choice and it happens to be of the standard variety? Well, you could still try to make use of a K-cup, I suppose. You could open it up and deposit the contents in your machine, but it would take a long time and give you a brew so strong it could melt concrete (I think that’s how coffee works, don’t quote me on that).

Simple Reconciliation

That’s where the K-pod comes in, fanning itself coquettishly and giving you a come-hither glance. The process becomes as simple as opening up the K-pod, dropping the K-cup into the slot, closing the lid, and selecting the strength by adjusting the wheel on the side. Position your cup, start it up, and in a matter of minutes you’re sipping gleefully from an appropriately-rich drink of your choice and chuckling at the misfortune of the granule-heaping fools looking upon you enviously.

Coffee

Look, I don’t know coffee, but those little cups are everywhere, and no-one ever notices you taking them (he said with kleptomaniacal fervor); instead of pointlessly hoarding them for years, or treating them as gastronomically-questionable novelty shots, you might as well do something with them. I’m basically an idiot when it comes to putting mechanisms together, but I’m fairly confident I could handle the level of complexity presented by the K-pod.

Limited Alternatives

Let’s consider other options for those of you with coffee habits and K-cup collections. You could pick up Keurig brewers and use your cups that way, though the expense of purchasing a second machine would be relatively massive. Manual brewing is most assuredly possible, of course, but if you were content with making coffee unassisted, you probably wouldn’t have bought a coffee machine in the first place. And that’s pretty much it. Keurig sells filters for its machines allowing them to use regular coffee granules, but I imagine it’s fairly unlikely that anyone not in the service industry would have anything other than a standard machine as their sole coffee device, making the K-pod of interest to a much larger consumer base.

Cost and Practicality

The cheapest tier will cost you $19, and for that you get the K-pod itself in all its cup-housing glory, while $24 and above will yield you a stainless steel K-cup holder in addition. If you are in possession of a goose that has a habit of laying golden eggs—or your brain is addled by caffeine abuse—you can commit over $900 to get a K-pod made from ‘Aircraft Grade Aluminum’ which sounds impressive as hell for a beverage-related product. What else are you going to spend that money on, wealthy people? Solid gold toilet seats?

So, if you’re the sort of person who gets the shakes after an hour or two without a steaming cup of joe, you should head to the Kickstarter page and back the K-pod. With your caffeine-enhanced reactions, you can grab a very reasonably priced one before the tiers start to vanish. It’s always good to reward lateral thinking. Or latte-ral thinking. I’m not withdrawing that pun, you’ll just have to deal with it.

Alistair worked in technical support for a while and emerged a frightened layabout wholly unprepared to deal with the realities of adulthood. He now dreams of being given some money to do stuff with words. He's a huge PC gamer, and in the time he's spent playing Team Fortress 2, he could have eaten at least ninety thousand cupcakes or acquired rudimentary juggling skills. He'd love to play console games but can't justify the expense.