Keurig K-Cups Life Hack

We recently picked up the new Keurig 2.0, which was a huge step up from Mr. Coffee.  Love love love the convenience of the machine, but was disappointed to find it was super picky when it came to K-cups.

I knew that this particular model was more advanced and we wouldn't be able to fool it with some of those re-usable k-cup things that look like a tiny coffee filter.  So I was always very careful to make sure we only picked up the k-cups that had the Keurig logo on them, as directed.  Well, unfortunately we came across some that didn't work.  You can see in the picture below that we had 2 types of Green Mountain Coffee, both in Keurig approved k-cups, but the green one is solid green across the top, whereas the brown one has a white-ish/lavender ring around the brown.

We popped the green one in the coffee machine and got this message.

"...try one of the hundreds of packs with the Keurig logo"????  But we did?  So I called the number on the screen and was informed that some k-cups are produced without the white or off-white band around the cover and those do not work with the 2.0 machines.  The customer service rep I reached indicated that you could somehow tell by some marking on the outside of the boxes whether they would work or not, but I can honestly say that I've scoured boxes looking for something that says they are compatible, and haven't seen anything so far on any box I picked up at the grocery store.

Since this was our first issue, the rep nicely sent us replacement coffee for what we had purchased.  But for the future I developed this little hack so that even if I pick up the wrong kind of k-cup in the future, I won't have to make another trip back to the store (with screaming children) to return them.

Note - this only works if you have a used k-cup that had that special perimeter band on it.

For this project I just needed the dud k-cup, a used k-cup with necessary band, glue dots, and a utility knife.

Using a very sharp utility knife, cut around the hard plastic rim of the k-cup.  Don't bother trying to remove just the foil lid as those things are so flimsy that I imagine it would tear pretty quickly.  Instead make you incision just under the lip of the lid.

It gets a little messy when you get the whole lid cut off as some of the coffee will spill out on the counter.

Toss out the used k-cup.  Rinse and dry the chopped off lid.  Next you want to apply one of the glue dots to the backside of the lid.  You can get glue dots at a craft store, or I guess you could use something like double-sided foam tape.  It's really just for sticking the old lid to the top of the green k-cup, otherwise the lid will slide off before you can close the hatch.

Finally, stick the dummy k-cup lid on your non-functioning k-cup and close the hatch to brew your coffee.  Yeah!  No error messages this time.

 

As a side note, I suppose the reasoning for the white perimeter band is so the machine knows how to make whatever hot beverage you are wanting.  So if you were wanting tea, you would need a stick on top that was from another tea k-cup.  This system has served us very well as we primarily use the Keurig for coffee, so a replacement top from another type of coffee seems to brew the green-top coffee with no issues.