Designed by mechanical engineer/industrial designer Joseph Pruitt, the K-pod Coffee Converter is a little plastic adapter module that fits inside your existing coffee machine and enables it to brew with K-cups. Here’s a quick overview of how it works:
You start by popping a K-cup into the pod and closing the lid. After that, you adjust the strength of the brew by with a knob located on the side (we’ll get to how that works in a second). Once you’ve chosen the boldness, you simply drop the pod into the filter basket of your machine, add a cup full of water, and hit brew. Because coffee filters are typically a standard size, the pod is designed to fit into most drip coffee filter baskets perfectly – even cone-shaped ones. In about a minute, you’ll have a single cup of piping-hot coffee.
The magic of the K-pod is the bypass system that allows you to control the strength of your coffee. K-cups typically require hot, high-pressure water to brew – which your drip brewer isn’t equipped to deliver. So instead, it works by sending hot water at low pressures into the K-cup (resulting in a very strong brew), and then adding plain boiled water to it afterward – similar to how an Americano is brewed. By spinning the dial on the side, you’re simply raising or lowering the bypass valve and allowing less or more water to pass through the K-cup, thus changing how strong it comes out. It’s pretty brilliant if you ask us.
The best part is that if you back the project now, you can snag a K-pod Coffee Converter for around $24 bucks – a fraction of what you’d pay for even the cheapest Keurig machine. Pruitt is looking to raise $35K to help cover the cost of tooling needed to injection mold the first batch of K-pods, but if everything goes as planned and the project reaches its funding goal, he plans to ship the pods to backers as early as June.
Find out more here.
