Keurig builds a K-Cup brewer into the machine meant to replace the K-Cup

Someone in a house or office with a new Alta will want a plain cup in a hurry, and Keurig has already planned for that person to skip the new round. The company says the K-Cup brewer inside the Alta is there for coffee styles the Alta does not yet make, and for when users want something quick ^[7].

The story around the launch is the end of the plastic pod. In Wired's account, Keurig wants customers to leave the K-Cup for the AltaRound eventually ^[23]. Wired's reviewer wrote that if Alta takes off, "we are likely seeing the beginning of the end for the disposable K-Cup" ^[20]. The same review weighs the price and concludes, "With that high price, it will be some time before the K-Cup dies" ^[22]. By Wired's count, Keurig is the coffee maker in nearly 50 million US homes, with offices on top of that ^[12].

What Keurig has built is an espresso machine. The Verge calls the Alta one of Keurig's most expensive consumer machines because it doubles as an espresso maker ^[6]. Phil Drapeau, Keurig's senior vice president of Future Coffee Systems, said customers wanted espresso drinks as well as brewed coffee, and that Keurig had to invent a new system to make them ^[13]. "We wouldn't be able to do any of that with K-Cup," Drapeau said. "It will fail. You have to brew it at the right temperature and extract. You can't be constrained by the K-Cup system." ^[14]

Divide Wired's pack price by eight and each round costs $1.25 to about $1.38, before milk ^[16]. Knowing which rounds to order is harder, because the two launch reports disagree on the range. Wired lists single espresso, double espresso and regular coffee at launch ^[3]. The Verge lists six caffeinated varieties across light roast, medium roast and flavored options ^[5]. Wired counts four boxes of rounds in the bundle ^[17], and The Verge counts six ^[21]. Wired also reports that the preorder bundle has already sold out ^[17].

For a stocking or office-coffee decision, I'd sort the Alta on two questions. The first is what people actually drink: plain coffee, or espresso and milk drinks. The second is whether the budget covers new machines this year or only pods for the machines already in place.

Where people drink plain coffee on machines already in place, nothing in this launch touches the order. Plain-coffee drinkers getting new machines would put most cups through the Alta's K-Cup brewer, the use Keurig itself describes ^[7], and pay the bundle price for the privilege. For espresso drinkers on their current setups, the Alta is a replacement candidate, and the per-round cost above is the number to compare. Espresso drinkers buying new are the people Keurig built the Alta for ^[13], and they are the one group for whom AltaRounds become a standing order.