Review: Keurig Kold

The Keurig Kold is large. You should know this right away, because its most likely home is a kitchen countertop, and unless you measure yours by the hectare, you will need to seriously consider if you have enough space to accommodate it.

There are other things you should know about the Keurig Kold, like the fact that yes, it produces perfectly good drinks (I especially enjoyed the subtly lime-flavored seltzer). It makes sense to start with the size, though, because it's so representative of how Keurig Kold's ambitions are repeatedly done in by the pesky reality of materializing them.

"There's a lot of technology packed into that footprint," says Keurig's Phil Drapeau, and when he goes on to detail the cooling method required to churn out a 35 degree beverage, the two-piece aluminum chamber, the two thermoelectric conductors, the tiny propeller that splashes water up to the cold aluminum to flash-cool every single soda, you believe him. "It's a lot harder to get something cold fast than to get it hot fast," says Drapeau.

It shows. To accommodate all of that genuinely impressive innovation, the Keurig Kold is bigger—deeper, wider, taller—than any coffee Keurig model, by more than you're picturing. It weighs over 23 pounds, so remember to lift with your legs. The box it comes it could accommodate an adolescent Great Dane.

This isn't a contraption that recedes into the background. It announces itself with all the subtlety of a space ship, complete with an eerie glow, thanks to a front-facing button that lets you know it's cold, and a glowing indicator below it that lets you know just how cold.

The cooling mechanism comes with other quirks. It takes over two hours from when you plug the Keurig Kold in for it to get appropriately cold, during which time it sounds like a tiny leaf blower. It's loud (though not as loud as that initial set-up) when you make a soda, too, and for some time after, again a byproduct of trying to get shrink the soda process down to countertop size. That there's a technical explanation for most if not all Keurig Kold gripes, though, doesn't make them any less exasperating to live with.

In fact, we haven't even gotten to the most exasperating part, which is making an actual drink. The process is simple, and familiar to anyone who's ever used or dreamt of using a Keurig. Grab pod, remove protective seal, plop in machine, push button. And then wait. And wait. And wait. The Keurig Kold takes around 90 seconds to disperse each eight-ounce beverage, in which time you could have grabbed nearly as many cans out of a refrigerator. Or, more practically, grabbed a single can out of a fridge, opened it, and enjoyed its bubbly goodness.

Time for a good-news interlude. The Kuerig Kold produces tasty drinks. They may not line up exactly with their can-based counterparts, at least according to an unscientific blind taste test I conducted, but the Coke is recognizably Coke, and the spiced root beer from Red Barn (Keurig's new in-house cold bev brand) went down smooth. And again, big fan of that seltzer.

None of the flavors I tested was appreciably better, though, than their bottled and canned equivalents, and again, they all come with that added wait time. I'm not so attention-addled that I can't sit patiently for a minute and a half. It's the overwhelming sense that it's time being wasted that rankles, the knowledge that there's a much faster, much cheaper way to do this.

Yes, cheaper. The Keurig Kold retails for $370, nearly twice the most expensive hot-beverage Keurig on the market today. For that, you get one device and two diminutive "Keurig Kold Drinkmaker glasses," which happen to make those 8-ounce portions look not quite so small as they do in a standard pint glass. The pods, meanwhile, cost either $4.50 or $5 for each four-pack, meaning each pour comes out to over a buck. You can buy a 24-pack of 7.5 ounce Diet Coke cans for $22.

Simply being expensive is no great offense. Lots of things are expensive, besides which "expense" is entirely relative to your bank account. And again, it can't have been cheap for Keurig to cram all that technology into a single Kold. It's just hard to see exactly what benefit you're getting in return.

In a discussion about just that, Keurig Chief Innovation Officer Kevin Hartley points to the tremendous variety available to the Keurig Kold customer. Rather than one or two 24 packs of the same soda in your fridge, the logic goes, you could house a few dozen different brands (there are currently 26 beverage types listed at Keurig's web site, with plenty more in the offing) of soda, iced tea, seltzer, flavored water, and energy drink in your pantry. And because all of the carbonated options have CO2 built directly into each pod, there's the added convenience of never having to futz with canister refills, as you might on a SodaStream.

That's fair! But are people so malleable in their drink choices? Is the off chance that a diet peach iced tea craving might hit worth the counter space, expense, and noise? Hartley describes one potential customer as a mom who might be hosting a flock of thirsty tweens; in that context it makes more sense. Even then, though, the Kold can only make six drinks before you need to add ice to the water. And pity the last kid in line, watching one 90 seconds after another tick by, until his Blissful Berry flavored water was finally ready to spurt.

Whatever gripes people might have with the hot-beverage Keurig, it at least made intuitive sense. It's so much easier to pop in a pod than to measure out scoops of coffee grounds, and water, and put those into a coffee maker, and wait for that coffee to drip drip drip slowly out. It's so much more convenient to make coffee one cup at a time than it is to hope the pot doesn't cool by the time you're ready for seconds.

But soda already comes in single-serve convenience. And problems the Keurig Kold does solve—do I have enough different kinds of flavored bubble-water (or tea or sports drinks) in the house—don't seem worth the many, many trade-offs required in deal.

As a piece of engineering, the Keurig Kold impresses. As a consumer product, it's baffling. It may make more sense in an office setting, where someone else is footing the bill, where that wait is a reprieve from work, where there are enough people with enough different tastes that this much variety can have a tangible daily benefit.

Both Hartley and Drapeau say that Keurig is already looking at ways to make Kold smaller, cheaper, better. Wait until they do. In the meantime, a quick trip grocery story should do the trick.