#HelloKeurig! My Keurig 2.0 Review

In late August, I received an e-mail from Influenster, and I could barely believe my eyes - I had been selected out of 1,000 lucky participants to participate in reviewing the Keurig 2.0! Soon, I would receive the Keurig 2.0 brewing system for free from Influenster.

I love coffee, but had never jumped on the Keurig bandwagon. Nothing else gets me going as the day starts and nothing else keeps me going all day, so coffee is a very important part of my day. I believed my little $14.99 4 cup coffeemaker was just fine for me, thank-you-very-much... or so I thought...

The Keurig 2.0 arrived at my doorstep and I could barely believe the size of the box. It was huge!

I took it into my kitchen and got it opened. I have to admit, I was pretty awe-struck that this was happening at this point.

I've never had another Keurig to compare it to, but the Keurig 2.0 is awesome. What makes it so different from other Keurig's is that it answers that question that I even had - what am I supposed to do when I want to make more than one pot of coffee? How will I serve all of my guests without brewing them individual cups... which will take forever and will get expensive and wasteful with all of those cups?

The Keurig 2.0 answers that all with a carafe and slightly larger K-cups. The slightly larger K-Carafe Cups make 4 cups of coffee per cup, and all fall into this carafe that sits perfectly under the Keurig spout.

Included was this very large instruction manual, which I was very grateful for. Seeing as though I've never had a Keurig, I knew I had to do things like run a pot of water through first, etc... but I had no idea how. This big instruction manual was very helpful and well-designed to be easy to flip through and store.

Here it is, out of the box! It's large, but not as large as earlier versions of the Keurig machine. They've made it much more compact while still delivering the same great tastes. They've successfully made it more compact even while adding a carafe option!

Touchscreens are everywhere, including your Keurig. The Keurig 2.0 boasts the largest touchscreen they've ever put on a Keurig - and it's customizable even, including backgrounds and down to the LED color of the water.

Say #hellokeurig! This all came in my box - a sampler of the regular sized K-Cups, the Carafe cups, and another box of Carafe cups in Hawaiian blend, and the carafe (not pictured... it was getting washed. :). The Keurig 2.0 works for me because I'm the only coffee drinker in the family - but whenever we have friends or family stay over, it's handy to provide great tasting coffee for all. And that's another thing... I never knew what I was missing out on taste-wise before the Keurig. So many flavors to choose from, my favorite so far has been the Nantucket blend of coffee. Coffee tastes bolder and more complex with my Keurig, and is that much more enjoyable.

So are there any cons? I would say there are a few cons, but nothing that is ultra detrimental.

• One of my biggest cons is that with the Keurig 2.0 is that it uses scanning technology to scan the lid of your K-cup to determine the best size and strength for taste. Great, but this limits the Keurig usage to only Keurig brand cups with scannable lids - no utilizing a mesh cup using your own coffee grounds, and no off brand. The off-brand doesn't bum me out too much, but it would have been nice to use your own grounds when you're out of K-cups. This has lead me to keep my 4-cup coffeemaker out as well because I am almost out of the samples, and will keep it out until I get a stockpile of K-cups.
• Weird noises. I'm used to the brewing/bubbling/boiling of the water, but when it's using a cup, it makes weird gurgling noises and squeals like it's trying really hard to squeeze water through. 
• Lifting to get the spent K-cup out. I chalked this one up to user error the first time I did it... but now I realize it's not. but when you lift the spent K-cup out of the machine, you have to lift the cup out and then close the lid. The system recognizes this as "You must want to make hot water!" because it doesn't sense a cup in there and lifting and shutting the empty holder is how you make hot water. So no, after making a cup of coffee, I don't want to make hot water... and have to cancel the hot water out. Not the end of the world, for sure, but this could have easily been remedied by making it so that hot water had to be selected from the home screen vs. just lifting and closing the lid.

But really, the Keurig 2.0 has been an awesome thing and I've had a blast reviewing it and using it. My "pros" are:

• Easy to use touchscreen. The touchscreen is large enough where I am not hitting other things as I push buttons, and it's not covered in buttons, either. 
• Taste. The taste alone had me sold. The Keurig makes a solid, bold cup of coffee and is a world of difference from what I had been drinking before.
• The carafe option. This was something that stopped me from buying before - now that Keurig has addressed this, I'm all in!

All in all, I love it, and even my non-coffee drinker husband thinks it's pretty cool - he's enjoying the teas and the lemonades! The variety of K-cup options is amazing now and I am planning to buy a large variety pack so I can keep trying them all out!

Thank you Influenster and Keurig for letting me review the Keurig 2.0!

Disclaimer: I received the Keurig 2.0 for free from Influenster for testing and review purposes. I was not compensated monetarily or otherwise to provide a positive or negative review.