Tasting Table Rounds Up Ways Around the Keurig 2.0 Pod Lock

If you still have a Keurig 2.0 on the counter, Tasting Table has pulled together five ways owners get it to brew pods that didn’t come from Keurig. The 2.0 series shipped with a reader that looks for a mark on the lid and refuses anything without it, and people have been working around it for about as long as it’s existed.

The list, as Tasting Table describes it, runs from gentle to drastic. The simplest is a reusable My K-Cup filter, which it puts at about $8, filled with your own grounds or with coffee from a third-party pod you’ve cut open. Next come two lid tricks: taping the foil top from a used Keurig pod over an off-brand one, or sticking a small neon label where the sensor looks. There are also clip-on adapters sold for this job. Last is opening the machine and cutting a sensor wire, which the article itself flags as risky, with mixed results.

The article notes that some of these could void your warranty. We’d go further and skip the wire-cutting entirely. Taking apart an appliance that heats water under pressure isn’t a good trade for saving a few cents a pod.

The good news is that this is mostly a 2.0 problem. Keurig’s current brewers don’t check the lid, so any K-Cup-style pod will run. If you’re keeping the 2.0, the reusable filter is the cleanest fix, and our guide on how to use a reusable K-Cup covers grind size and fill level so you don’t end up with weak coffee or grounds in the cup. We also compare the options in the best reusable K-Cups.