Keurig is best known for popularizing the coffee pod machine, designed to make your morning cuppa joe more convenient. But realizing it’s always five o’clock somewhere, the company is now taking the concept out on the town with the Drinkworks Home Bar, which cooks up cocktails (or beer and cider, for some reason) from the same kind of premixed pods.
At a glance, the Drinkworks Home Bar looks like a regular old coffee machine, measuring 13.5 x 13 x 13.5 in (330 x 343 x 330 mm) with a 50-oz (1.5 L) tank of water. Once you pop in a pod, the device chills the water to a refreshing 35° F (1.6° C), then carbonates it from a replaceable CO2 cartridge and mixes all the prepackaged ingredients together. According to the company, the machine recognizes which pod is in there at any given time and will adjust the water and carbonation levels accordingly.
Home Bar will launch with 15 different cocktail recipes, including cosmopolitan, gin and tonic, daiquiri, Long Island iced tea, mojito, Moscow mule, old fashioned, red sangria, white Russian, white wine peach sangria, lime vodka soda, mai tai, margarita, classic margarita and strawberry margarita.
For those with less of a sweet tooth, the Drinkworks Home Bar can also dispense beer and cider. At launch, the beer pods pack brews from Bass and Beck’s, and the cider is supplied by Stella Artois.
Cocktails in pod form make perfect sense – after all, it can be a pain to mix them up just right, especially after you’re already a few drinks into the night. Plus to get this kind of range, you’d need a well-stocked home bar, which can be a pretty pricey investment. Slapping in a pod and pressing a button is an enticing alternative. What we’re less sure of though is the need for beer and cider pods – this seems like more work, and more room for something to go wrong, than just cracking open a bottle.
The Drinkworks Home Bar isn’t the first attempt at streamlining the cocktail experience at home, but it does look like the neatest so far. The Somabar, for example, has canisters that need to be filled from your own liquor collection and it can’t chill the water for you. Pernod Ricard’s Opn smart cocktail system packages individual ingredients into cartridges and then makes you mix them yourself – with some guidance, of course.
The Drinkworks Home Bar is available for US$299, with cocktail pods selling for $3.99 each and beer or cider pods going for $2.25 each, which is much cheaper than bar prices or keeping your own liquor supply well-stocked. For now, the machine is only available in St. Louis as part of a limited test run, but Keurig says it’ll open up to more places in 2019.
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