Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART Review

Quick Answer: The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is only worth the money if you specifically want to control the machine with your phone or tablet. For most people, the Keurig K Supreme Plus offers better value for money despite not having any “smart” features.

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is Keurig’s first foray into making “smart” coffee makers – coffee makers that can be controlled remotely with your phone.

Here were going to look at:

• Whether the K Supreme Plus SMART’s “smart” features make the machine easier and quicker to use.

• Whether the SMART justifies its additional cost over other premium Keurig coffee makers like the Keurig K Supreme Plus and Keurig K Elite.

Let’s dive in.

Should I Buy the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART (Quick Verdict)?

I’d only recommend the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART if you are certain you will take advantage of its Wifi connectivity and ten saveable preset coffee types.

While the SMART’s ability to connect to your phone may seem cool at first, it doesn’t make the machine significantly easier to use (other than in a few, uncommon circumstances), nor does it improve the quality of coffee that it produces.

The SMART has a few other cool-sounding features that other Keurig machines lack (additional strength settings and user profiles, for instance). 

However, when you test these features you see that they also do not actually improve the machine’s brewing quality or user-friendliness. They are instead very specific features for very specific needs.

I would therefore recommend that most people stick to the cheaper Keurig K Supreme Plus over the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART.

While the SMART’s new features are a nice novelty, I think that very quickly you’d use the machine in the exact same way as you would use the K Supreme Plus. 

Save your money and instead buy the Keurig K Supreme Plus right off the bat.

Overview of the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is essentially just the Keurig K Supreme Plus but with the ability to connect to your phone via the Keurig app.

The SMART’s phone connectivity allows you to do three things:

• Brew ID: This is where the SMART reads a QR code on your K-cup and gives you a brewing style based on the K-cup you are using. The brewing variables that this affects are strength (brew length), brewing temperature, and serving size.

• Phone control: You can get the K Supreme Plus SMART to brew a coffee using your phone and tablet rather than the machine’s control panel.

• Online pod store: You can buy K-cups and get them delivered to your house via the app.

In terms of design, the machine is very similar to the Keurig K Supreme Plus. If you want to find out more about this you can check out my Keurig K Supreme Plus review or check out the video below:

Other than phone/tablet connectivity, the differences between the Keurig K Supreme Plus and K Supreme Plus SMART are:

• Two extra strength settings (five compared to the Supreme Plus’s three)

• Three extra temperature settings (six compared to the Supreme Plus’s three)

• Seven extra favorite drink profiles (ten compared to the Supreme Plus’s three)

• The SMART has a better-quality display screen than the Supreme Plus

You can find a table of specifications for the Keurig K Supreme Plus below:

Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART Pros

Makes the joint best-tasting coffee of all Keurig machines.

Allows you to make an extra strong coffee with its 4 oz serving size.

It can be operated with your phone or tablet.

It has a pitcher-style reservoir that you can carry with one hand, even when filled to its max line.

It allows you to save ten brewing styles which can be accessed at the touch of a button.

Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART Cons

You probably will not use most of its smart features, making the machine overpriced.

Some units have a bug where they die (sometimes permanently) mid-brew.

Is the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART Better than the Keurig K Supreme Plus?

I don’t think that the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is better than the Keurig K Supreme Plus. The SMART has a slightly nicer user interface, but that’s about it.

I’m now going to run through all the features that the SMART has over the K Supreme Plus and evaluate how far they actually benefit the machine.

Brew ID

As I mentioned earlier, Brew ID is where the K Supreme Plus SMART reads a QR code on your K-cup and then sets a specific brewing style based on the recommendations on that K-cup.

I’m really not convinced by these brewing recommendations for two reasons:

• A lot of the K-cups recommend 8 oz and 10 oz serving sizes. K-cups only hold enough ground coffee (10.5 grams) to make a 6 oz coffee and still stay at an acceptable ground coffee-to-water ratio. The fact that the K-cups often recommend an 8 oz serving size makes me think the people who set these recommendations don’t know what they’re talking about.

• One of the three brewing variables that Brew ID makes recommendations on is brewing temperature. Tests suggest that the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART cannot accurately control brew temperature. This means that two of the three variables that Brew ID controls (temperature and serving size) are redundant.

So yeah…Brew ID seems unnecessary.

Brewing Coffees with Your Phone/Tablet

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART allows you to brew a coffee using your phone or tablet rather than the machine’s control panel via the Keurig app.

You can see a video of someone doing this below (watch from 5 minutes 40 seconds to 8 minutes):

Again while the novelty of this may seem cool, I have a few issues with it:

• The strength, temperature, and serving size sliders on your phone aren’t any faster or easier to use than the buttons on your machine. I don’t see how the phone operation makes the machine any easier to use than its standard control panel.

• While you can operate the machine remotely, you still need to put the K-cup and cup in the K-cup port and on the drip tray respectively. Unless you have the forethought to do this in advance you still need to be by the machine to make a coffee. This makes remote connectivity kind of pointless.

Again, I’m not convinced that many of you are going to get much use out of the ability to control your coffee maker with your phone.

Buying Your K-Cups Online

The ability to buy your K-cups online and have them delivered is a feature that I think many will find useful.

Often these types of integrated online stores force you to pay a large markup on products (Nespresso are guilty of doing this when you buy their pods on their app) so it will be interesting to see if Keurig does the same.

Additional Strength Settings

Although the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART offers two more strength settings than the K Supreme Plus, its maximum and minimum strength settings are the same.

While one could argue that being able to go more fine-grained with your brewing times (the variable that strength settings control on a Keurig machine) is never a bad thing, never in my year of owning the Supreme Plus have I thought “I wish I could get my coffee stronger than strength setting two but weaker than strength setting three”.

I, therefore, think that additional strength settings solve a problem that no one has.

Additional Temperature Settings

The temperature settings on my Keurig K Supreme Plus don’t make any noticeable difference to my coffee’s taste or temperature.

Although the Keurig K Supreme Plus smart has three more temperature settings I don’t see any evidence that its underlying temperature control system has changed.

This leads me to doubt whether its temperature settings actually do anything.

Extra Favorite Profiles

These additional user profiles are a nice addition, however, it’s worth asking yourself how many different brew styles you drink from your Keurig machine.

I brew all my coffees in the same way with my K Supreme Plus: six-ounce serving on the highest strength and temperature settings. I personally do not need ten favorite presets.

However, I can see this being useful for households where a lot of people drink K-cup coffee. I also really like how you can name each preset. The Keurig K Supreme Plus does not have this option.

An Improved Digital Display Screen

While the K Supreme Plus SMART’s digital display screen looks better and has more functionalities than the K Supreme Plus’s, these extra functionalities are required because of the SMART’s phone connectivity.

The K Supreme Plus’s display screen is sufficient for the machine’s needs, even if it wouldn’t be sufficient for the SMART’s needs.

Therefore, even though the Plus’s display screen is a step up from the Plus’s it doesn’t actually make the SMART more user-friendly than the Plus.

In short, I don’t think that the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is a better coffee maker than the K Supreme Plus. 

The SMART’s only advantages over the Plus are its additional favorite drink profiles and its app’s ability to let you buy pods online. I’d therefore only recommend the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART over the K Supreme Plus if:

• The machine is for a large household of people who all like different K-cups
• You find buying K-cups a challenge

To find out more about how these machines compare, please see my comparison of the Keurig K Supreme vs K Supreme Plus vs K Supreme Plus SMART.

Ive also written an invdividual Keurig K Supreme review and Keurig K Supreme Plus review.

I’m now going to evaluate the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART against the following five criteria:

• Quality of coffee
• Functionalities
• Ease of use and cleaning
• Design and build quality
• Value for money

Quality of Coffee

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART makes excellent coffee. Its coffee is not better than the Keurig K Supreme Plus’s, however.

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART makes the joint best coffee of any Keurig coffee maker (along with the Keurig K Supreme Plus).

This is for two reasons:

• The K Supreme Plus SMART can brew 6 oz serving sizes. Since K-cups only hold enough ground coffee to brew strong 6 oz servings, the Supreme Plus SMART makes better coffee than any K-cup coffee maker that starts at 8 oz servings.

• The K Supreme Plus SMART brews coffee for the joint longest out of any Keurig coffee maker (along with the Keurig K Supreme Plus). Longer brewing creates a better-tasting coffee as there is more time for your coffee to extract into your brewing water.

Again, I’d always recommend brewing 6 oz servings at the machine’s highest strength setting. This negates the need for Brew ID.

Quality of Coffee Rating: 9/10

Functionalities

The Keurig K Supreme SMART has far more functionalities than any other Keurig coffee maker.

The functionalities that make the SMART better than other single-serve coffee makers are:

• 4 oz and 6 oz serving sizes: Smaller serving sizes allow you to make a stronger, better K-cup coffee.

• Large number of strength settings: The longer your machine can brew, the better coffee it will make.

The functionalities that some (but not all) users will like on the SMART are:

• Wifi connectivity: This is only going to be useful for people who will be bothered to load up their machine with a K-cup and cup in advance before brewing. If you do this then you can brew a coffee remotely with your phone or tablet.

• Iced coffee mode: This allows you to brew a 6.5 oz coffee at a lower temperature and for a longer time than normal. Coffee brewed in this mode is cooler, so will not melt any ice it gets poured on as quickly. Its cooler brewing does make it watery, however. While this is a convenient way of making iced coffee, you’ll get much better results by making a coffee the regular way and letting it cool before adding it to ice.

• Ten favorite brews preset: As I said earlier, this will be useful for households where many of you will use the machine. It’s overkill for most individuals, however.

The superfluous functionalities on the SMART are:

• Multistream Technology: This refers to the K Supreme Plus SMART piercing K-cups with five needles in the top rather than one. While this is supposed to promote even extraction, I notice no difference in my coffee’s flavor between machines that use this and ones that don’t. Piercing the K-cup with five needles rather than one also often causes coffee grounds to fall into your drink.

• Six temperature settings: The three temperature settings on my K Supreme Plus make no difference to my coffee’s temperature or taste. The SMART uses the same temperature control system so I have no evidence to suggest that its temperature settings actually do anything.

In short, although the SMART has a lot of functionalities, several of these are superfluous or not executed that well. You, therefore, pay a premium for many half-baked features.

Functionalities Rating: 8/10

Ease of Use & Cleaning

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is as easy to use as any Keurig machine. Its multiple needles make it a bit harder to clean than Keurig machines that pierce K-cups with only one needle.

Ease of Making Coffee

The Keurig K Supreme Plus is easier to make a coffee with than most Keurig coffee makers for two reasons:

• It has a tall pitcher-style reservoir that can easily be removed/reattached to the machine and carried around even when full to its max line.

• It has ten saveable presets that allow you to brew in a specific way with the touch of one button

The ease of making a coffee with the SMART is part of the reason why I think its phone operating system is a bit pointless.

Ease of Cleaning

The SMART is easy to clean as almost all its parts that come into direct contact with coffee or water can be removed and cleaned in the sink or dishwasher. These are:

• Its water reservoir
• Its drip tray
• Its a K-cup port (I wouldn’t recommend dishwashing these)

The only part of the machine that is a pain to clean is its K-cup needles. 

These regularly need to have any coffee grounds that get stuck on them scraped off. Failure to do this can result in the machine refusing to brew.

Design and Build Quality

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART has the same quality assurance issues that affect the other Keurig K Supreme models.

External Build Quality

I can have no complaints about the SMART’s design and external build quality.

The machine is compact given all its features, its water reservoir is easy to remove and fill, and its control panel and the display screen are excellent.

I really like the dark metal finish on the front of the machine, this makes it much more resistant to smudging compared to the K Supreme Plus’s silver finish.

Internal Build Quality and Known Issues

I found several SMART users complaining that their machine dies for no reason.

Generally, this happens just as you try to get it to brew a coffee. Here is an Amazon reviewer describing this problem:

“Today this one stopped working out of nowhere. It didn’t brew properly then it just shuts itself off completely and won’t turn on. It’s been seven months. This isn’t the first one to do this though, I had another right before it do the same thing.” Amazon review, July 2022

You can find someone making this same complaint on the Keurig subreddit here.

This is a bug that affects all of Keurig’s Supreme range, and I’d have hoped that Keurig will have addressed it before releasing the SMART.

Clearly, they have not done this and for such an expensive machine to have this bug is disappointing, to say the least.

I talk more about the technical bugs in the Keurig Supreme range in my Keurig K Supreme review.

Design and Build Quality Rating: 6/10

Value For Money

The Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART is about $30-$40 more expensive than the Supreme Plus.

I don’t think it justifies this additional cost for the majority of people.

As I said earlier, you’ll only get value from the SMART’s new features if:

• You are willing to load the machine up with a K-cup and mug well in advance of brewing.

• If the machine is for a large household of K-cup drinkers who all use different brew settings.

If this doesn’t apply to you then I think you’ll get better value elsewhere (with the Keurig K Supreme Plus and Keurig K Elite specifically).

Value for Money Rating: 5/10

Product Alternatives: Keurig K Supreme Plus and Keurig K Elite

Two coffee makers I’d recommend as alternatives to the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART are the Keurig K Supreme Plus and Keurig K Elite.

Keurig K Supreme Plus: Better Value than the SMART

As I mentioned earlier, if you aren’t going to use the SMART’s wifi connectivity, then you might as well get the cheaper Keurig K Supreme Plus.

The Keurig K Supreme Plus makes coffee just as well as the SMART and also shares the SMART’s ergonomic design.

Unfortunately, it also shares the SMART’s reliability issues, however, if you are willing to risk having to return a dud then it can make some excellent coffee.

Keurig K Elite: More Reliable than the SMART

The Keurig K Elite is Keurig’s most reliable premium coffee maker.

While it doesn’t make coffee quite as good as the K Supreme Plus SMART (due to having shorter brewing times), it also does not have the tendency to die for no reason.

It’s therefore a safer purchase than the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART.

Final Verdict

Although the Keurig K Supreme Plus SMART has some cool new features, I think that most people will end up using it in the exact same way as the Keurig K Supreme Plus.

Therefore I think that you’re better off opting for the cheaper Supreme Plus over the Supreme Plus SMART.