Keurig K-Mini Coffee Maker (Open Box)

I hope you'll take the time to read this one star review because it is not coming from a place of anger and is written by someone who is very confident that they know how to operate simple home appliances. Where I work, we have a larger Keurig brewer that gets daily use from at least five people, typically in rapid succession and sometimes multiple times per person. With that in mind, I considered Keurig to be a producer of reliable single serve coffee machines. I purchased this item in December of 2023 and it started getting used on Christmas day. I appreciate an 8oz cup of coffee, and was pleased to see that it happily brews up an 8oz cup of coffee with no complaint. All is well with the world. My wife, who would prefer a cup of stronger coffee, wanted to try it out at its minimum water level of 6oz. The reservoir emptied, but it refused to brew. Well, as much as that sucks, we figured that there may just be a design oversight where it *has* to be exactly 6oz of water, and maybe we were just under that somehow. I added a few more ounces of water and got it to actually brew. I suggested always making sure it was over the 6oz line, and that seemed to be the solution. In April of 2024, we hit a snag - it wouldn't brew an 8oz cup of coffee. I tried giving it a few more ounces and it once again did brew that cup of coffee, albeit weaker than intended. I chalked it up to maybe having mismeasured the cup. Now here we are in June of 2024. It once again would not brew an 8oz cup of coffee. No amount of additional water given to it would make it brew the coffee. The instruction manual says to hold the button for 5 seconds to purge the water that is currently in it, but it would do no such thing. Eventually, it did brew the water it had in it after I turned the entire machine off and back on, presumably resetting its software... But after getting 12oz of water out of it and pouring it down the sink, the next 8oz cup... Wouldn't brew. I added more water and for the first time ever, found that water was somehow leaking out of the bottom. Where did it come from? Who knows. I cleaned up and took the entire thing to the sink, pouring out what was in the reservoir and trying to see if I could shake more water out of wherever this mystery puddle had come from. There was the obvious sloshing sound of water coming from inside the machine, presumably in whatever little heating chamber it has in there, but shake as I might, I could not get the water to leave that heating chamber. So, one K-cup gone to waste and no coffee made. A shame. I did not successfully brew a cup of coffee after that. I re-read the instruction manual to see if there is something I missed, but no. We have used only filtered water in this machine, pulled through a Zero Water filter, so there is almost no chance that something is clogged or scaled, and I have no intention of purchasing Keurig's overpriced bottles of lemon juice to attempt to descale the machine. I have not yet sought remediation through Keurig, but I intend to. Regardless of the outcome, it won't change my review of this machine because I have read the one and two star reviews and see that this is a common problem. If Keurig honors their one year warranty and sends me a replacement machine at no cost to me, then what I can say is that Keurig is a company with standards and integrity, but it won't change my opinion that there is something built to fail about this particular model. If they do not honor that warranty, my opinion of Keurig will be at rock bottom and I will find other ways to make my $60 "investment" serve me. As an aside, it baffles me that there is a "minimum" amount of water that a coffee machine will take. I understand that inevitably, some small portion of water boiled is lost as steam, but you have to cook water for a long time to lose an appreciable amount. As someone entirely unfamiliar with the mechanisms at work inside this brewer, I think it may be suffering from being overcomplicated. It shouldn't care how much water it has in it - it should simply dispense hot water. Based on sound alone, these machines have a pump that ejects the water, so it doesn't seem to rely on the steam to force the water out. No one wants to spend 80 cents to over a dollar on a K-cup to get two drips of coffee, the user is not going to sabotage themselves with less water.