Excellent Product - Great Coffee

This replaces an 8 year old Krups 12 cup.

Purchased from Sur La Table in Scottsdale.

I followed the instructions and ran a couple of full pots of water through the machine prior to use. The instructions don't seem to indicate that you should rinse the filter prior to use, but this seemed to be obvious. I don't need the filter because we use spring water, but wanted to see if it made a difference.

The carafe is pretty solid and made of stainless, so I preheated it before making coffee, figuring that if left at room temperature it would suck a lot of heat out of the fresh coffee. My first pot was 5 cups, so I used the 3-5 cup switch just like on the Krups. I used the same coffee, grind, filter and amount as the Krups. The brew was noticeably richer that the Krups, and is just about the best tasting drip coffee I’ve ever made.

Machine details:
The machine is gorgeous with the extruded aluminum body and black plastic. The controls are well placed and understandable without reading the instructions. The clock is readout is nice looking and somewhat unique.

The lid is large, so you have to pull the machine forward from under the cabinet to fill, but you shouldn’t leave an operating coffee maker under there any way unless you want to have issues with steam and the finish on the cabinet.

The carafe is solid and very attractive. The lid is easy to figure out and has an indicator that shows you how far you need to twist the top to dispense coffee without drips or the risk of having the lit fall of and dump hot coffee on the counter. As mentioned above, like any vacuum carafe, especially stainless, you must preheat it by filling with hot tap water; if you don’t it will actually cool the coffee down because the stainless will act like a heat sink and pull heat out of the coffee. If you do this, the coffer will still be drinkable a couple of hours later, but after that the taste is too off for me to care if it is hot enough. Also, the reservoir is slightly larger than the carafe, so don’t overfill it. I filled the carafe to capacity and used that to fill the reservoir, noting the max fill on the indicator.

Using the machine:
As stated above this machine makes excellent coffee due mostly I think to the high temperature of the water at the basket and the stainless steel heating system. Can’t say whether the filter does any good or not since we use bottled spring water. It did not adversely affect the taste of the coffee though.

Using the machine is straightforward. The machine brews the coffee (much faster than my older machine) and turns itself off after the brew is finished, which is very cool. The machine also has an auto on feature which I will never use, because what’s the point of storing your beans properly and using a decent grinder only to let the fresh grounds sit over night to become stale? I do wish that appliances with clocks had a feature to turn the clock off. As of last count we have to reset three clocks in the kitchen after a power failure which is 2 more than necessary.

I’ve read that some think the machine is too noisy. I haven’t really noticed much of a difference, and this is not a big consideration for us.

Clean up is easy. Wiping the body and the carafe down with a damp cloth is enough to keep the machine clean.