Must have been asleep when I bought it.

Let me preface this by saying that it is really rare that I have any kind of strong feeling about a kitchen appliance. I tend to look at these things on a works / doesn’t work type of basis. As long as my toaster still spits out toast and my blender demolishes stuff in the proper manner, I am happy. Our Krups AromaControl Coffee pot is the first that I would really like to take out and smash with a baseball bat.

Why smash it? Why not just throw it away? Well the problem comes in the fact that it is pretty and sleek looking and is therefore my wife’s pride and joy. So as long as this thing works, I am stuck with it. As a side note, despite its continuing ability to toast bread and my very convincing “beauty is on the inside argument”, my toaster is now in storage because it is ugly.

So before this starts to sound like the rant of a guy with kitchen appliance related marital issues, let me tell you about our Krups coffee pot. I will concede that after you put all the proper stuff in the proper places this coffee pot will indeed spit out a pot of coffee for you, and in general that is all I am concerned with, but everything beyond that it a bit of a fiasco. The majority of our problems stem from the fact that my wife and I don’t make it to the coffee pot at the same time. We both work kind of crazy schedules so one of us is always up before the other. This leads us inevitably to problem #1

Problem #1: The opaque insulated coffee pot. The idea here is that you do away with the heated base of the coffee machine and have an insulated pot that you can set out on the table and serve your guests. The problem is that no one really does this. 96% of most peoples home coffee drinking is done with their breakfast or just on the way out the door to do whatever they are going to do that day. (Yes, much scientific research went into producing that statistic.) Therefore most people pour themselves, and whoever happens to be within arms reach, a cup of coffee, and put the pot back in the machine, because frankly, that is where it goes. So what have you gained from this nearly useless addition to your pot? You have gained yourself an opaque pot so that nobody knows how much coffee is left.

For the person who is up first this is difficult because you have to kind of guess by weight whether there is enough coffee for you to have another cup without getting in trouble for only leaving half a cup for your spouse again. Or if you are alone it reduces your ability to judge from afar whether there is enough left to make it worth your while to get up from the table to finish the coffee. For the second person up this means that you don’t know if the first person up made coffee or not until you attempt to pour yourself a cup. Then you need to determine if it is hot coffee or simply left over from the day before. With traditional machines you look at the pot from across the room and say “well its black, so it has coffee, and it has a little red light on, so it must be warm.” By the way the little red light on this pot stays on for a little while after the brew and then turns itself off. This may sound trivial, but that is okay, because the real problem that the second person up experiences is Problem # 2

Problem #2: No hot pad to keep coffee hot: Thanks to the insulated pot, the designers decided that there was no need to continue to add heat to the coffee. And also due to the plastic nature of the pot, it would be difficult to add more heat to the coffee. So from the moment your pot is done brewing, it is getting progressively colder. While this strategy may have saved McDonalds some time in court, those of us who live in the real world like to have our coffee hot, and would prefer if the second person out of bed didn’t have to microwave his cup of coffee that was just made an hour before. Give me the heat pad on my Mr.Coffee anyday.

Problem #3:The filter thing. This is something I probably could have gotten over if it weren’t for the fact that the rest of the pot annoys me so much, but this pot only takes the filters that are actually made of two pieces of filter paper stuck together so that they are preformed to the pot. (I know this is a terrible description, but I don’t know how else to describe them.) In short they are the expensive filters. If you go to the coffee filter section of the grocery store, there are basically three types of filters, the oversized cupcake wrappers, the cones and the wedges. This pot takes the wedges and yes they are the most expensive type, and guess what, they do the same thing as the other filters and are still not reusable. So, I ask you, what is the point?

Basically, I am stuck with a very expensive, pretty looking coffee pot in which, more often that not, you can find half a cup of cold coffee. So since I have obviously lost this battle with my wife, I call on all of you to start a letter writing campaign to help me bring back Mr.Coffee. Oh yes, and now you can’t say you weren’t forewarned, when you here this sweet little sirens song calling you from the shelf at the coffee pot store, keep shuffling on down the isle. Stay away, you will regret it if one ever shows up in your kitchen or, God forbid, your workplace.