I adopted a new coffee maker this week. This is a momentous occasion in our household, as the coffee pot is often the last safety rail between me and the gaping maw of insanity. I don’t just like coffee. I need coffee. My name is DaniGirl, and I am a java junkie.
We got our last coffee maker about a year ago. Its predecessor had unceremoniously passed, and I had exactly one lunch hour to find a replacement. I went with a Hamilton Beach model from Home Sense, thinking I was getting a fancy-ass coffee maker at a discount. In fact, it was just a discount coffee maker. I accidentally broke one of the hinges on the carafe lid about the second week we had it, and the coffee has gone from mediocre to awful in the last month or two. And, it had an annoying propensity to overflow without warning, flooding the counter with hot coffee and grounds — something that is very not good for our septic system. And yet, we tolerated it because the idea of spending money on another coffee maker when we have a functioning one rankles me, even if the coffee it makes is nearly undrinkable. The final straw came when it seemed to be emitting random puddles of water, even when turned off. Time for a new coffee maker.
Even though I am a copious consumer of coffee, I do not have high-end coffee maker tastes. We got an espresso-cappuccino maker for our wedding that collected a lot of dust until we got rid of it at a garage sale a few years back. I won a Tassimo through Twitter last year, and couldn’t find a blend I liked. Beloved loves the Tassimo, though, and absconded with it to his office. In all the years I’ve been buying and replacing coffee makers, I never could justify spending any more than $20 or $25 for the basic model. Does it make coffee? Then it’s good enough.
This time, though, I noticed a mid-level Black and Decker model on for half price at Canadian Tire. It’s fancy, but not pretentious. Now I know. When you graduate to the mid-level coffee maker, you get features like brew selection (mild, regular, strong) and adjustable temperatures on your warming plate. Those are nice features, I suppose, but I still wouldn’t pay $80 for them. it has the usual timer feature, so you can set it to brew first thing in the morning, and an auto-shut-off, which is invaluable. It has a little blue LED that lights up the reservoir, which again is nice but kinda useless. And, it has a digital display that tells you whether the coffee is “fresh” or “not fresh”.
This last one I was a little too excited about. And then I read in the manual that the coffee maker thinks “fresh” coffee is less than 20 minutes old. Harrumph. If I get to a cup of coffee in the first 20 minutes after a pot is brewed, it’s the exception rather than the rule. To me, “fresh” coffee has been turned back on after the auto-shut-off only once. Heck, sometimes “fresh” stretches its definition all the way to ‘was brewed today’. I am not fussy. I will drink, if I must, coffee that is burnt, or cold, and not irregularly, both.
The proof of the coffee maker, though, is truly in the drinking. I divested it of its packing material this morning (sidebar note: it now seems that small appliances are being shipped with the same amount of ridiculously overwrought packaging that one previously experienced only with toys) and cleaned it out. I brewed up a pot and was highly impressed with its near-silent operation – our current coffee maker rivals the dishwasher and passing garbage trucks for decibels. And the coffee? Divine. I am in love. In fact, I’m on my third cup, twice rewarmed, and it’s still tastier than the first drops out of Hamilton Beach’s poor excuse for a coffee maker.
Sweet brown ambrosia, you lubricate my mornings. And afternoons. And occasional evenings. Don’t judge me, it could be crack, yanno.
What about you? Do you have one of those high-end coffee makers and does it make your mornings worthwhile? Or are you more like me, unable to see what features beyond “makes coffee” one might need in a coffee maker?
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