Some of the best coffee projects we know of got their start on Kickstarter. From...
I have a sneaking suspicion that the people around me might say I shouldn’t caffeinate myself — I’m already going in ten directions at once, all the time—but truly, my morning cup of coffee seems to be the one time in the day when I stop to savor something, and I wouldn’t trade it. My harem-skarem habits, however, necessitate appliances that will take care of me, rather than the reverse.
To qualify as a proper care-taker, a coffee maker would have to meet an exacting inventory of requirements. It should turn itself on, and turn itself off, and (if it can’t clean up the counter after itself) be a model that doesn’t make messes on the counter. It needs to provide its own filters, clean its own removable pieces (or at the very least, allow them to jump into the dishwasher), tell me when it needs more water, and (in deference to the counsel of my friends) it should cut me off from coffee-drinking after two mugs in the morning.
Impossible, you say? On the contrary, I’ve found a model that perks its way through every prerequisite: the Black & Decker DCM675BF coffee maker.
I realize that in my description above, I’ve practically made the coffee machine sound like a member of the household (or possibly the household-staff, if I had such a thing)—but that’s pretty much how I feel about it. My Black & Decker DCM675BF coffee maker does an admirable job, for a kitchen appliance, of taking care of me. It’s pre-programmed to turn itself on to brew when I get up in the morning, turns off its heating plate after two hours (which I would never remember to do, fire-hazard or no), doesn’t drip or dribble when it brews or when I pour, shows me via the water level indicator when it needs to “be watered,” and comes with its own mesh metal filter—roughly two fills of my favorite mug—it’s the ideal size for my needs.
I’m particularly attached to the detachable parts—the removable mesh metal filter doesn’t allow even my preferred fine grinds to slip through the filter into my coffee cup, and both the filter and the carafe are easily cleaned in my dishwasher (another care-taking appliance). I did have to realize the hard way that this pot doesn’t have the pause and pour type of feature which allows you to take the carafe out from beneath the brewing basket while the brewing is still in progress. I suppose I had come to assume that every coffee pot had that feature, but in actual fact, it’s hardly necessary on this model.
The Black & Decker DCM675BF coffee maker brews so quickly, it’s hardly an unbearable wait to hang on until the machine finishes with its business. And most days the pot is pre-programmed to get going before I’m out of bed to get to it, so I seldom find myself waiting.
With its small capacity, the Black & Decker DCM675BF coffee maker doesn’t take much space on my counter top, and I’ve even toyed with the idea of plugging it in on the nightstand beside my alarm clock. It would fit just fine there, and there’s some appeal to reaching for the coffee cup before I get out of bed. An appealing thought, but I think I’m better off leaving the machine where it is, by the sink and the dishwasher. If I could only train the machine to bring me that first cup in bed, it would truly be the perfect coffee machine.
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