Kitchen Selectives CM-688 Single Serve: Owner Guide, Replacement Filter, and What to Buy Now

The Kitchen Selectives CM-688 was a twenty-five dollar single-serve coffee maker, and it is worth being honest about what that buys you. This was never a good machine in the way a Technivorm is a good machine. It was a small plastic box with a heating element, a permanent filter, and an on/off switch, and it brewed twelve ounces of regular ground coffee straight into your mug. That is the entire feature list. But it did that one job for the price of two bags of beans, and for a lot of people in small apartments and dorm rooms it was exactly the right amount of coffee maker.

It is discontinued now, which is why you are probably here: you own one, something broke, and you want to know if you can still fix it. Short answer, mostly yes, and the parts you need are generic.

What it is

• Brews one 12 oz cup at a time, directly into your mug
• Permanent reusable filter, no paper and no pods
• Flip-top water reservoir
• A single on/off switch, no programming, no display
• Removable drip tray
• Roughly the footprint of a large mug

The appeal was never sophistication. It was that it used the ground coffee you already had, cost about $25, took up almost no counter space, and could not be operated wrong. You plug it in, add water, put coffee in the filter, flip the switch. I have tested machines forty times the price that are harder to use before you have had your coffee.

The honest verdict

Here is what it did well: it was cheap to buy and cheap to run. No pods, no paper filters, no waste from brewing a pot you would not finish. It brewed reasonably fast, cleaned up with a damp cloth, and the drip tray and filter went in the dishwasher. Through a few apartment moves with tiny kitchens, that combination is genuinely hard to beat at the price.

And here is what it did not do well. It was loud. Noticeably, wake-your-roommate loud for something so small. The brew temperature was whatever the heating element felt like that morning, which means the coffee came out on the cool side and under-extracted compared to any machine that actually holds 195 to 205 F. The plastic build was exactly what $25 buys. It made acceptable coffee, not good coffee, and if you care about the cup itself, a $35 AeroPress and a kettle will beat it every single morning.

But that was never the trade you were making. You were buying “one cup of real coffee, no pods, no fuss, twenty-five bucks,” and on those terms it delivered for years.

The replacement filter question

This is the single most common thing CM-688 owners need, usually after the permanent filter falls through the dishwasher rack and gets mangled, which a reader named Chad wrote in about doing. So, directly: Kitchen Selectives does not sell replacement parts anymore, and there is no official CM-688 filter to order.

The good news is you do not need one. The CM-688 uses a small cone-shaped mesh basket, and generic replacements fit fine. You have two paths:

• A generic universal cone filter. Measure the diameter of your old filter across the top and the depth, then match it to a reusable cone coffee filter in the same size. Mesh baskets in this class are largely interchangeable, and a close fit is all that matters since nothing is under pressure.
• Paper cone filters. A #1 or #2 paper cone, trimmed if needed, sits in the basket housing and works. It costs a few dollars for a hundred of them and, as a bonus, catches more of the oils and fines, which makes the coffee taste cleaner. Some owners prefer the machine this way.

One tip from Chad’s mishap: stop putting the permanent filter in the dishwasher. Mesh baskets are light enough to get flipped by the spray arm and dropped onto the heating element at the bottom. It rinses clean in the sink in about four seconds anyway.

Keeping one running

These machines fail in predictable ways, and most of it is scale.

• Brewing slowly, or sputtering and stopping. Almost always scale in the heating tube. Run a 1:1 mix of white vinegar and water through with no coffee, twice, then two or three cycles of plain water to rinse. On a machine this small with a narrow tube, do this every couple of months if your water is hard. Skipping it is what kills these.
• Coffee tastes weak or sour. Partly the machine, since it never ran hot enough to fully extract. But grind finer than you would for a drip pot and use a bit more coffee than feels right, and it improves noticeably. Descale first, because scale drops the temperature even further.
• Water in the reservoir but nothing comes out. Usually an airlock or heavy scale. Descale, and make sure the reservoir is actually filled past the intake.
• It got louder. They all do, and it is usually scale rattling in the tube rather than a dying pump. Descale before you assume it is finished.
• If the heating element goes. That is the end. There is nothing serviceable inside and the parts do not exist. At a $25 original price, do not spend money on it.

What to buy instead

If yours has died and you want the same thing, ground coffee, one cup, cheap, no pods, you have better options than you did then. The Hamilton Beach FlexBrew single-serve does exactly the CM-688’s job with a proper brew basket and better temperature, usually around $40 to $50, and the versions that take both grounds and pods give you a way out if you ever want the convenience. It is the closest honest replacement.

If you would rather spend the money on the cup than the machine, buy an AeroPress or a small pour-over cone and a kettle. Around $35, no electronics to descale or break, and it makes genuinely better coffee than any $25 machine ever did. For the whole range, our best single-serve coffee makers guide covers the current picks, and if this is for a small room, the best dorm room coffee makers roundup is the more targeted list.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I get a replacement filter for the Kitchen Selectives CM-688?

Not from Kitchen Selectives, which no longer sells parts for it. Measure your old filter’s top diameter and depth and buy a generic reusable cone filter basket in that size; they are effectively interchangeable in machines like this. A #1 or #2 paper cone filter also works in the basket housing and costs almost nothing.

Is the Kitchen Selectives CM-688 still made?

No. It is a discontinued budget house-brand machine with no direct replacement and no official parts support. Working used units turn up cheap online, but there is little reason to hunt one down when current single-serve machines cost only a little more and brew better.

Does it use pods or K-Cups?

Neither. It takes regular ground coffee in a permanent filter, which was the whole point of the machine and the reason it was so cheap to run. If you want a pod machine, this is not it.

Why is my CM-688 coffee weak or cool?

These never ran as hot as a good brewer, so start by descaling with a 1:1 vinegar and water mix, since scale makes both problems worse. Then grind a little finer and use a little more coffee than you would in a full drip pot. That gets you most of what the machine has to give.