BKaF – Brad Kovach and Friends

I am a lazy person.  If I don’t want to do something, it won’t get done immediately.  This laziness dominates everything I do, so you can naturally assume that my morning routine is a pathetic mad-dash for class, work, or wherever I need to be.

Days ago, an auto-grinding auto-brewing coffee maker was on sale for $55 on woot.com.  To be specific, it was the Cuisinart Grind & Brew 10-Cup Coffee Maker with Gold Tone Filter.  Normally about $140, this seemed like a great deal at the time.

I knew that this coffee maker would be a boon to my laziness.  If I just set it at night,  I could wake up in the morning and JUST KNOW that my coffee was freshly ground and brewed to perfection.  With this in mind, I knew that I could hit the snooze button several times and still make it to class “on time.”

It’s been three days, and I’ve already condemned this machine to “counter-top decoration” status.  And so begins the three day narrative of my experiences with the worst coffee maker ever designed…

Day 1.

I get a text from a coworker that my coffee machine has arrived at Starbucks.  I didn’t order it through Starbucks, but I work there and naturally have all of my cool new Internet things shipped there.  Getting a package through WWCC’s mail system is impossible.  The fact that it was a coffee maker being sent to Starbucks was amusing.

I take the machine home and unpack it.  I am immediately dismayed to discover that the automatic coffee grinder is a blade grinder.  Blade-ground coffee is disgusting compared to the full-flavored burr-ground coffee.

Once everything was washed and assembled, I realized that this is a gorgeous coffee maker (which is why I am leaving it on the counter).  It’s stainless steel and smooth.  The carafe is eye-catching.  Visually, I cannot tell that this is the most ill-conceived piece of coffee brewing equipment ever stamped out by a Chinese robot.

I set the clock on the unit and set the auto-brew timer for 8:00 am and headed to bed.

Day 2.

I wake up to the sound of a jet flying overhead.  A few moments later, when my lucidity arrived, I realized the sound was my coffee maker discretely brewing a pot of coffee in the kitchen.  After about a minute, the screechs and whirrs of the grinder ceased and the coffee quietly brewed.  I drifted back to sleep because I didn’t need to be awake yet.

I wake up, get ready and pour a cup of coffee.  The coffee was palatable.  It wasn’t perfect.  I’ll be considerate and blame the old coffee beans for this lack of flavor.

I filled up my cup and went to class.  I was still late, but again, I cannot blame the coffee maker for that.  Actually, I can and I will: the coffee pot’s clock was EIGHT minutes slower than my phone–the same phone I used to set it the night before.

Day 3.

Once again, I awake to the sound of my coffee maker grinding my sanity coffee to a pulp for brewing.  Despite the noise, I anticipate a decent cup of coffee since the beans were fresh.  I bought them the day before at Starbucks.  Knowing that my coffee maker was on top of things, I drifted back to sleep because I can.

45 minutes later (ten minutes to class), I wake up to a catastrophe.  I open my door to see a fresh pot of coffee brewed all over my floor.  Not only was my coffee ruined, but I am now forced to wipe a pot of coffee off the floor.

As I began to swab coffee off the floor with my Swiffer WetJet, I began to reconstruct the incident that has permanently condemned my coffee pot to a life of “looking pretty on the counter.”

The night before, I had filled the bean hopper with delicious, new coffee beans (Caffé Verona, if you care).  I filled the water tank with cold tap water.  I rinsed out all of the components because I wanted my coffee to be phenomenal the next morning.  The night before, I had failed to realize that I didn’t assemble the machine in its entirety.

Many coffee pots are built with a little valve that is activated by the top of the carafe.  Without something on the top of the carafe, the valve wouldn’t activate and the coffee will not flow through the valve and into the carafe.  My coffee maker is equipped with such a luxury.

Since I didn’t put the top back on the brewing carafe the night before, there was nothing to press up and activate the valve and let the coffee flow into the carafe–even though the carafe was in place.

Coffee gurgled out of the top of the machine because it had nowhere else to go–the valve was shut.  It filled my counter, pooled up on my floor and made my entire dorm smell like coffee with a hint of Swiffer WetJet mopping solution.  Magically, the gurgling coffee pot didn’t land a drop of coffee into the carafe.

I was late for class again.  My dorm was a mess.  Don’t buy this coffee maker.

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