Mr. Coffee FTTX95-1 10-Cup Thermal Coffeemaker, Black

First the good:

--It looks nice sitting on your counter.

--The beeping sound to signify the end of the brewing cycle is nice.

Now the bad:

--You will never get anything but a warm cup of coffee out of this coffee maker. And if you add milk or cream to your coffee, the result is lukewarm at best. You will aways have to put your coffee in the microwave. This is true no matter how close you follow the directions, and no matter how creative you get. Even if you remove the carafe from the unit after the brewing cycle is completed, your coffee will only be warm. The instruction manual says to completely fill the carafe with very hot water and let it sit for 10 minutes before brewing in order to heat up the carafe. Okay, during the morning rush to get out to work, who has time to let their kitchen faucet run for a few minutes to get hot water (especially in the winter) and then wait for 10 minutes with the water in the carafe and then wait for the brewing cycle to end?

--The carafe is stainless steel no glass lining (which is the best insulation material) Not sure who the genius is that thinks stainless steel is an insulator.

--The Pause-and-serve mechanism broke on the third day. I went to pull out the carafe to grab a cup and coffee came splashing down all over my hand.

--This isn't a huge deal but the clock is so bright I'm fairly certain it could serve as a beacon to guide large ships sailing past rocky coast lines.

this was a gift for my husband, we've had it for about 2 weeks. he tends to nurse a pot of coffee over several hours, so we thought this would be better than the conventional coffee makers. it doesn't have a warming plate, so we don't have to worry about leaving it "on" accidentally. the coffee doesn't burn after sitting there for a couple of hours. it also has a water filter insert. my husband is overjoyed, he has his hot coffee when he wants it and says it tastes better than our old coffee maker coffee. he loves the programmable coffee brewing feature as well.

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I had one of these for about 3 months before it died. I used it to make about 5 cups a day and after a while it just quit working. Aparently the element burned out from the low water levels I was using. Mr. Coffee customer service was great though, after an email I had a replacement in just a couple days. When it worked, the coffee was good once I adjusted recipes to match the machine. The water filter is a nice touch if a bit pricey for replacements and it seemed to be effective. One hint, use hot water to preheat the carafe and the coffee will stay warmer longer.

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I had this coffee maker for about 6 months before I moved into a new house, unboxed it, and started using it. As the user image I added to Amazon can attest, this coffee maker and I did not part ways amicably (unless you consider being thrown off a 15 foot high deck on to a boulder in 5 degree weather an amicable breakup). You should strongly consider buying another model, but I don't know what to tell you to get ... none of the coffee makers I can find in stores appear to be truly well made.

First, the cons:

In summary, what you are looking at here is a coffee maker that will make increasingly bitter lukewarm coffee that you may, depending on the day and your luck, find in the "thermal carafe," or find all over your counter, cabinets, and the floor below. The details:

The filter basket is cheap plastic and has a tightly ribbed bottom surface that is impossible to clean. This seems endemic to most every drip coffee maker on the market today. My kingdom for a coffee maker with a stainless filter basked that I can surgically clean! The gunk builds up on the little plastic ribs in these plastic baskets. It is impossible to clean (ever try to get the brown staining out of a white plastic filter basket?) and it contributes to coffee that gets increasingly bitter over time.

Unless you follow the instructions and pre-heat the carafe with hot water, your coffee will never come out anything more than tepid. The "thermal carafe," as someone else has pointed out, is stainless steel inside and out -stainless steel is an efficient _conductor_ of heat, not an insulator. How about a true thermal carafe, with a glass lining on the inside and some actual additional insulating material between the glass and the outer stainless steel shell?

The check valve in the lid of the "thermal carafe" will stick shut on you. For me, it took maybe 6 uses for this to occur. When this happens, the coffee will be unable to enter the carafe as it exits the filter basket, instead pooling on the carafe lid, then continuing to spill on down the sides of the carafe, all over your counter, and down into whatever is below that (unless you have a counter that will pool 10 cups of water around your coffee maker for you). When the coffee got into my new cabinetry as it dripped over the edge of the counter on its way to spreading across the floor, that is when the coffee maker found itself hurtling to the boulders below my deck.

A timer feature is useless on a coffee maker that requires as much user involvement as this one. On coffee makers I've had in the past, I would set to brew coffee at approximately the same time I woke up. With this one, if I were to properly use this machine, I would need to wake up 1/2 hour before the timer was set so I could go and pre-heat the carafe, then stand watch over the unit until I was satisfied that the machine was not about to make coffee for the counter, cabinets, and floor instead of for its own carafe.

Pros:

For a machine that smacked into a boulder after being thrown downward from approximately 15 feet, it suffered surprisingly little damage. The plate where the carafe is normally placed shattered, revealing the guts of the machine below, and it was a bit scuffed up, but that was about it. I think this is because it took more of a glancing blow off of the boulder, although in my blind rage I must admit I really didn't watch that closely ... I was more concerned with cleaning up the mess back in the kitchen.

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When our last coffee pot died, we looked at many models, since my husband and I drink a lot of coffee. I wouldn't call us coffee snobs, but we do have definite opinions on good versus bad coffee. Our previous coffeemaker, which we loved, had a thermal carafe, and the only problem we ever had with it (until it finally expired after years of faithful and trouble-free service) was that pouring out of the carafe always ended in a few drips. Mildly annoying, but certainly not a deal-breaker.

We got this one because of the features and the thermal carafe. Here's how it works:

First, you can't pour the water into the reservoir at any rate faster than a drip without having it splash all over the place. This is because they handily placed a flat panel in the middle of the grill over the reservoir, apparently just to splash the water back in your face. So, having splashed about a quarter of your coffee water onto your counter, you wipe it up, get more water and pour it S-L-O-W-L-Y into the grill. Then you put in the coffee grounds and turn it on. I didn't time it, but it felt like about 20 minutes to get that water through the grounds and into the pot. I once made the mistake of moving my hand near the top of the coffeemaker during this process (intending to turn on the disposal), and discovered serendipitously that quite a lot of steam escapes from the top where the edges of the lid don't quite meet the sides. Ouch.

Another ouch: don't -DON'T -try to remove the carafe and pour the coffee before it's finished. The stop-pour feature simply does not work. You'll get burned and make a mess. But not to worry; it's just the beginning of the mess.

Ok, now you try to pour your coffee. You tilt the carafe forward while pressing a button on the handle with your thumb. No matter how hard you press, you will get --a trickle. If you are like me and drink from a mug that holds closer to 16 ounces than eight, this means you are holding the d*** carafe for a full two minutes, with your thumb losing circulation all the while. And the less coffee in the carafe, the slower it comes out. And to add to the fun, the spout is not designed to inhibit dripping, so you now have coffee drips all over the counter you had just wiped to clean up the water that splashed back on you from the grille.

So. You bite back the language you don't want your kids to hear, and simply unscrew the lid of the carafe to pour the coffee. Right? Wrong. You unscrew the lid alright, but here's what happens: coffee goes everywhere. There are copious, large coffee drops hanging off the bottom of the lid. I can't figure out how they designed this lid so that there is a good ounce hanging there. And it goes all over the counter, which (by the second or third time you've used this wonderful product) you now have covered with paper towels. The lid is finally off, the counter is protected, but your coffee cup is still empty. You tilt the unlidded carafe forward, carefully, and observe a flow of liquid that more closely resembles rafting-grade whitewater than anything that should ever come out of a spout. Lots of coffee goes into your cup, and lots more goes on the paper towels.

You wipe the drips (there are several) off the sides of your cup, and put the top back on the carafe. Here's where the thermal carafe should keep the coffee warm. Well, I have to agree with someone else here who posed the question: what idiot thought that stainless steel is a good insulator? This carafe has no glass. Buyer beware. The coffee wasn't even that hot in the first place because I had ignored the printed instructions to fill the carafe with hot water and empty it again BEFORE I brew the coffee, so that the carafe won't suck all the heat out of the coffee immediately. They MUST be kidding, right? Ahhh -apparently not. Hear me now: ignore this instruction at your own risk, unless you like lukewarm coffee. And if you have to keep taking the lid on and off to pour your coffee without getting carpal tunnel syndrome from that d*** button, the carafe insulates even less.

My final note on this was about something so stupid as to be hilarious. That notorious button on the handle, the one you press to allow the coffee to flow -no, correct that, trickle -has a picture on it. It is an icon showing the carafe in a forward-tilted position. No, really! I guess if, like me, you were stupid enough to buy this thing in the first place, you might need that icon to understand that if you hold the coffee pot level, nothing will come out of it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

My husband, who is a very peaceful and non-violent man, was threatening to take this THING out into the driveway and run over it with his car before we got a replacement. We now have the Zojirushi, and all is once again well with the world.

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