BUNN My Cafe AP Auto Eject Pod Brewer

I've been a coffee pod advocate for years have had the Bunn MCP in my home for about five of those years. It's flawless, never broke, brews delicious coffee. My Bunn is also "hard lined" to the plumbing behind my fridge so I always get fresh cold water and never have to pour over the top. This was insanely simple to do and I'm not sure why more people don't do it. All you need to do is get the right adapters from your local plumbing or hardware store and create a "Y" in the 1/4" line that feeds water to your refrigerator. Then route the newly split line over to your coffee machine. Since most refrigerators are set inside a little cubby hole these days, I just drilled a 1/4" hole in the side of the cubby hole and put my coffee machine right next to the fridge (you can't see the hole any longer). Contact me if you have have questions about what type of adapter to buy in all you'll spend $5-$10 dollars completing this little task. Well worth it for never having to fill up a coffee machine tank ever again.

Back to the story....

My Bunn MCP is awesome but folks have a tendency to leave spent pods in the tray (yuck) and you need to clean the machine (decalcify as simple as 'brewing' a cup with vinegar instead of water) but the machine is analog in how it dispenses water so you don't really know you need to decalcify the machine until you notice that 7oz of coffee is starting to look like a lot less than that. So I went on the search for the next evolution in coffee pod brewing technology.

Let's just say you get what you pay for. The My Cafe AP is gorgeous and melts right in with all the other stainless appliances like the fridge, microwave, et al. In five years, Bunn has really stepped up their game. First off, the AP has an internal digital pour meter so it actually senses how much water has flowed into your cup, as opposed to the old analog style which was just leaving the solenoid open for some period of time, like 15 seconds or whatever. The AP actually shows this on its LCD display too so you can see how some pods that are packed more tightly than others might brew more slowly or absorb more of the initial water stream, but still end up brewing the same amount of joe. The AP also has a handy auto-eject feature so spent pods are simply discarded in the internal trash can you can put a tiny little trash can liner in here if you want, but I don't. Best of all, it's also plumbed like my original MCP, so I could literally reuse the exact same hook up as previous. This unit went from box to usable in under 5 minutes.

I also like all the features available in the LCD although it's not intuitive my looking at the LCD. You need the manual for this one. It's almost as if the CPU is full of Easter Eggs, like locking the display, changing the amount of water dispensed through "small" versus "large" cup, etc. But out-of-the-box none of this is necessary. If you like to fill your travel mugs every morning, you might however want to turn stock "small" into stock "large" and stock "large" into 10oz, instead of whatever the default is set at, I think it's 7 or 8oz.

Anyhow, it's by far the most expensive coffee machine I've ever bought, or that anyone's ever bought for their home that doesn't brew espresso. But if you're sick and tired of waiting for an entire pot to brew, just to waste half of it, or need another pot, or whatever, this is the coffee machine for you. Brew as much as you want, one pod at a time, and please for god sake live in the 21st century and plumb it into your fridge like a normal person.

PS When it comes to which coffee pods to buy, all I can say is that you need to do a taste test. Nearly all of the mass producers I've tried make the worst 'regular' coffee, but the best flavored coffee. Whereas the opposite is true from the non-coporate small-business vendors they make the best regular coffee and worst flavored coffee. So in my case, I get my Guatemala and Paris French Roast online from a small boutique coffee pod producer. But I get my Hazelnut online from Amazon from one of the bigger companies.

CHEERS!

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