Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Review revised on April 24, 2002 My initial review: My wife and I have been using this machine for several months now, and we have become familiar with the good, the bad, and the ugly, as these terms relate to this worthwhile but flawed innovation by Cuisinart. The good: the coffee made by the machine is wonderful, IF you have the common sense to adjust the amount of beans you use in accordance with how strong you like your coffee. The people who complain that the coffee is "weak" need to put on their proverbial thinking caps and simply ADD MORE BEANS! Yup, once you get the right ratio of beans to water the coffee is plenty strong, and since it's freshly ground, the flavor is terrific. The automatic brewing features are reasonably easy to set and use, and these make it possible to wake up in the morning to freshly brewed coffee, a terrific start to any day. Complaints about how hard it is to clean the machine are also kind of silly; have we gotten so spoiled as a culture that we can't stand to routinely remove and rinse out the necessary parts of a kitchen appliance after every use? Cleaning the removable parts takes a couple of minutes, true, but it's definitely not such an odious task that it should discourage potential purchasers. The bad: the construction of the unit itself needs some improvement; after two months of routine, reasonably careful use, the top of the machine broke off, due mainly to what seems to be a flimsy hinge design. Fortunately, it was still possible to affix the top to the unit during the time we waited for a replacement part. The ugly: possibly the most annoying feature of this machine is that normal cleaning of the unit caused the lettering that labels the various buttons to disappear. We now have memorized the function of each button, but it would have been nice and probably not difficult for the engineers at Cuisinart to design more permanently affixed labels. It's likely that over time, new versions of this machine will be marketed that improve on this one. In the meantime, this is a good, affordable, and reasonably reliable unit that exhibits how clever engineering can help to move us ever closer to that "perfect home-brewed cup of coffee." Added April 24, 2002: I feel compelled to inform those few readers who will ever come across this revised review that my initial commentary on this Cuisinart grind and brew unit was overly generous. No, it wasn't the cleaning process that got to me; I was always willing to accept a little routine maintenance in order to end up with great coffee. The problem is that this unit simply isn't designed to stand up to everyday use over any extended period of time. I've already mentioned the disappearing labels for the various buttons. But after ten months or so of daily use, the machine stopped doing a trustworthy job of sending the ground coffee on to the brewing basket. No matter how thoroughly we cleaned and prepared the unit, every morning we would find a large percentage of the ground coffee still stuck in the grinder. The result was weak coffee and frayed tempers. We still use the machine, but only for brewing already-ground coffee, and there certainly are cheaper machines that will perform this task adequately. Also, I should explain to people that whereas you can get adequately strong coffee by using more than one measure of beans per cup, this essentially transforms the "ten cup" machine into a four or five cup unit. I hope that the folks at Cuisinart will take all of this customer feedback and commentary and put it to good use, i.e., a renewed effort to redesign this machine so that it is more reliable, durable, and flexible in terms of brew strength.