Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Out of the box, if you heat filtered water with it, the water will stink and taste like that horrible cheap Chinese plastic/rubber smell many new products have, these days. For a $200 list price coffee maker, these guys fell into the same trap lots of US manufacturers are, where they don't bother to do some QC on manufactured units and verify the material quality. I personally believe a coffee maker should first and foremost be: a great hot-water maker. If it cannot make hot water you would drink, why use it to make coffee? Why say: "man it smelled when I first got it, but now that I have drank 10 pots, I can't smell or taste it anymore". Yeah, that's because you are masking the toxic out-gassin, and consuming it. I ran at least 12 rounds of nice water through it, using the brew cycle. I REFUSE to follow the coffee-maker blog wisdom out there, where people suggest several courses of vinegar water. I think that's B.S. Your coffee maker should work for you-- you do NOT work for your coffee maker. After a lot of sniffing around, I narrowed it down to two black rubber pieces the instructions claim are "silicone". If you want to know the smell, go to the cheapest hardware store you can find and pick up a $2 made-in-China black rubber mallet and sniff it. Same thing. As you can see in my movie, after I owned it for a few days and soaked these pieces in water to out-gas them, I still could only make a cup of hot water that tasted-- not great, but.... not as bad as before-- when I removed the silly black rubber water guide tube in the carafe BEFORE heating the water. After soaking that tube in a glass of water for days and watching bubbles form on it, due to out-gassing, the tube smelled OK at room temp, but stinks like crazy when heated up in the carafe, where it then ruins your water or coffee. Shame on OXO for not paying more attention to this serious issue-- which could be toxic-- and shame on them for not paying 5 cents more for a truly silicone food-grade part. And shame on the "SCAA-certified" stamp of approval for not noticing this. They must take bribes. Also, as many complain, the carafe does not line up straight under the filter basket outlet and dripping liquid has to be caught by the side gutter on the top of the carafe, to make it into the carafe. Otherwise, it looks like it would have been a nice coffee maker.