Coffee Mate
Category: Food...
Posted Wednesday, July 07, 2004 at 06:37 PM [GMT-6]

I don't think I've mentioned that we have a new coffee maker. Actually, we've had it for a couple of months, but like any significant new relationship, there's a bit of a probationary period before you want to make a big deal of it in front of the whole world. But, I really think this is going to work out, so I'm introducing it to the family, so to speak.

It's a Cuisinart 12-cup carafe model, very sleek and very tall. It replaces a somewhat dumpier model from Philips, which also had a built-in grinder that we never used. The grinder was (a) ineffective and (b) a pain to clean, so we ditched it in favor of a burr grinder from Starbucks. The Cuisinart is grinderless, which means it can devote its full attention to its raison d'être: making really good coffee.

It has other qualities that the Philips model lacked, or lost over time. For one thing, it makes hot coffee...blow-before-you-sip, pre-McDonalds-lawsuit hot. The Philips model gave us very warm coffee, but that's not good enough. Also, the Cuisinart's carafe is wonderfully insulated and the last cup comes out almost as hot as the first, another area where the Philips model fell down. And, almost magically, you can pour coffee from the Cuisinart carafe without unscrewing the lid! Is this a great country or what?*

But most importantly, the Cuisinart is reliable. Near the end, when we walked into the kitchen each morning, we never knew whether the Philips coffee would be in the pot, or all over the countertop and floor. There's very little in life more aggravating than an incontinent coffee maker, IYKWIM.

I've applied my keen powers of observation (which seem to work only in really trivial situations) and determined that the key to finding a reliable carafe-style coffee maker is in the sturdiness of the carafe lid. The lid on a coffee carafe is a wonder of engineering skill, outfitted with myriad valves and channels and tubes and flanges and the like. It has to be, for the process of dumping a hot liquid into a cool closed container stirs up all kinds of thermodynamic reactions, the scope of which are well outside both this post and my comprehension. But what I do know (or believe) is that a girly kind of lid just won't stand up over time (and I mean no disrespect to the girlyish among my readers). The Philips lid was girly; the Cuisinart's is, by contrast, burly. The ball valve makes a healthy rattle when you shake it; the Philips' valve sort of tinkled. Over time, coffee-derived sludge gums up the works, and the more robust mechanisms are more easily kept clean.

I trust that you'll keep these factors in mind when the time comes to choose a new mate maker. Trust me, you'll both be happier for having done so.