Grinds, Brews, and Keeps Coffee Hot and Flavorful - Grind & Brew Thermal Coffeemaker
Written: Sep 02 '04
Product Rating:
Pros: Grinds, brews and keeps your coffee warm - all in one machine!
Cons: Machine must be cleaned well after every use
The Bottom Line: The Grind and Brew makes a great pot of coffee and has some nifty features including a built-in coffee bean grinder and a thermal carafe to keep your coffee warm
jps246's Full Review: Cuisinart DGB-600 10-Cup Coffee Maker
It’s a nifty kind of coffee maker that does make an excellent cup of coffee, it’s just that there are a few flaws in the final design. I don’t think they’ll make or break anyone’s choice, but they are something to consider if you’re looking at this coffee maker.
I really was dying to get this coffee maker. I had been drooling over it in the stores, I had it on my wishlist and I had been telling everyone I knew, I wanted one. I made sure to tell them that I wanted the stainless steel one too – I didn’t want any plain old white coffee maker.
What drew me in was the look and the functionality of the coffee maker. It not only brewed a pot of coffee, but it would grind the beans for you! If you’ve ever struggled with a bean grinder before making a pot of coffee, you know how frustrating this can be. Somewhere along the line you’ll make a mess and it never seems to work very easily. Cuisanart’s Grind and Brew coffee maker aimed to take care of that problem by incorporating the bean grinder directly into the coffee maker. Put in your beans, push a button and voila, you’ve got freshly ground beans and fresh coffee.
Finally someone listened and my best friend and my boyfriend went half and half and got me the coffee maker and since then, I’ve been enjoying some good coffee, albeit with a few issues here and there.
Basics
This fellow is bigger than your average coffee maker – and somewhat heavier. It’ll also take up more counter real estate in your kitchen.
The Grind and Brew basically takes a standard coffee maker, a thermal carafe and a coffee bean grinder and puts them all together. Unlike standard coffee makers, the coffee pot is not glass and the element underneath doesn’t heat the pot. The pot is a stainless steel thermal carafe that can keep the hot coffee from the coffee maker hot for several hours with very little cooling. The coffee maker itself features an automatic shut-off if you just have to have your cup of coffee before the entire pot is brewed, along with a water filter to improve water quality and an option to either use paper filters or a metal mesh filter. You’re able to make 10 cups of coffee at a time and for a full pot of coffee, it’ll take about 8 to 10 minutes to brew the entire pot.
The big deal here though (beyond the nifty idea of the thermal carafe) is the fact that the bean grinder is built into the coffee maker. Now this may sound strange, and it is the area where operational difficulties come into play, but it’s a novel idea that works as well as can be expected under the circumstances.
The unit also features a clock and can be programmed to automatically grind and brew coffee at a specified time or just brew coffee and leave the grinder turned off (if you put already ground coffee in). There’s also a special setting for brewing 1 to 4 cups of coffee that lets the machine do a better job brewing such a small amount of coffee.
The Grinder and it’s issues
Think about it – what do you have with a coffee maker? There is water, ground coffee and steam – all of which can make a mess and tend to do so at times.
The coffee bean grinder featured in the Grind and Brew is pretty simple. You place the beans into the grinder from the top – the beans are grinded and then the grinds flow down a small tube into the area where the paper filter or mesh filter is located. It can take a little bit of practice to figure out exactly how many beans to put in to get varying amounts of coffee, but it’s really pretty easy.
The problem comes from the fact that once you start brewing that coffee, the steam is of course going to go up through that little tube and right into where the coffee was ground and gets everything wet and damp and the residual coffee grinds stick to everything.
It means that after every single use, you’ve got to thoroughly clean the insides of the Grind and Brew, otherwise you’re going to get this gunky, disgusting build-up of coffee grinds. Clean-up isn’t hard, but it is a pain. You simply remove the grinding assembly, along with the tube to the filter and the filter assembly and wash it off. It’s more the fact that you have to do this whenever you use the filter – otherwise it would be unusable the next time.
Other issues
Along the same lines of the grinding issue, even if you don’t use the grinder – the steam will still travel up into that area when you brew a pot of coffee and get it wet and damp. If you don’t at least wipe it out, or rinse it out and let it dry, mold and other stuff can start growing in there from all the warmth and moisture. I wish there was some sort of way to close off the grinder assembly when you weren’t using it, but there isn’t, so you have to put up with this problem after each use.
The mesh filter that comes with the Grind and Brew can be a real pain to clean, especially if you’ve let the grinds sit for more than a few hours. More than once I’ve brewed coffee in the morning before work and come home in the evening and cleaned the filter only to find the grinds dried into the mesh. It takes a lot of effort to clean it out.
And heaven help you if you forget about the grinds for more than a few days. Like any coffee maker, the grinds will start growing mold, but the problem with the Grind and Brew is the fact that the mold will go through the entire filter assembly, into the grinder and onto any surface that stays somewhat moist (and if you don’t open it up and clean it out after using it, this is almost all the interior surfaces). I once forgot to clean it and it literally took me several attempts to clean out all the mold that had developed – I kept finding more with each cleaning.
Coffee
The coffee coming out of this guy is good, better than I ever had from my cheapo Walmart special coffee makers. I guess you’d expect that from a coffee maker that costs about 10 times more than the average coffee maker (it’s around $149).
The thermal carafe is also a great idea that helps keep the flavor of the coffee at its best. With the heated pots, coffee is evaporating and slowly what’s left in the pot is getting stronger and stronger (turning into mud I believe), but in the Grind and Brew the coffee that is brewed is what stays in the carafe and it doesn’t change flavor and it barely changes temperature. You can brew a pot of coffee at 6 in the morning and still be drinking hot coffee around 8 and still have fairly hot coffee around 9 to 10.
Final Thoughts
The Grind and Brew makes a great pot of coffee and has some nifty features including a built-in coffee bean grinder and a thermal carafe to keep your coffee warm. While it does suffer from a few design flaws, mostly relating to the coffee grinder, you have to expect something when you stick a coffee grinder inside a coffee maker.
You’ll spend a little extra time cleaning the Grind and Brew after you make a pot of coffee compared to a standard coffee maker, but in the long run, it’s well worth it – at least for me.
Plus it looks really cool on your kitchen counter!
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