We purchased this exact Melitta 10 cup drip coffee maker in May 2016 and it is a valued member of our family ever since. It was a replacement for a previous Melitta drip coffeemaker that was so old and well used the handle was falling off.
Spoiler Alert: We love this coffee maker, have purchased this model twice, and would buy it again. This review covers why we love it and think you will, too.
Cone Shaped Filter
The conical filter brews better coffee than a flat bottom. The cone shape allows for more even saturation of the beans with the hot water and enables a more consistent flow. The cone shape avoids the dreaded floppy filter problem inherent in flat bottoms when the filter flops over into itself, resulting in a pot full of muddy grounds and a tragic waste of both coffee and time.
Melitta drip coffee maker cone filter basket
For everyday use, we stock up on coffee filters and buy 300 at a time (3 boxes of 100 filters) to last almost an entire year. Did I mention that we use this coffee maker often?
Say No to Sludge
Drip coffee is brewed as a result of hot water flowing over freshly ground beans. Water temperature makes a huge difference in taste. Temperature too low makes bland, weak coffee. Coffee extracted at a temperature too hot will taste burnt and bitter. Melitta has figured out how to build a budget coffee makers with a quality water heater for the consistent temperature.
A pot sitting on a hot plate serves no purpose other than to fill your house with a bitter burned coffee smell and to condense the once good coffee into a foul sludge. Anyone who has worked a job with a community coffee pot knows the disappointment of pouring an afternoon pick-me-up cup, only to be subjected to coffee carnage — that burned smell and disgusting charred taste. Nobody needs to wake up badly enough to drink that, and no amount of cream and sugar can fix it.
Stainless Steel for the Win
The thermal carafe solves the sludge situation by keeping fresh coffee hot for hours without having to reheat it. Unlike a glass carafe, you can drop it without creating a minefield of glass shards on your kitchen floor and a futile search for an after-market replacement carafe that never seems to quite fit.
Keep it Simple
This system doesn’t have a lot of gadgets to break. It’s got a digital clock. You can probably schedule it to start brewing automatically, but we like to grind our own beans within seconds of brewing, so we’ve never actually tried. The system can’t be controlled by Bluetooth. It doesn’t have WiFi. It won’t talk to our dishwasher or automatically order more filters for itself online. It doesn’t recognize our voices (but yes, we do sometimes still speak to it). Chinese hackers can’t control it and spy on us. It’s an automatic drip coffee pot, and it consistently brews awesome coffee without hassle.
We use this pot every day. It survived two hurricanes. It’s brewed delicious coffee when plugged into generators with uneven output not even close to household power. It’s been dropped, whacked, upended, and dangled from its cord. It still works great, and the thermal carafe still keeps coffee hot for most of the day (although it rarely sticks around that long).
