What do coffee makers have to do with rimrocked? To be honest, not much other than a lot of rimrocked was created with the help and stimulation of many cups of coffee. With Rimrocked i try to be picky about what we do with it to ensure it’s well-designed, well-thought out and easy to use (we’ve got some updates coming shortly that’ll address a few things we’ve found since the initial design process that’ll speak to all 3 of these things!), with choosing appliances I try to do the same.
Recently the coffee maker that my wife and I have had for the last 5 or so years decided to kick the bucket. We should have guessed a few weeks ago when it started leaking out the side it was on it’s last legs, but simply turning the carafe to catch the leak solved that problem.
It’s important to me to have a well-thought out coffee maker. I’m at my most vulnerable (and grumpy) first thing in the morning and don’t want to risk making it worse by having the first thing i do after i get up go wrong. So with our coffee maker broken my wife and i set out to find a replacement - this ended up being a 2 day project.
The last machine that we had was not an expensive one, but it was simple and well thought out. For instance the water reservoir pulled out and could be filled and put back in which meant no spilt water on the counter as you tried to fill the back of the machine. Also, the basket that the filter sat in was removable so you just grabbed it, dumped it into the garbage can and the filter (with used coffee grinds) slid in to the garbage never having had to touch the wet filter or risk spilling/breaking it on the way to the garbage can. It also made a good cup of coffee. I think it cost us a total of $40 but sadly, Hamilton Beach no longer makes this model (to be fair it was 5-6 years ago that we got it).
So the search began…between the 2 of us we were a little picky (e.g. knew it was 5-6 year thing we had to live with so it had to fill some pre-determined criteria so that it would not be a point of contention to complain about for that amount of time). I wanted it to be easy to fill and maintain and my wife didn’t want a stainless steel carafe (I don’t really know why that was an issue but any one who’s married knows to choose their battles wisely and this wasn’t one that was gonna do any good to argue…so no stainless steel).
We tried a number of stores over the course of 2 evenings to no avail, there was one or two that were potential candidates but nothing that really stood out. We finally ended up choosing the KitchenAid* JavaStudio Coffeemaker, it filled most of our needs - the water can be poured in from the front ensuring less of a hassle while on the counter top, it has a glass carafe, and it has a removable basket to dispose of the grounds. However, there was one major sticking point - it was white. They had 3 colours to choose from white, red and black. My wife was dead set on black (can’t blame i preferred it to) however the red and white models were marked down to $89.99 whereas the black model was still priced at $179.99. It may have done what we were looking for but i’m not about to part with $180 if it doesn’t clean itself or have a pot of coffee ready for me as soon as i think about wanting a cup of coffee. So after a brief discussion we ended up with the white model - saving ourselves $90 in the process. We brought home and it looks find on the counter AND most importantly it fulfills our requirements and (so far) makes a good pot of coffee.
This morning while setting up the machine i noticed a really great detail on the carafe, on the side where it has the number of cups of coffee there’s 2 part to it, one for the number of cups of coffee, the other for the amount of water required to get that many cups of coffee. I often noticed with our old machine that i’d put in 12 cups of water and only get 10-11 cups of coffee - a normal thing when you heat water up is that evaporates so not a big deal, but this small detail actually worked - this morning i got the exact amount of coffee i thought i was making.
* I generally dislike KitchenAid products so this was a hard choice - they seem to be the fine choice of Yuppies everywhere these days which immediately causes me to hate anything but i also find their products are designed to look cool but are usually not great in the usability end of things and they’re generally way over-priced for what they are - now, i’m more than willing to pay for good design (and have on many occasions) but not when most of the design has gone in to the way it looks and not the way it works. Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it’s well-designed, generally looking good certainly helps something work better, but looking good doesn’t in itself provide good design.