Coffee Maker Report: Mine Sucks!

Let me dispense with the formalities and tell you flat out, my recent purchase (a month ago) of the Hamilton Beach BrewStation 10-cup Coffee Maker I bought from Wal Mart is a piece of crap and, it sucks. I only tell you this so you won't make the same mistake I did.

First, you should know that my wife prefers coffee from a percolator type pot. We used to spend about $75.00 every year purchasing a really fancy one from JC Penny, but after a while, I figured why spend so much on one that had the auto-brew timer when I could just buy the regular percolator and wait the five minutes it takes to make coffee. So, for the next few years we used a regular plug in percolator and the coffee was good, but for whatever reason, our last one fried and it was time for a new one.

We get into Wal Mart and I tell my wife that I would prefer to buy the $15.00 Proctor and Silex carafe coffee maker and just replace every six months like normal people do. Here in San Antonio, we have seriously hard water. If you don't own a water softener system (and we don't) your dishwasher, your coffee maker and everything else goes to crap unless you are constantly conducting preventative maintenance to clean the calcium build-up out. Lots of vinegar.

Anyway, my wife points out this spiffy Hamilton Beach BrewStation gimmick where you don't actually have a carafe, but instead, a holder where the coffee collects and you simply retrieve that fresh mug of coffee directly into your cup! Brilliant!

So, first mistake is, we get the 10-cup version. Ten Dixie cups, maybe! I kid you not, fully loaded, it makes three normal sized cups of coffee. But, what the hey.For the first week, the coffee tasted kinda burnt. I thought the burnt flavor would wear off, and actually, today, a month later, it finally tasted pretty good. Unfortunately, today was also the day when the thing just stopped functioning by any standard of acceptable performance.

Now imagine this. I set the thing to brew all ten Dixie cups of coffee, and after about ten minutes, I walk over to the machine to see that it has brewed two Dixie cups worth. I look inside, and sure enough, the water in the reservoir has ceased pumping. I look and the red light indicating power is still on, so I turn it off then back on. Like clockwork, it brews two more Dixie cups worth of coffee and I recycle the power again, and get two more. What the hell?

So my wife and I enjoy our regular size cups of coffee, thus emptying the BrewStation, and my wife tells me it should be cleaned. I whip out the coffee cleaner stuff and as expected, it will only brew the cleaner stuff two Dixie cups at a time. Forget it. My life is too short to deal with this kinda crap. I'm pretty sure we'll be out purchasing a new percolator today. I somehow suspect this was planned well in advance by my wife.

And in case you are wondering, no, we don't have the box it came in or the receipt. That pretty much spells, "You own it" in Wal Mart lingo.

What kind of coffee maker do you use? Tell me about it.