Great coffee, terrific convenience, esp. if you run the dishwasher every night or pay someone to clean it for you :-)
Positive Product Points
Putting the grinder on a timer is a boon to hardcore types like me who balked at leaving ground beans in the hopper all night. Tons of nifty features (burner temp control, programmable auto-shutoff, auto-clean cycle, etc.) The built-in grinder can be turned off if you want to play with the attributes of the grind itself.
Negative Product Points
A royal pain to clean - the built-in grinder gets soaked from the steam when you make a pot, and must be meticulously dried before you can use it again. Also, the lid of the carafe is poorly engineered, with tiny little nubs that tend to break when dissasembling for cleaning. The feature that‘s supposed to prevent coffee from dripping onto the burner when the carafe is lifted off the burner doesn‘t work.
Detailed Commentary
This machine makes an outstanding cup of coffee, which is of course really the whole point. It is laden with features (as you‘d expect for a $175 drip coffeemaker!). Honestly, though, the only real justification for this model is the ability to grind and brew in one step from the timer - and even then, you don‘t have control over the courseness of the grind. If you never use a timer, or if you always want to control your own grind, or if you don‘t think that you can tell the difference between a pot of coffee brewed from freshly ground beans and one brewed from ground beans that have been sitting around all night, then you‘re probably best off looking for something cheaper without a built-in grinder.
