A superbly competent extravagance. If you really like drip coffee and you can scrounge up the $$, then do so. You won't feel like you've wasted your money.
Positive Product Points
Makes absolutely great drip coffee.
Negative Product Points
It's not really necessary to pay this much to make great drip coffee.
Detailed Commentary
I received my Moccamaster as a Christmas present from my wife. I can't disagree with most of the other reviewers regarding the quality of the coffee this thing brews. It is outstanding. You can actually taste the nuances in different types of coffee, which didn't really happen with my old Krups and Capresso drip units. I'd put the Moccamaster coffee on par with the best French press and the most carefully made manual drip coffee. And that's really the rub with this thing. This is one heck of an expensive drip coffee maker. You can get a press or a manual drip filter unit for a small fraction of the price of the Moccamaster. You will lose out on convenience - you have to mess with the press or carefully pour through the manual drip filter. If all you're after is high-quality coffee, you can put in that extra effort and save yourself some serious bucks. Still, it's not like we're talking the price of a new car or anything like that. If you're like me, you just don't want to spend any more of your precious morning minutes on coffee making chores than you absolutely have to. The Moccamaster gives you a great cup with minimal operator intervention. It doesn't go so far as to offer you a timer that you can set to start it up in the morning, but we all know what letting the ground coffee sit in the basket all night will do to it. As others have found, we're using less ground coffee for a given amount of water than we used in our other coffee makers, so we are getting a little bit of our money back that way.
As far as style goes, I rather like it. It looks great next to the Breville grinder we have and fits underneath the overhead cabinets. It also looks cool when it's brewing, with the bubbles coming up the central column. The carafe is a little weird. If you put the stopper in it, it doesn't fit back under the basket (but we end up drinking the pot before it cools to any noticeable degree, anyway).
Ultimately, the Moccamaster is a superbly competent extravagance. If you have a few extra bucks to put into something like this, you really like good drip coffee, and you'd rather have a machine make it than do it yourself, then buy one of these. With every cup you drink, you'll feel like it was money well spent.
Buying Experience
GREAT!!! I didn't buy it at all! (It was a gift.)
Three Month Followup
Still making great coffee. No issues whatsoever with the unit.
