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We’ve come a long, long way from the Braun and Krups auto drip brewers of a decade or two ago. For the longest time, if you wanted an auto drip coffee maker that could brew a capable cup, with lots of advanced features, you had to be looking at $200, $300 auto drip machines from Capresso or Technivorm.
Fortunately, that has changed in the last decade. We’re seeing more and more auto drip coffee makers with advanced features, better ways of delivering water to the bed of coffee, and even advanced technology like automatically converting from a flow-through device to a full immersion brewer for tasty one cup brewing. Brands like OXO, Bonavita, Cuisinart, Breville, and others have introduced very capable, SCA-certified coffee brewers in the $100 to $350 range, delivering you a SCA Gold Cup Certified brew.
But what if you want a capable auto drip brewer under $100? One with many advanced features and the ability to brew a SCA Gold Cup calibre cup?
In our Mini Review today, we’re looking at a sub $100 auto drip coffee maker that – while it isn’t SCA certified – has many advanced features and abilities: the Taotronics 12 Cup Self Cleaning Coffee Brewer.
For this review, we used Social Coffee’s Ethiopia Naga Singage to test this machine (and had a lot of delicious coffee to enjoy during the process!)
We’ll find out if it can brew at capable temperatures, look at how it saturates the bed of coffee, and how the machine operates. At $70 or less, we’ll report to you on if this is a good solid purchase or not, below. But if you can’t wait, here’s our ratings for the brewer.
Nothing super fancy about the box the Taotronics Auto Drip Coffee Maker comes in: it’s basically a stenciled cardboard box featuring a styrofoam top and bottom frame holding the machine in place. The machine arrived via Amazon shipping, and was double boxed. In this day and age, Taotronics lose points for not having environmentally friendly packaging: the styrofoam has got to go.
Inside the box is the auto drip coffee maker, the glass 1.8 litre (!!) carafe, a white nylon mesh Melitta #4 size permanent filter, and a scoop for your coffee. The machine is dressed out in a glossy black plastic with some brushed metal plastic in areas.
The Taotronics 12 Cup Coffee Maker sits very square in its presentation, and measures 25cm wide, x 20cm deep, and 34cm tall (10 x 7.8 x 13.5in). Empty, it weighs 2.35kg (5.2lb) making it very lightweight.
As mentioned above, the carafe maxes out at a whopping 1.8 litres (that’s almost 2 quarts!) and the internal reservoir, accessed once you lift the lid, holds the same.
The internals are interesting. It is a hot plate style auto drip coffee maker, but you can set the hot plate at one of three temperatures: 75C for low, 78C for medium, and 81C for high.
The Taotronics Auto Drip Coffee Maker draws a respectable 1000 watts, which in theory should do a good job of heating water at a good clip.
When you lift the lid on this coffee maker, you see the dispersion screen and it’s not bad. It is a series of holes along rows, forming a rectangle shape, which should distribute the water nicely over the same-angled filter holder. Normally you see these dispersion screens in a circular pattern, but the rectangle shape of this one might just reach more ground coffee.
The removable filter holder is pretty basic: designed for a Melitta #4 filter, it comes with a nylon mesh white permanent filter that I’m just going to recommend right now you consider not using. The Melitta FlavorPore paper filters are excellent and allow some oils to pass through to the brew, while still giving you a clean, grit free cup.
Up front is the control panel, and it’s all soft touch controlled. And let me get the good news out of the way up front: the machine is very responsive and easy to control. In all my testing, I didn’t register one missed press: the machine responds well to all positive touches of the control panel.
You see an always-on clock (yay, another clock for your kitchen!) once you program in the time. Underneath that are a bunch of buttons, including Brew, Auto Off, Clean, Carafe Temp, + / -, and Prog. There’s also an hr and min soft touch area for setting the clock and timer functions. The display is all white LCD on black, but it’s not overly bright, which is a good thing.
The touch panel is easy to use and there's no missed touches.
The display may be complex, but it’s pretty easy to figure out even if you don’t read the manual (though you really should – here it is for download). Some key things:
Before using the Taotronics machine for the first time to brew coffee, the manufacturer recommends running a few empty cycles of water through the machine, so we did that. Then it was time to set up our first brews.
At CoffeeGeek, we recommend a starting ratio of 7g of ground coffee per 100ml water used to brew with. This can be adjusted for larger batch brews (above 750ml). Since the Taotronics can brew 1.8 litres of coffee, that would be 125g of coffee at the 7g/100ml ratio, which is very full even for a #6 Melitta filter.
Because of this, we decided our test brews would be 10 cups, or 1.5 litres of coffee, for a full brew. We also dropped our coffee ratio to 6.5g/100ml for the full batch, using 95g of coffee. For our small batch tests, we settled in on 4 cup brews (600ml) using 42g of coffee. Taotronics measures 150ml as “1 cup” on their carafe. At this ratio, we are still pushing the limits of the #4 Melitta filters, and a #6 might be better.
When brewing in the normal (full strength) brewing mode, and doing a 1.5litre batch of coffee using 95g of ground coffee, we found the brewing temperatures on the Taotronics were very near SCA Gold Cup standards. The brewing times were a bit slow though. Flow rate was good, with the heating element pulsing on and off at a steady pace, but it can take as much as 9 minutes to brew a full batch.
At the start of the brew with the initial blooming of the ground coffee, I measured both the coffee slurry and the water coming out of the machine’s dispersion screen: the water was in the 198F range, and the slurry was 181.5F once about 100ml of water was in the basket. This takes into account the bed of ground coffee, at room temperature, eating up a lot of the brewing water’s heat.
3 minutes into the brew, the showerhead water was above 200F (range was 200.2F to 202.7F) and the slurry temperature was 192.8F.
5 minutes into the brew, the showerhead water was above 201F, and the slurry was sitting at 195.4F.
At finish, the slurry temperature was approaching 199F and higher as a bit of steam from the end of the water heating process hit it.
All in all, these were very acceptable brewing temperatures, especially considering this machine wasn’t designed or tested for SCA Gold Cup standards. It’s clear this brewer was designed to work best doing 8 cups or more of coffee at one time.
We tested the machine several times using both a Fluke thermometer with a K-probe, and a quick read needle thermometer.
I don’t recommend using the 1-4 cup brew cycle mode on this machine, even if you want to brew less than 600ml of coffee with the Taotronics 12 Cup Coffee Maker.
If you do have a need to do small batch brewing in this machine, I have a hack for you to try, detailed below, that will result in a much better cup of coffee than using the 1-4 cup brew cycle on the Taotronics 12 Cup Brewer.
Keep in mind, this is a $70USD machine. Where companies like Breville have invested tens of thousands of dollars in research and design, and even more money in engineering a unique design and mechanism to their high end brewers to produce a superlative single cup brew experience from their 12 cup brewers, well, this machine and its designer have not.
Taotronics’ solution is to just slow down the heat / pause / heat / pause system of their water heater when you put the machine in 1-4 cup brewing mode. In full strength brewing mode, the machine’s water heater pulses on and off every few seconds to deliver water to the dispersion screen up top in regular pulses at around 200F. But in 1-4 cup brewing mode, the pauses between the on state of the heating element are longer and more drawn out – about 6-8 seconds, as opposed to only a few seconds in the full brew mode – and the result is a slower brew speed and lower brewing temperatures.
Indeed, brewing our sample 600ml brews using the 1-4 cup mode resulted in an average brewing time of 7:02, and a coffee slurry temperature of 177F / 182.5F / 188F in the start / mid / end ranges. Just too low and too slow for brewing a good cup.
I do have a hack, and it’s one I came up with on older Braun and Krups auto drip coffee makers to get a better cup: Pour your 600 or 500, or even 400ml of water into the reservoir for a single or two cup brew, add your coffee the the filter basket, and leave the machine in full pot brewing mode. Turn it on, but do not put the carafe in place, leave it out of the machine (don’t worry – the drip-stop feature will not let the initial brewing coffee leak out).
Let the first full minute of machine operation take place without putting the carafe into the machine. The drip-stop feature of the filter basket will keep the slurry from draining, and you end up doing a full infusion initial brew of your coffee (which is kind of what the high end Breville auto drip machines do, but automatically, with gears and levers controlled by the machine’s internal brain).
After about a minute, put the carafe in place, and the brewed coffee will start draining into it. Voila, you just did a partial immersion brew for a much better tasting 300-600ml batch of coffee.
The cleaning mode is interesting on this machine. It is actually a warning light that pops up automatically after a set number of brews, and just asks you to run water only through the machine. It runs a cycle that’s different from the brewing cycles, and just kind of flushes out the Taotronics. You still will need to descale this machine once in a while too. This is either a nice feature or an annoyance, depending on how you look at it.
The touch display is a lot nicer than I expected: it registers all your touches of it, and in our testing over two weeks we didn’t have any surprises.
The carafe is really basic, but no complaints about it: pouring is okay, without any real drips or spills, and it gets the job done. It seems a tad fragile though, so just be careful with it.
The hot plate with it’s three settings is nice, and you can also turn it off (it’s on while brewing, but you can have it turn off right after the brew finishes), so if you don’t want to continue cooking and baking your brewed coffee, you have that option.
The Taotronics machine is very quiet: the only sounds it emits (besides the electronic beeps which can be turned off) is water heating and transport sounds. It’s not going to wake up the house, that’s for sure.
Lastly, there is a side view port for the water level in the reservoir. A nice feature is that it lights up when the machine is operation, making it pretty easy to see the water level inside.
Taotronics 12 Cup Brewer
Pictured with a Baratza Virtuoso+ Grinder
We’re frequently recommending auto drip coffee makers in the $150 to $300 range to readers of CoffeeGeek, which can turn a lot of people off. Even our “budget” recommendations, while often having SCA Certification (a very good thing) lack features people expect in an auto drip coffee maker, like auto on settings and built in clocks.
I didn’t have very high expectations for the Taotronics 12 Cup Coffee Maker, so I was pleasantly surprised by the review process and the coffee it brewed. The bottom core line for any auto drip coffee maker is a) how it saturates the bed of coffee, and b) the temperatures of the water it heats up to brew with. In both regards, the Taotronics does very well and that shows in our review scores.
It does have some issues: the permanent filter is way too small to do a full 1.8 litre brew; the 1-4 cup brew mode is useless when it comes to producing a good cup of coffee; it is a glass carafe with a heating pad; and the brew times are a bit long when compared to the SCA standards.
All that said, the benefits of this machine, including the good brew temperatures, the good water dispersion over the bed of coffee, the easy to use front touch panel, the display, and even small niceties like the lit up water reservoir all make it a good option for brewing coffee in the home automatically.
For $70, you could do a lot worse in an auto drip machine than the Taotronics 12 Cup Coffee Maker.
For $70, this is a feature rich auto drip coffee maker that, for full batches at least, brews at near ideal temperatures. A good choice for quality coffee on a budget.
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