Coffee Equipment Rating:
4.5 out of 5 coffee pots

Coffee Brew Buddy
Suggested Price: $5.99

Available from Primula

For many of us, when it’s time for coffee, it’s time for a full pot of our favorite beverage. Whether it’s an automatic drip brewer, a French press, or some other method, you choose your coffee, grab some water, and heat it all together for a pot of get-up-and-go. On the other hand, the proliferation of various single-serve applications—K-Cup, Vue, Senseo, Nespresso, Tassimo, Verismo, and more—makes it clear that there is a demand out there for coffee made and served one cup at a time. While these may make a smaller amount of coffee than your regular full-sized brewing rig, they can still take a fair amount of effort, as well as a relatively expensive machine to extract all the magic that your coffee has to offer. A much more low-tech solution to this need is the Coffee Brew Buddy by Primula.

The folks at Primula sent us a free Coffee Brew Buddy to put through its paces. The Coffee Brew Buddy single serve brewing device is a simple gadget consisting of a plastic collar that suspends a mesh filter bag. Put your ground coffee in the filter, set the device on top of your cup or mug, add hot water, and you’ve got the fastest, freshest cup of coffee going. The Brew Buddy should fit cups with an opening of anywhere from 2 3/4 to 4 1/2 inches across. In function, the Brew Buddy reminds us of the old Melita filter cone coffee maker, except that when you’re done with the Brew Buddy, you can stick it in your purse or bag to take on the road with you; you certainly can’t do that with that old filter cone. Needless to say, you’ll want to wrap it up in something before you drop it in pocket or purse, to keep everything from getting soggy. The Brew Buddy is dishwasher safe, so clean-up is easy, and since there’s no paper filter involved, you’re doing your bit for the environment, too.

To test the Brew Buddy, we grabbed one of our favorite coffee mugs and plopped the device on top of it. We added two tablespoons of a coarse-ground French Roast, and poured in hot water. The mesh is fine enough to keep most of the grounds out of the coffee; no doubt using a coarse grind like in a French press will help keep the crunchy bits out. Because of the tightness of the weave of the filter bag, it takes a bit for the water to work its way through the grounds and into the cup. Since you can’t see the level of the coffee in your cup, if you plan to use the Brew Buddy often, it would probably be worth your while to measure how much water you are adding to the cup, just to make it easier to replicate your results. Since the filter bag hangs into the cup, you could leave the whole rig to steep like making tea with a tea bag, but we found that just the amount of time it took for the water to make its way through the filter and into the cup was sufficient to give us a good cup of coffee.

The Coffee Brew Buddy sells for $5.99 is available directly from Primula on their website.

Coffee Equipment Rating:
4 out of 5 coffee pots

Capresso SG120 12-Cup Stainless Steel Coffee Maker Model #494
Suggested Price: $79.99

Available at Capresso.com, Amazon.com, and other retailers

Of all the ways to brew a cup of coffee, the automatic drip machine has been a favorite since Joe DiMaggio introduced us to Mr. Coffee back in the 70′s. It’s a convenient method, requiring only that you can pour water and can rescue the resulting brew before it burns up on the warmer element.

The folks at Capresso sent us a free sample of their Capresso SG120 12-Cup Stainless Steel Coffee Maker Model #494 so that we could put it through its paces. We found it to be an attractive coffee maker that makes a pretty good cup of coffee without our having to be rocket scientists to use it. Its brushed stainless steel and black exterior goes nicely with most kitchen color schemes, and the smooth finish makes it easy to keep clean.

Setting the machine up for first use is pretty straightforward. It has one of those short cords (about 28 inches) that many appliances come with now, with the explanation that by being shorter, you reduce a host of potential safety issues with the cord being a tripping hazard or getting wrapped around other things in the kitchen. That’s all well and good if you can locate the coffee maker right next to an electrical outlet; otherwise, you have to add your own after-market extension cord (of sufficient electrical rating, of course), which would seem to nullify any safety advantage, while costing additional dollars to add that cord.

The coffee maker itself measures about 7 inches wide by 10 inches deep and 14 inches tall. Because of the way you add water to the machine to brew your coffee—the whole top of the machine is hinged at the back and rotates upward—it actually extends to 23 inches tall when you are adding water. The combination of the cord length and the machine height means you may need to work a bit to find the right location to place this coffee maker. Luckily for us, we have a work counter that allows us to put ours close to an outlet and to not have to worry about low-hanging kitchen cabinets.

If you’re interested in waking up to coffee in the morning, you’ll need to set the clock on the coffee maker. A couple button presses is all it takes to enter the current time-of-day, and setting the auto-on timer isn’t much harder.

To brew your first pot of coffee, you need to fill the machine with your choice of ground coffee. The coffee maker comes with a reusable GoldTone filter, or you can use a standard #4 paper coffee filter, available almost anywhere. Fill the carafe with the appropriate amount of water for the coffee you’re going to make, and pour it into the machine’s water reservoir. This is a bit tricky, because of how things are spaced under the hood. You have to rotate the top of the machine upward to expose the inner workings, and then pour water into a relatively small space between the filter basket and the back of the machine itself. Because of how the top rotates up, it gets pretty tight in there. The workaround for this is to make sure that you pour water in from the side rather than approaching from the front of the coffee maker.

Once the machine is all loaded up, it’s easy to start the brewing process: just press the On/Off button. The button turns red to let you know things are happening. The control panel also includes an AROMA button. It’s not entirely clear where this name comes from (if you don’t, there’s no coffee smell?), but pressing it slows the brewing process down, presumably to allow more aroma to develop. Frankly it all smells pretty good without pressing AROMA, but there you have it. One recommendation the manufacturer makes is that if you are making just a small amount of coffee that pressing the AROMA button will help to make sure that you extract all the coffee goodness from your smaller batch of ground coffee.

Brewing 48 ounces of coffee—about 10 cups by the markings on the carafe—takes about ten minutes. When brewing is complete, the machine beeps three times and the On/Off button turns green to let you know it’s done. If you press the AROMA button while brewing, it just about doubles the length of the brew cycle—our ten cup batch took nineteen minutes to complete with this setting.

If you’re impatient about getting your first cup of the morning, you can pull the carafe out of the machine to pour a quick cup while the rest of your batch is brewing. You’ll want to make sure that you get the container back into the machine in no more than about twenty seconds, however, or else you run the risk of coffee and grounds covering your kitchen counter.

If you’d like to be awakened to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee first thing in the morning, it’s easy to set the timer for a start time. Press the PROG button to enter the start time, and then AUTO to activate that setting. The On/Off button will show a yellow light to let you know that the timer is set. Be sure to add coffee and water to the machine, or the start time you program for your early morning brew may turn into the start time for burning up your coffee maker!

We tried a couple of different dark- and light-roast coffees, both with pretty good results. We generally use about half a cup (4 ounces by volume) of ground coffee to 48 ounces of water. This corresponds to the “10 Cup” marking on the carafe. As with most automatic drip systems, a medium grind seems to work best to give you the optimum combination of rich coffee flavor but relatively little sediment and residue at the bottom of the pot. Even though our preference is the French Press, where the water is in contact with the ground coffee for a longer period, this machine made a perfectly good cup of coffee, and it’s certainly more convenient than having to wait for the water to heat, pour it into the press-pot, and then set the timer to know when it’s ready.

As with many automatic drip coffee makers, this machine has a heating element to keep your freshly-brewed beverage piping hot. We generally pour our coffee into an insulated vacuum bottle carafe immediately after brewing, as our experience has been that most machines keep that warming tray too hot, resulting in coffee with a nasty burnt taste and aroma after sitting there for even a short while. We went ahead and left a pot sitting on the element for 30 minutes after brewing without filling the kitchen with the stench of dying coffee, but we were starting to detect a “something’s not quite right” smell by the end of that half hour. The temperature of our brew did rise slightly over that time period, from the original 173 degrees up to 177 degrees by the end of that time, as measured by our not-necessarily-accurate kitchen thermometer. While the coffee certainly didn’t get any better for sitting on the warming element for that length of time, at least it didn’t go completely off the deep end. We would still recommend a storage method that didn’t apply additional heat after the coffee has been brewed.

While we liked the Capresso SG120 overall, there were a few areas that we thought might have been designed better. As with any cone-based coffee maker, it’s tricky to get the ground coffee into the basket or filter, and this machine was no exception. With coffee that’s already ground, there is no problem just loading the coffee into the filter as it sits in the machine. With freshly ground coffee from our Capresso burr grinder, however, there’s always a problem with the coffee particles carrying a charge of static electricity. That means that loading the coffee into the machine makes a bit of a mess, as the little bits of coffee fly around inside the coffee maker, attracted to the various surfaces. As we mentioned earlier, it’s a bit awkward to pour water into the machine as well. Because of the relatively small opening that you have to hit with the water, it’s a bit tricky to get it all into the machine and not all over the counter. In addition, because the way the carafe is designed, with a bit of a shoulder from a wider body to a narrower top, it’s quite difficult to get the last of the contents out of the carafe, whether it’s the water you’re pouring into the machine to make your coffee, or getting the last of your coffee out into your cup or vacuum bottle to hold for later use.

The Capresso SG120 12-Cup Stainless Steel Coffee Maker Model #494 could make a welcome addition to your coffee-making arsenal. It looks nice, is convenient to use, and makes a decent cup of coffee for those times when you don’t want to spend the time and effort to really get in there and muck about with a more labor-intensive method, or when you’d like that first cup of the morning to meet you when you stumble into the kitchen in the morning.

Coffee Equipment Rating:
4.5 out of 5 coffee pots

Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder Model #560
Suggested Price: $89.99

Available at Capresso.com, Bed Bath & Beyond, and other retailers

While there seems to be an almost limitless number of ways to brew coffee—percolator, drip, French press, vacuum, espresso maker, and more—there are basically only two ways of turning big coffee beans into smaller particles of ground coffee: a blade grinder, and a burr grinder. Or of course, there’s the third path of just opening a can of Folger’s, but then that’s not real coffee, eh?

With a blade grinder, you put coffee beans into a chamber and turn on the motor. A pair of blades spin around, like the chopping blade in your food processor, taking big beans and turning them into small pieces of beans. While this is the cheaper method—blade grinders generally run around $20—it also may give less-than-satisfactory results. If you pulse the cutting blades only a few times, you’ll get really large coffee particles to put into your coffee maker. With less surface area exposed, you’re less likely to extract all the coffee goodness your beans have to offer. Or alternatively, if you have a heavy hand on the blade grinder, you’ll end up with a very finely-grained powdered coffee, which while it may be suitable for your espresso maker, certainly isn’t going to make your French Press or Mr Coffee happy, since you will have tons of “mud” left in the bottom of your cup. If you want better control over how your coffee is ground, with an eye to uniformity of particle size, you need to invest in a burr grinder.

A burr grinder, rather than chopping beans as they fly around the grinding chamber, actually uses a pair of steel or ceramic grinding surfaces, or “burrs”, that attack your coffee beans more like the way that wheat is turned into flour. With one grinding surface remaining stationary, the other grinder rotates against it with an amount of space between the two blades that corresponds to the size of coffee particles you want to end up with. Because of the extra work required to machine these grinding surfaces to the correct tolerances, a burr grinder will always cost more than a blade grinder. On the other hand, since the grind depends on the precision and spacing of the grinder, rather than on how long the user pulses the motor, you will get a more uniform result, and this will lead to a better cup of coffee.

The folks at Capresso sent us a free sample of their Infinity Burr Grinder Model #560 so that we could put it through its paces. We tested it with various combinations of coffee beans for different brewing methods, and overall the results were pretty good.

To use the grinder, we plugged it into a regular kitchen outlet. It has a two-pronged plug, so will fit into any outlet. Removing the top of the bean container allowed us to load the hopper with coffee beans. If you generally make only one type of coffee, you can put a couple day’s worth of beans into the container; however, if you like to mix it up and use different coffees on different days, you may want to pre-measure your coffee beans and use only the amount you need for the current brewing session. Slap the lid back onto the hopper and you’re ready to go. To select the size of your grind, you rotate the bean container clockwise, until the black dot indicator lines up with your selection of grind. There are several settings in each of Coarse (for your French press), Medium (for your drip system), Fine (for espresso), and even Extra Fine (for Turkish coffee or other preparations that require a super fine grind).

Once you’ve loaded it up and selected the setting, it’s time to grind some coffee. The grinding itself is governed by a rotary timer that you twist and let go of. As the timer counts down, the grinder continues to crunch away, until the timer returns to Zero, and then the motor stops. The timer has settings from “0″ up to “10″. While the temptation to try to translate this into something like number of cups may be there, don’t be fooled. These numbers are only useful relative to one another in the sense that choosing “6″ will make the grinder run about twice as long as if you had chosen “3″ instead. Indeed, cranking the timer all the way around to “10″ translates into the motor running for about 65 seconds. If you pre-measure your beans, you can just grind ’til they’re all done; if you want to keep the bean hopper full, you will probably want to figure out how long you need to run the grinder—which number to select on the timer—to grind just what you need for this cup or pot of coffee. Remember that once you compromise the integrity of the roasted coffee bean, the flavor and aroma components will start to rapidly dissipate, so don’t grind a whole bunch at once if you’re not going to use it shortly thereafter.

For our first batch of beans, we chose a Colombia Supremo, a lighter roast with little oil evident on the exterior of the beans. We were grinding for our French press, so we chose a coarse setting. We typically use about half a cup (4 ounces by volume) of beans with 48 ounces of water to brew up a batch in our French press. We put the beans into the hopper, chose the coarseness setting, and cranked the timer dial all the way around to 10. The grinder took care of our coffee in about 28 seconds, with the timer rotating back from 10 to somewhere between the 5 and the 6 on the indicator. Pulling the ground coffee container out of the machine, we took a look at the ground coffee. The particles were relatively large and mostly uniform in size. There were a few larger pieces of the lighter chaff you can find on the outside of lighter roast beans that made it through the grinder. It carried a nice coffee aroma. Curious to see what the inside workings looked like after a grinding session, we disassembled the grinder to clean out the grinding chamber. The chamber was mostly empty, with only a few smaller particles remaining after the grinding session. It was easy to clean the machine out, since you can lift out the upper burr and then use a brush to get the little stick bits out of the machine. We prefer an acid brush for this task, since the stiff bristles and long handle let us get into all the little nooks and crannies to fully remove any of the oily bits that could give the next batch of coffee an off taste. Because of the uniform large size of the coffee particles, the plunger in our French press was east to depress, and there were none of the particles in the bottom of the cup that we might expect from a finer grind used in our press.

For our second batch, we chose a very dark and oily French Roast. Using the same 8 tablespoons as before, we ground this batch in about 30 seconds, just slightly longer than the Colombia Supremo. The particle size was again large and uniform, as we used the same settings as before. The plunger was once again easy to depress, because of the uniform larger size particles. Cleaning the grinder took a bit more time this round because of the oilier beans. Even at that, spending a few extra seconds with the cleaning brush removed all the significant residue from the grinding chamber.

To see how the grinder performed with a Medium grind, we grabbed our lighter roast coffee again and ground a batch of beans for our automatic drip coffee maker. Using the same proportions, we ground a half cup of beans at Medium, which took about 37 seconds in total. The longer grind was because of the smaller particles required, meaning that there was more grinding going on. We loaded the ground coffee in the drip machine, and brewed up a tasty pot of lighter-roast coffee. There were no visible particulates in the bottom of the cup, once again pointing to the coffee’s having been ground to the appropriate size for this brewing method selected. One thing that we did notice with Medium grind that was not evident in the Coarse grinds is that there was a fair amount of static electricity generated during the grinding process. When we retrieved the ground coffee container from the grinder, many little “bits” of coffee flew out of the top of the container. Presumably this is because there is more burr-on-bean movement to grind the coffee into smaller particles, and this gave more time for a static charge to build up on the surface of the beans. Bear in mind, this was not being attacked by a bunch of rabid coffee grounds, but it did require an extra wipe of the kitchen counter with a nearby bar rag. In addition, it did take a bit more of an effort to clean the grinding chamber out, presumably in part because of the same static build up, as well as the fact that the smaller particle size managed to fit into some of the smaller spaces between the various pieces of the grinder.

And finally, we wanted to check out the Fine setting, so we grabbed a couple tablespoons (7 grams) of our dark French Roast to put together a cup of espresso. As you might expect, it took almost no time at all to grind this small batch of coffee. Pulling the espresso ground coffee out of the machine didn’t result it the explosion of “bits” we saw earlier, possibly because of the stickier oily coffee granules, it was a bit of a pain here again cleaning the ground coffee leftovers out of the grinding chamber. The smaller, oilier coffee seemed to find its way into all the little out-of-the-way spaces in the grinder. The cup of espresso that we made with our home espresso machine turned out just fine. It was rich and full-bodied, meaning that the finely ground beans released much of the oily goodness inherent in a good French Roast.

Overall, the Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder could be a great addition to your coffee-making arsenal. The fit and finish is very good, and with its substantial steel burrs, it looks like it will last a long time. With its wide open grinding chamber, it’s easy to clean, unlike other burr grinders we have used in the past. It does a fine job of grinding uniformly-sized coffee particles, important for quality and consistency in your coffee from batch to batch. The only real drawback we found was the static-related problem of smaller particles of lighter roasts flying around the room when we tried to retrieve our coffee from the machine and clean the grinding chamber. At a list price of $89.99 from Capresso.com and all the other usual places, it’s an affordable way to add a burr grinder to your coffee kit.