After getting completely fed up with Black & Decker’s piece of useless junk, the Cafe Noir, I decided to go ahead and spring for the Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Brew Station based on the marvelous reviews I had read at good ol’ Epinions. For the most part, I was happy with that decision.
The Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Brew Station is a very nice art-deco looking machine in sleek black. It sits higher than most coffee makers, which may be a problem for some kitchens. Ours has very high cabinets so this model fit just fine, we did have to pull it out from the wall to fill the reservoir with water though. That’s pretty much the norm with most machines though so no harm, no foul on that front.
The main plus to the Brew Station is that there is no annoying carafe to deal with. I’m a major clutz and cannot count the number of glass carafes that I’ve busted by accidently banging them up against something or other. With the Brew Station, the thingy that holds the actual brewed coffee is contained within the unit itself. There is a little dealy (ya like all my techno-jargon?) on the front much like a soda fountain. You push your cup against the dealy and coffee dispenses into your cup. Sweeeeeeet. It will dispense even while the coffee is still brewing. That’s another plus of the highest degree in this household as we’re not real patient in the morning. heh.
This dispensing part is, while being the best part, also the main drawback. I know others have not had this problem, so perhaps we just got a faulty model. It happens. But the thing is that it drips sometimes. I mean fairly badly at times. The majority of the time it behaves itself quite nicely. Just once in awhile the pushing-dealy gets slightly stuck and you have to depress it with your cup again to un-stick it so it’ll stop dripping. All things considered though, I can live with this inconvenience, but that’s why I’ll be going with 4 stars rather than 5.
Another plus is that this model has the water filter. Our tap water in DC was not filtered, so to me this was a fantastic feature. It’s a bit of an ordeal to put the filter in initially… but not so hard as to make you just skip the thing. Call it a minor inconvenience well worth the small bother. You have to soak the filter in cold water for 15 minutes before putting it in its little holder and then into the machine itself. This filter is reputed to last through 60 brew cycles, and you can set the little dial to show when you expect to have to change it. I’m just not that organized so I suspect it would get changed sometime in the next year or three… heh. I’m thinkin I should really just buy one of their permanent filters next time I do buy this machine…
The basket sits on top of the coffee reservoir (which is also what you use to fill the thing with water… a note here: don’t fill it to the top! DO pay attention to that line inside it or you’ll have water everywhere… trust me on this). This uses standard filters that you can find everywhere for around a buck a package. You can get the life-time filter via the little card that comes with the machine for I think it was 10 bucks or so.
Yet another plus is that the front is see-through plastic and marked by cup so you can tell exactly how much coffee is left in the thing. No surprises there.
This model also has the easy-to-set clock and advanced brewing timer so you can set it to be ready when you wake up, something I constantly forget to do. It does work well when you remember to set it up though. This also means that you don’t need to worry whether you’ve left the thing on or not since it does turn itself off after 2 hours. That is a must-have deal-breaker feature for forgetful folks like me.
All in all I’m settling on 4 stars, like I said. The coffee comes out with a nice flavor (unless Lars makes it, in which case you can stand a spoon up in it. urgh.) It has all the features I like and looks right purdy on the counter. I only wish it came in different colors and didn’t tend to drip once in a awhile. Still, at $49.99, I do recommend the Brew Station rather highly, and am in search of this very model once again now that we live in Sweden.
