Coffee! Coffee! Coffee!

The majority of people are familiar with the daily routine of waking up, getting ready, and brewing a pot of coffee. What you might not think of though, is how accessible your coffee maker actually is. Is there tons of multi function buttons that require you to see what is on the screen to tell what is going on? Does setting even the most basic functionality require you to see the screen and confirm certain settings are correct? When you can’t see, finding a brew station that is simple yet sophisticated enough to be useful can be quite the challenge.

Ever since I started drinking coffee, I despised pouring from carafes. Some were alright but most were difficult to position over my cup, were hard to handle with one hand and feel my cup with the other, and quite often ended up with me pouring over my liquid level indicator (which caused it to beep and malfunction sometimes) or pour right over the edge of my cup. Not fun!

Several years back, a friend actually introduced me to a brew station with a press and pour functionality. I could press my cup against the button, coffee would pour in a nice little stream into my cup, and my liquid level indicator would beep when coffee was near the top. It was great! It also featured only six buttons, two of which were for setting time, the other four were for turning the machine on, turning the brew at later set time function on, toggling through the three brewing options, and toggling through the five keep warm settings. For a blind person, this was refreshingly simple and did everything I needed it to!

A couple of weeks ago, however, the little push button internal mechanism broke. I hadn’t seen any other coffee machines with the same simplicity and functionality so I went looking for the identical replacement. When it arrived, I was surprised to see that my new coffee maker was new and improved! Probably the most useful upgrade, I no longer had to pour water into the bottom reservoir, there was a new removable side reservoir that you filled up and simply placed back on the side of the machine; the flawed drip tray that used to allow for drips to leak down onto the counter was now fixed so all drips stay in the drip tray; the keep warm function could now be turned back on after it turned off by holding the on button for three seconds; and most exciting upgrade, there was...wait for it...an ice coffee button!

A small complaint about the ice coffee button, while pressing it reverts the keep warm time to 0 (very useful for figuring out what the status of that setting is without being able to see the screen), but it for some strange reason, does one heating cycle after the pot is done brewing if you don't turn it off. A very surprising thing when you think your coffee is done and sitting nicely on the counter and all of a sudden you hear gurgling coming from the machine and find out it has heated your entire pot of ice coffee...quite disappointing.

This weird glitch does have a simple fix, turn pot off after brewing, and ice coffee is perfect. Another small difference, the brew station no longer beeps when the brew cycle is complete...kind of weird but it gurgles enough while brewing that you can tell when it is done, so a fairly small complaint. So with my new and improved brew station and my handy ice trays, Seevey says...five coffee beans!

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