coffee maker angst

I may have blogged about this before, but I've been in a continuous coffee maker saga for the past year or so (mostly of my own doing). Over several years I've bit on two "free" coffee maker offers from Gevalia - strictly speaking you don't have to buy anything beyond the initial coffee purchase, but it was so hard to cancel I let it go for quite awhile, so I've probably paid back "free" in triplicate. But in all fairness, both coffee makers were actually pretty good for "free" (one was the full pot maker, one was a dual-single cup maker). However, anything "free" wears out eventually, and the pot one started dying sometime in January.

So I decided this time around that I wanted a really good coffee maker, that did everything automatically (grinding, etc.) so I'd use it more. Well it turns out to get a quality one that really does that, you have to spend like $400+ (every review of the "grind-and-brew" ones that are in the $50-150 range were bad on the grinder and cleaning). So I dialed that down and decided I could continue grinding beans myself, and read reviews and bought what I thought was the best brewing machine - a Cuisinart model, in June. Since then, I have tried every combination of things I can think of to get the coffee to come out not so "watery" - using the permanent gold filter, white filters, brown filters, double filters, gold + paper filter, filtered water, unfiltered water, built-in water filter, not built-in water filter, different coffee, etc. etc. and it all still just tastes a bit watery. I should have returned it immediately, and now it's probably too late.

Meanwhile most people tell me that the cheap Mr. Coffee or brands like that from Target are just as good, and that really it's just the coffee you use. So my friend Ryan brought in an old 4-cup maker he had used before he moved out of an office and into a cube, and let me take it home and try it. Well, the coffee tastes pretty good - I didn't do anything special (it uses just plain standard filters), and even buying a new one just like this is probably $20 or less.

So now I have to decide what to do with the $80 Cuisinart that I'll probably never use again, and whether I should make my own coffee every day or just go to Caribou like I have been and pay the $2 for a cup in the morning (which I have to admit is kind of a "fun" part of the morning - those Caribou marketing people really know how to make the atmosphere in there nice).

Do I spend too much time thinking about this? Probably...