Café - Grind & Brew Smart Coffee Maker with Gold Cup Standard - Stainless Steel

Café - Grind & Brew Smart Coffee Maker with Gold Cup Standard Café’s approach to this complete coffee experience starts with eye-catching style, continues with tech that adds convenience to the tedious, and finishes up with perfectly brewed coffee. My wife has experimented with the more elaborate coffee systems and has no problem firing up the simplest office machine. Her conclusion regarding Café’s exciting looking coffee maker is that it’s possible to impress the most meticulous coffee snob (her included) while keeping the effort surprisingly simple. It’s now her choice to keep the process “office machine“ simple or spend a few minutes more to tailor the coffee preparation to achieve her ideal cup or carafe. The Café is very pretty, in a modernist way. And, yet it does not sacrifice simplicity and function to convince you of how special it is. It makes great coffee. SETUP: Kudos for Café for their very useful, complete, easy-to-read, and accessible instruction booklet. The machine is very intuitive so that helps. There is even a cheat sheet which we’re going to laminate. (Psst, GE, you could do that, too.) Every step can be modified from the control panel, but the Café starts you off with setting that get you close.You will need to set the clock, and if set up Wi-Fi the time will stay accurate and you can save your preferred settings. (Hold HOUR + MINUTE to initiate WiFi setup.) The Default setting are a the starting point,, but from there you find the button on the CONTROL PANEL to pick your TEMPERATURE, pick your brew size (volume), pick your STRENGTH, start BREW, or the next button over DELAYS the start, and start GRINDER action or CLEANING with the final button. The instruction booklet contributes immensely to your understanding of the machine, the adjustments that will improve your coffee to your taste and some art and science behind the brewing process.. SUMMARY: After you get past the distinctive design, the imposing size, and the very complete-while-staying-simple coffee making process you have to marvel at the thoughtful engineering. Café has managed to create a coffee machine that manages to compete with more complex and fussy machines and pleasantly satisfy serious coffee lovers.

I was looking for a coffee maker that had a removable water tank for easy filling, a thermal carafe to keep the pot warm in case I slept in or for my work from home, all morning coffee drinking days, and had a built in grinder. The Cafe Grind & Brew seemed to check all those boxes. This machine makes a good pot of coffee. It’s relatively quiet during operation. I have a few notes. The construction is a bit cheap for the price point. The parts don’t snap together firmly and the pause and serve feature can easily go astray and spill because of a loose connection. The machine uses way too many grounds. It’s not a matter of strength of coffee, it over fills the filter basket and makes a mess (for paper and copper filters alike). The bean hopper is way too small for the amount of beans the machine automatically selects to grind.

Ok well this is one stylish coffee maker. It’s absolutely stunning and it matches our GE Café air fryer to a T. We thought we were getting black but it arrived in silver which was actually perfect, since our fryer was the same color. I was so impressed to see how simplistic it is but how advanced it is also. I was immediately excited to remove our giant land mass of an espresso machine to replace it with this. The simplest reason that we love the GE café coffee machine….The espresso machine had become such a cumbersome over complicated machine that it had become a place holder on our countertop. The excitement had definitely wore off bc when you are a family that’s always on the go, you quickly realize that you don’t have all the extra time to fine tune, dial in and train like the Olympics to be a perfect barista every day. The GE café coffee maker was made to make life simple again but in a beautiful, more compact and smart way. It was so easy to set up, and the most difficult part was just figuring out how much ground coffee to place into the basket, haha. It’s easy to set it and forget it, with the app where you can set it to make your coffee any way you like it at any time of the day and all week long if you prefer. There are a few extra settings that can be done through the app as well, like “extra bold”. You can also set up to 3 favorites to cycle through so that’s perfect if you have multiple people who like to enjoy their coffees differently. There’s one issue that I found, and I hope it’s fixed quickly with an update. When trying to save a “favorite” that has the “extra bold” brew with the temp of 185*, specifically for iced coffee, it fails to save those settings. We will go check to see if it’s saved, and it resets back to factory “Gold” settings, so on and so forth. It only refuses to save the settings when we switch it to “extra bold”. It has gotten stuck “loading” to which we would have to restart the app when trying to save that specific setting as well. But we have saved other favorites under other brew strengths and those saved just fine. You absolutely dont need the app if you aren’t concerned with setting up schedules, having favorites, making small customizations, knowing about your filter, descaling times, notifications displayed on your phone, etc. You can set the coffee machine directly and it will remember your last settings until you change them manually. It makes a whole huge carafe of coffee with multiple cup size options that stays warm for hours, or you can make a personal size cup with multiple oz. options. It handles ground and whole coffee beans. To me it’s quiet ?? which compared to the espresso machine is a dream. It also counts down the brew time so you know when your brew will be ready and it will also let you know how long the coffee has been sitting. The parts are easy to clean, but it has to be done by hand. I don’t think any of the parts are dishwasher safe. Well here’s the most important part…The coffee tastes absolutely delicious. I’m the member who isn’t a huge coffee fan. I don’t need it or drink it daily but wow it made such a delicious tasting cup, even I was excited to wake up to a few cups in the past two weeks. My husband has had his daily and it’s been a joy to try all the different settings to see what’s our perfect cup. And my mom who is at our house all of the time, and drinks coffee morning and night, has enjoyed every cup. She can get quite frustrated with new tech, all the fancy buttons, dials, gadgets, etc. but It’s easy enough for her to understand and make it herself and she has loved it too. I highly recommend this coffee machine to everyone. And if you have a couple GE café appliances this will definitely hit the mark in your kitchen. I would’ve given 4 stars because of the one issue currently with the app, but it hasn’t affected us enough to remove the star if it’s based solely on the machines performance. It makes great coffee and it’s easy to use. So it gets a full 5 stars from us.

I’ll start by (shamefully) admitting it, I’ve been using a Keurig for the past several years. When I feel fancy, I grab my French press, my AeroPress, or make cold brew overnight. But day to day, it’s going to be the Keurig because that’s the path of least resistance. That ended last week. Well, the Keurig part did; I’m keeping the fancy makers still. This coffee maker makes some of the best coffee of all my sets with the absolute least amount of hassle. Using it is trivially easy – pour fresh beans in the top (or ground directly in the drip basket if you desire), fill the fancy decanter with water, hit brew. Come back in around eight minutes, conveniently shown on the screen for the impatient. The result is what GE calls the “Gold Cup Standard,” around 200° F and with enough strength that I was wired all day. Or come back in a bit! The carafe is great at holding temperature. After an hour and it was still just like it had been fresh brewed. I like that this came with extra seals and a special brew basket for individual sized brews. Speaking of which, you can totally use this like a Keurig (ignoring the plastic waste). All you do is switch basket filters, flip a switch on the bottom of the drip basket and place a cup under it. Press the “cup” button on the panel and pick your size. Admittedly it does splatter a bit on the maker itself, but cleanup is quick. Splatter shouldn’t be a problem if you were to use a thermos instead (a 20oz Yeti fits nicely under the basket). A few things I don’t like though… First off, the cup measurement for carafe brewing seems to be off for what a normal mug would consist of. For four “cups” of coffee brewed, I can only enjoy two cups from a standard size mug. Changing the temperature is a practice of patience as you must tap the touch sensitive button for every degree from 185 to 205 and if you hold it, it will only switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit. When you switch to “gold” brewing mode, it automatically goes to ~200° F. Finally, the bottom of the water fill is to contain a filter. When I got ours, I found the screw on holder impossible to get off due to how small of a space you need to place your hand in and how tight it was placed on at the factory. To the extent that one of the tiny fins broke off in my struggle. As a result, I’ve been using filtered water from our fridge. It’s nice, but I’d rather be able to just add water directly from the tap. One note to buyers that had no impact on this review, this thing is big. Make sure you take a look at the sizes before you click order, it makes our newer kitchen countertop space look tiny.

This is the best coffee maker ... So easy to use and so cute

So excited at the prospects of replacing wasteful single serve pod machine with a fresh ground and brewed coffee machine. My biggest gripe (especially with the white) is not having an elevated tray for your mug. It’s a good 6 or 7” drop meaning significant amounts of splatter. Secondly, the grounds DO get everywhere. And if you’ve adjusted to single serve units, having to rinse the basket and basket holder out every time is annoying. Which is why I’ll probably get the more fully auto true brew machine and return this one. Also, the carafe is only insulated, not heated. This does brew to a 205° temp which is awesome for the lighter roast coffees. And I will say the gold cup brew makes an excellent cup. Almost the perfect machine here but honestly it doesn’t do anything buying a $40 grinder wouldn’t accomplish. No espresso mode no iced coffee mode, etc.

Great cup of coffee. The water container if not put on accurately will leak completely. For such a cool design I feel it should have some sort of latch or maybe indicator letting you know its on properly. While that can be debated the real problem I experienced with this machine was the mess it left every time after brewing a carafe. No matter if I cleaned right after I brewed the coffee it would leak continuously. I literally had to clean the grounds out before removing the carafe or I would have coffee splats all over the machine and even then it was getting all over the place. Do not know if I had a defect but it was brand spanking new and it took about a week to deliver because none were in storage so decided to return and bought a Delonghi instead which I will review shortly. Like I said great coffee and kept it hot with a pretty cool design but man what a hot mess.

This is a great option if you're relatively tech-savvy and want the convenience of a grind/brew machine. I find it really easy to control with the app and set up a daily schedule to have my coffee auto-brew in the morning. I use the Gold setting and it makes a really good cup of coffee. The only minor cons I've found so far are the bean usage and cleaning. It seems to use a LOT of beans on the Gold setting so I may need to experiment a little with manual settings. It's also a little bit of a pain to clean each day. I've found that the brew basket and shower head need to be removed and cleaned after every cycle since the grounds stick to any surface that sees moisture. Overall, these are minor gripes and I'm really happy with the machine. It's also quite tall so measure underneath your upper cabinets to make sure it fits!

This is the best coffee machine hands down, I read the reviews about how it leaks so much. I haven’t had that problem yet. But other than that coffee at home is great