Customer Reviews

Cuisinart DGB-600BCW Grind-and-Brew Thermal 10-Cup Automatic Coffeemaker, White and Brushed Stainless

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I've had this coffee maker since last Christmas, and it is such a pain, it is not worth having the grinding unit in the coffee maker. As another writer had stated, the grinder fills with steam and becomes a sludgie mess. Coffee dust finds its way into other nooks & crevices of the maker so the filter door sticks shut, the coffee chamber doesn't hold enough beans for 12 cups of coffee, the grinder grinds too fine so that it doesn't work with the enclosed gold filter and you get coffee sludge in the pot of coffee....I could go on.

I got better results with rinsing the grinder immediately after brewing, and with switching to paper filters, but ultimately I bought a separate coffee grinder and much less expensive Mr. Coffee and got better results, less maintenance & less headache.

If you're like me, you may want to buy this dreaming of amazing freshly ground and brewed coffee waiting for you in the morning. I'm warning you of the nightmare on the other end. Please, avoid this product.

This is a nice product. It does a great job automatically grinding and brewing coffee. Cuisinart quality is evident throughout. The only problem? The grinding chamber gets moist from steam during the brewing process, and must be cleaned out and dried thoroughly after every use.

When I ground my own beans, I used a small electric Braun grinder. It was great... I just threw the beans in, ground them up, and dumped them in the basket. No need to fuss and clean the grinder daily, or even weekly. With this product, the grinder needs to be cleaned after each use, so that adds one more item to the daily chore of keeping the coffeemaker clean and operating in top condition.

Failure to clean and dry the grinder leads quickly to grinding failures (due to stickiness of the ground coffee not dropping into the brew chamber) or mold growth (hot steamy chamber is perfect for mold!).

If you don't mind this bit of added work, you can automatically have your beans ground for you and your coffee made each morning using the built in Program timer mode.

All around, a good product.

So many bad things to say, and so little time. First off, the coffee reservoir is woefuly inadequate, unless you drink coffee so weak expressly to avoid it having any flavor. It randomly decides to spray coffee all over the counter with no warning, the grinder is louder than can be possibly justified, so forget early morning auto brew unless you have a a soundproof kitchen, and the most disturbing thing, the steam from the brewing chamber travels up the grinder chute, dampens the coffee, leeching it of flavor and turning it into sludge. If the best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup, this may be the machine for you, however if you actually like your coffee to have any flavor, don't even CONTEMPLATE buying this machine.

I've used this machine for 2 years and have LOVED every (ok, sans the cleanup) minute of it. For people complaining of it overflowing out the top, the only way that could possibly happen is if you forget to put the lid on the caraffe while you're brewing a pot. The machine has a nice "stop dripping" feature if you take the caraffe off the base while its still brewing. The removable top of the caraffe must be on the caraffe in order to allow the coffee to drip from the filter to the caraffe. But if you don't have the top piece of the caraffe on while brewing, then yes, the coffee cannot drip down into the caraffe itself and the coffee has nowhere to go except overflow in the filter reservoir.

This is not a flaw of the machine, but ignorance of the user. You MUST make sure all the pieces are in place while brewing a cup (duh!). I have NEVER had a pot overflow unless I accidentally forgot to put the top of the caraffe back in place after rinsing it out.

Second, the complaints that steam causes a "coffee sludge" in the grinding bay.....yeah, so what? by the time that happens your ground coffee is already settled in the filter making a great pot of coffee!? You have to clean out the grinding bay after each pot anyway, so what is the big deal?

The only reason I gave it 4 instead of 5 stars is due to a few minor annoyances. First, cleanup is a bit of a pain, but to me its the price you pay for having an outstanding cup of joe. It takes me about 2-3 minutes to rinse out the grinding bay, filter reservoir, rinse out the caraffe, and wipe down the parts. Easy enough though; run them under some warm/hot water in the sink and scrub out with a scrub brush, and its done. And if you really want to save time, you can leave the parts lay out to dry overnight, and you won't have to dry anything.

My second gripe (and I'm really reaching here) is that the coffee pours out the top of the caraffe at a steep angle, so when I get to the bottom of the pot, I have to take the caraffe lid off and literally almost turn the caraffe upside down to get all the coffee out. Not a huge deal, and I'm sure that this design helps to keep the coffee hot longer, but it is a bit of an annoyance.

Lastly, I just wish it held more beans. I can only make 6 cups with whole beans. And that tiny little plastic measuring spoon that comes with the unit, throw that thing away unless you want super weak folger's style coffee. I found that to get that nice bold starbucks flavor, you need to mix one 1/8 cup of whole beans to every 5 ounces of water(FYI--5 ounces is one "coffee" cup, not the traditional 8 oz). Follow these guidelines with your favorite beans for an incredible cup of coffee.

People complaining about residue: I never have any noticeable residue (try using a french press and you'll know what residue really is). And if it bothers you that bad, you can use a paper filter! In the manual Cuisinart even says that by using the gold mesh filter by itself, it may produce a more robust, flavorful brew, although the wire mesh may allow very very slight residue through the mesh (it is a wire mesh after all)at the bottom of the caraffe, but I've never noticed it at all.

Lastly, whomever complained that the coffee doesn't stay hot for X number of hours after making a pot...well, what do you expect? its a thermal caraffe, it doesn't have a heating pad underneath (that burns the coffee after 20 or so minutes). I usually pour my coffee into a mug and drink it right away anyway. And it DOES stay hot for at least an hour or two. If you need your coffee blazing hot all day, then no, this probably isn't the coffee maker for you. But good luck finding any machine that will do that.

This system is really great, if you have time for the cleaning process. It takes a fair amount of time to disaasemble the grinder, (2 parts) the basket (3 parts if not using paper filters, 2 if you do) and the carafe (2 parts) for cleaning.
We fill the machine and program for AM start, have our AM coffee, hit the door for work and then clean it in the PM when doing dinner dishes. (Then fill it for the next AM coffee)
The carafe keeps the coffee really hot if rinsed with hot water in the AM. It's a very nice product!

This coffee pot works exactly as billed. It is wonderful, though jarring, to wake up to the sound of the grinder grinding the beans and then the machine brewing fresh coffee. I have two complaints: first, the grinder is factory set for medium grind, which means you don't get a very intense, fresh-ground coffee flavor so I end up using more beans than necessary to try to intensify the taste; second, the grinder base and lid must be cleaned immediately after every use, so overall it's much more labor intensive than a normal coffee maker. But the convenience of it grinding the beans and depositing them in the filter for you and then brewing, all at your chosen programmed time is a super idea. The Amazon price was $50 less than anywhere else, which is an added bonus.

I looked for a coffee maker that included a grinder for quite a while and was excited to see that Cuisinart had that combination. Unfortunately, I'm very disappointed in the product. It is very difficult to see down into the well how much water you've added when making 1-4 cups of coffee - there is no external water line. You cannot select the grind of coffee - it's all one grind. That would normally be ok since you usually use that grind for an automatic coffeemaker. However, there are times when I have a bold bean that I'd like to grind the coffee a little more coarsely. It can sometimes be challenging getting the accessories to sit just right in their respective locations, at least on my pot. This is especially true for the basket. I frequently find a few coffee grinds in my cup. I am particularly disappointed in how long the coffee stays hot - or I should say how long it doesn't stay hot. It's better when you make coffee on demand and warm up the pot with hot water before making the coffee, but it still doesn't keep it warm for hours. It isn't possible to warm the pot before making coffee if you're using the timer. To top everything off, they didn't even include a filter with the new pot. If I knew then what I know now, I would not selected this coffeemaker. I would not recommend this product to anyone and I'd take back my Krups anytime.

...miserable excuse for a coffeemaker.

The reality might not be so awful if the promise wasn't so compelling.

This product dangles the vision of cheerfully and simply prepping your machine and awakening to the heavenly aroma of piping hot coffee brewed from your freshly ground beans. Stroll into the kitchen & bring the carafe into your office or den to leisurely and luxuriously sip away your day in blissed out yummy java-land.

Dude. This is a fussy little machine. It takes more stroking and prepping and tweaking and messing to get anything accomplished than a trophy wife. If you are seriously OCD or have a perverse sense of satisfaction in being a 'slave to the grind', then this may be a dream come true. If you don't fit the lid of the carafe in *just so* it isn't really sealed (and the top will pop eventually pop off of the widget/gasket sealy thing). If you don't meticulously rinse and brush and dry each piece before each pot, you'll end up with a sludgy, backedup brackish mess. If you overfill with beans or underfill with beans or fit the filter in wrong or the H2O in wrong you'll have icky coffee and even *more* cleaning and fussing to do.
Even when you perform each step with the fanatical precision of a Geisha Tea Ceremony, the basic design of this coffeemaker guarantees disappointment. Hellllloooow?? Steam from hot water + fine grounds from coffee beans = goopy mess, wasted beans & inconsistent coffee quality. Good luck getting your full 10 cups out of this carafe. Good luck determining how much coffee is left in the carafe at any given point. And who in R&D thought that the equivalent decibles of a DC10 takeoff set a standard for a small appliance?

Bottom line is that I purchased this device with the anticipation of a convenient, quality, copious coffee experience...After 4 months of putting up with extra time noise and hassle to make coffee, the damnable thing finally committed turbojet suicide last night...apparently, the stupid 'clicky shut' filter door unclickied during the commencement of the grind phase...the resulting diaspora of grinds and hot water across the kitchen and shoved back up and through the machine itself must have finally proven too much for its delicate constitution. Even after a full ritual of cleaning, brushing with the fussy brush, etc. it does nothing but pathetically blink its digital display.

Good riddance say I. It will be a long time before I grumble about grinding beans and pouring them into the filter of a large capacity, reliable coffeemaker with my own two hands. And perhaps the overnight exposure of the grounds when I preset for morning coffee isn't as much of an issue as I'd made it out to be. There are worse things after all...things like this POS coffeemaker.

Great grind and brew EXCEPT that the basket component pops open while brewing and the coffee leaks all over the counter. I have contacted Cuisinart and have told them about this problem. They suggested that I should wash it better. I wash it after each use. The locking mechanism for the basket is very very difficult to reach and thus very hard to clean. I guess I am not cleaning it well enough, although i don't see how i can clean it any better. I don't recommend this coffee maker.

Yes the thermal carafe is wonderful and keeps the coffee hot and fresh tasting. Yes the grinder is very loud but who really cares. Yes it makes a delicious cup of coffee. And YES it periodically without warning clogs up in the middle of brewing and you wind up with coffee all over the counter. We don't even use the grinder anymore, thinking that might be the problem but it still clogs. We thoroughly wash every component before every pot of coffee that we make and that doesn't keep it from clogging. We have the coffee ground in a medium grind just in case it was too fine and that might be the problem....to no avail...it STILL about 1 in every 10-12 pots makes a gigantic mess. I cannot recommend this machine.