Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Grind & Brew, Although It Is a Bit Loud, October 10, 2009
I'm a Top 1000 Reviewer here at Amazon, but haven't reviewed anything in years -- until now. The Capresso 464 compelled me.
First things first. This is not my first grind and brew. My old Melitta Mill & Brew, with its faulty plastic latch long since broken had become a drag. For years I had to put a box of chicken stock on top of the grind chamber to keep it shut so it would work! And while it made pretty good coffee, it seemed to waste grounds by spraying them inside the grinder basket. And the daily cleanup ritual had started to make the whole idea of grinding and brewing in one device seem only of marginal value. And yet, the alternatives, including a best-selling Cuisinart model, have notorious bad reviews here at Amazon for being a total chore to clean.
Enter the Capresso CoffeeTeam GS, which solves all of my problems with its ingenious design. No longer do you have to measure the coffee. The CoffeeTeam GS will brew from 2 to 10 cups automatically, grinding just the right amount of beans with no guesswork. Cleanup is a breeze. The filter basket swings out and is easily washed. And because the grinding occurs in a separate chamber from the filter basket, there is no wasted coffee.
The quality of the coffee is also exactly what I want -- hot, and with the full flavor of the bean preserved by the conical burr grinders. If you want stronger or weaker coffee, it's very easy to do. You can also choose finer or coarser grinds depending on the type of coffee you are using (oily coffee should be coarser, light coffee finer).
There are two items that are drawbacks, but I don't mind them so am still giving this five stars. First, the grinder is wake-up-your-wife loud. And it can go for 40 seconds if you are making a full pot. It's not so loud that it hurts your ears, but it is not pleasant, and Capresso would have done well to add some amount of noise insulation. Second, because of the design, a small amount of ground coffee is left in the machine every time. This is an issue in two respects. First, switching from one type of coffee to another is not instantaneous, because invariably there is this overlap. Second, if you leave the machine unused for more than about a week, Capresso recommends cleaning out the coffee chamber and using new coffee. That's because the coffee will get a little more stale with each passing day. But like I said, in my mind these are very minor complaints to a really great product!
|
|
|
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
GREAT COFFEE WITH A FEW ISSUES, September 16, 2009
Overall the Coffee Team GS is great.
However, I have owned two CoffeeTeams with the "swing filter" design. I loved those machines but got tired of wiping up the coffee powder that it would drop on my countertop when the filter would accept the freshly ground coffee and then FLIP back into the brewing position. I cleaned the coffee shoot often but if you use the finer-grind setting, it seemed to always have that issue. The other was that it never made the coffee hot enough. The new CoffeeTeam GS brews VERY HOT coffee. I tested it at 192 degrees when first brewed.
For the newly designed CoffeeTeam GS, it has a nicely styled look with great quality construction as Capresso is known for (I have also owned a Capresso "Ultima" machine and the older swiss "Lantern" style machine that was later discontinued.
I don't hate it enought to return for a refund, but there are 5 main things that annoy me about this new design:
1) Coffee Grinder is LOUDER than the swing-type machine.
2) Because it is designed to grind at a slower speed (to prevent the beans from getting hot), it ends up grinding for 45 seconds straight for a six cup setting. This doesn't seem long in theory, but watch your second hand for 45 seconds and it will seem FOREVER, especially if you are sleeping and you have it set to brew before you get out of bed.
3)The water pump seems to GRUNT alot during the brewing process and then make that GURGLING sound when it is pushing the final drops of water out. Try making coffee when you have dinner guests over and you will see how loud it can be. As a comparison, I actually went and bought the Cuinart Grind-n-Brew (burr version) to compare side-to-side and have to say it was very quiet during the brewing process, but the grinder action was equivalent to the CoffeeTeam GS in grinding slowly (except the grinder had an annoying high-pitch sound to it). I opted to stick to the louder, "low-tone" that the CoffeeTeam GS provides.
4) The Carafe seems to make this odd popping/cracking sound as it sits on the warming plate (and I am not talking about the sound it might make if there is water drops under it).
5) The front panel has a LED-lit panel which is extra bright white. It needs to offer a dimming feature. Also, the function light that are RED and GREEN are very piercingly bright as well, and could be less obvious. To compare, the Cuisinart machine I tried, had a lousy front panel that was completely un-lit and you can't even see the time of day on it or make your setting changes without a flashlight.
If you can get past any or all of these 4 points, you will very much enjoy this machine. Also, Capresso is very customer-focused. Anytime I have had any issues with their machines, they respond very fast and in some cases (like for missing rubber gaskets or filter parts) they have actually shipped them to me at no charge - even though my machine was 4 years old. You need to make sure you register your product with them upfront.
|
|
|
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As good as it gets (in grind&brew), November 6, 2009
I'm writing from the perspective of someone who has owned more grind&brew coffeemakers than the typical coffee addict. This one is as good a grind&brew machine as anyone makes.
First, the negatives:
- It is definitely loud and long in grinding, as other owners mention. The burr grinding process is wonderfully consistent compared to blade grinding, but it seems to take forever and the noise is enough to wake up the ... sleeping.
- It doesn't have a way to dump out the coffee beans if you want to change blends to another bean (though you can still put pre-ground coffee in the basket while there are beans waiting to be ground.)
- The carafe does tend to make a sort of "cracking" sound when it sits on the hotplate sometimes.
I have owned some of the most popular, and some unusual, grind & brew machines in the past 30+ years, including a very different Capresso long, long ago. There are some models/brands that only have a single grind possibility (no settings), some that require constant cleaning of parts, some that fall apart within the year and don't have even that much warranty, and one that was going to cost an extra $65 to replace the faulty super-recessed lid switch, which died after 4 months, without which it was totally unusable. There's only one of those previous coffeemakers that I'd buy again by choice, and they stopped making it over 20 years ago.
This Capresso is well made, nicely packaged, and has all the features I want:
- Fineness of grind is controlled with 5 possible settings
- Amount of beans ground (from the hopper that holds approx. 2-3 pots of beans) is settable in 2-cup increments from 2 to 10 cups.
- "Aroma" (i.e. darkness & flavor) is controlled with 3 settings, which in combination with other controls seems designed to yield every possible preference for "perfect" coffee.
- It has automatic shut-off. (One of the much-lower-priced grind&brew machines doesn't have this feature, which I think should be mandatory on coffeemakers considering how many fires are started by overheating appliances.)
- It has drip-trip, which is critical as I often don't want to wait for the full pot to brew before I take a cup in the morning.
- It's completely programmable. Not only can you set a start time, but you can associate specific settings with the programmed time that are not the same as the current settings.
Other pluses that are less quantifiable:
- It doesn't seem to cause me to spill water all over the counter in filling it, like the last one I had. I have no idea what design elements affect this, I just know that it happens with some coffeemakers & not others.
- It takes some parts in common with the other-brand grind&brew that I last had, which started leaking when brewing. The charcoal filters and basket, at the least, seem in common with many other brands.
It cost quite a bit compared to some of the more popular models but, frankly, I'm convinced it's worth the extra investment.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
