Cuisinart 12 Cup Programmable Stainless Steel Thermal Coffee Maker with Thermal Carafe (DCC-1850 /DCC-3400) Bundle Including Permanent Filter and 1 YR CPS Enhanced Protection Pack

Overall good product
It’s simple to use, and makes great coffee. We love the mesh metal filter that comes with it. It’s so much better than the only available one for the 8 cup Oxo coffee maker, which you shave to buy separately a very high cost. The mesh filter with the Cuisinart has a handle which makes it easy to remove and replace. The thermal carafe with the Cuisinart is remarkable, keeping coffee hot (with very little worsening of taste) all day long. The Oxo thermal carafe, by comparison keeps coffee hot t for at most 2-3 hours.

Good, but not perfect
We bought this Cuisinart coffee pot because our when our other one broke, we bought a cheaper model—which turned out to have been poorly engineered. So…we bought this more expensive model and have mostly liked it. Two major drawbacks for us: The lid on the pot is difficult to unscrew. Not good for an older person. And you have to use a pitcher or other pourable container to fill the water chamber. The pot itself is not good for that purpose. This model makes good coffee and it stays hot a long time. We like it.

REALLY unhappy with this product
We had a Cuisinart 10-cup coffee maker for years, and it served us very well. Made good coffee. No mechanical problems. A little bit of a bother to pour the water into the machine but tolerable. It broke….RIP. So I reviewed a number of potential replacements and ultimately settled on the Cuisinart 12-cup. Reviews said it was a pain to pour water from the pot into the machine, but I thought, “How hard can it be?” Well, it turns out it can be a SERIOUS pain! For some truly dumb reason, Cuisinart increased the machine from 10 cups to 12 cups, and to do so they had to increase the size of the pot size by 20%. That’s all well and good, but they did so by making the pot fatter, not taller. If they had made the pot taller, they would have had to make the coffee maker taller or reshape it in some other way, and some genius decided they weren’t going to go to that much bother. But this fatter pot makes it a LOT harder to pour water into the machine You WILL end up spilling water while trying to fill this coffee maker. You will spill it on the counter or you will spill it into the brew basket, but you will spill it. So 2 really dumb ideas…one, to make the 12 cup machine at all; and two, to do so by making the pot fatter. But that’s not the half of it. They also changed something about how the machine brews coffee because we noticed right away, with the first pot, that the coffee didn’t taste as good as with our old machine. We grind our own beans, and so I fiddled around with the grind and found that if I grind the beans a little courser (but still WELL within the parameters for a drip coffee maker) and increase the grind time by 10% — which just means we grind 10% more beans — we got the taste that we like back. Eureka! Or so we thought. Now, we only make 10 cups even though this is a 12 cup coffee maker, and so a 20% larger machine should easily handle 10% more ground beans especially with the courser grind. It SHOULD but it doesn’t. When the machine brews, the basket fills, overflows, and pours grounds over the top of the basket, down between the filter and the basket, and into the coffee pot. Clue to Cuisinart: If I wanted to eat coffee grounds when I drink coffee, I would have a different kind of coffee maker! We never had this problem with our 10-cup coffee maker, even when we diddled around figuring out the grind we want to get the taste we want, and so CLEARLY Cuisinart changed something in the design. I suspect some genius decided they needed to reduce the brew time, and so they made the machine brew faster, and so it pumps the water into the basket faster than the basket can drain. One would think that whoever at Cuisinart designed this thing would have noted that problem and done something about it, but no. We use paper filters rather than the metal one, and so maybe this 1- cup model just doesn’t like paper filters. Never had a problem with our 10-cup model though. Anyhow, not only do you get coffee grounds down in the pot, you have to up the mess: clean the grounds out of the basket and clean the grounds out of the basket holder. I swear, the only thing this Cuisinart 12-cup coffee maker has going for it is that it looks nice on the counter. Swell! I don’t know where the Cuisinart designers had their heads when they designed this machine, but clearly they had them in a bad place. I have not quite decided to consign this machine to the e-waste recycle…not quite, but I am close, very close. Anyone have a recommendation for a replacement coffee maker that works like one would expect it too?

I wanted to love this machine, but…
This is our third Cuisinart coffee maker in 18 years. Our last machine was a Ninja and I HATED it so I decided to give this a try. At the time of this review I’ve been using it daily for more than seven months.There are good and bad things that I wish I knew prior to purchasing this machine, because I would have chosen a different product if I knew all of them.At this price point, upwards of $200, this machine has most of what you might expect: programmable timer for brewing, brew strength/size options, auto-cleaning, auto-off, reusable coffee filter, and replaceable water filter.The insulated stainless steel carafe was one of the “must haves” on my checklist, and this one keeps coffee hot for a few hours. There are problems with it, though. The first is the design of the lid, which is perhaps needlessly complex in that you must thoroughly rinse and DRAIN it after washing it, lest you leave coffee and/or soapy water inside the cavity and receive an unpleasant surprise the next time you brew a pot. If you use a dishwashing machine, you’ll have to take the lid out and shake it over your sink to drain it, and then rinse with tap water to make sure there’s no soap in it. Not very convenient.The other downside to the design of the carafe lid is that it is impossible to completely drain the carafe without removing the lid, in order to pour out the last half cup of coffee. Again, totally inconvenient.With regard to the insulated carafe, in turns out that it the ONLY method of keeping your coffee warm. This machine doesn’t have a built in “hot plate” at the bottom. Essentially, the machine heats the water, dispenses it, and then it’s up to the carafe to keep it hot. Which it does succeed at, for at least a few hours, but if you are someone who wants to be able to keep their coffee hot and ready all day (as I used to do. *sigh), this machine doesn’t allow you to do it. There is no on/off switch for the hot plate because there is no hot plate. Thus no “keep warm” feature. When the machine is ‘on’ it’s only on because it’s brewing, and then it shuts off. If it’s not brewing, it’s not on. Simple, right? And annoying. With other machines I used to be able to leave coffee in the (glass) carafe in the morning, come back later in the afternoon and switch the machine ‘on’ and even though it wasn’t brewing a new pot, the hot plate would heat up the coffee enough to drink without having to microwave it or whatever.With this machine, you’ll only have hot (or warm) coffee for as long as the insulated carafe does its job. Which I’d say maxes out somewhere between 3 and 4 hours, depending on ambient temperature in the room. For all-day coffee drinkers like my wife and me, that is insufficient.Apart from these specific issues that may or may not matter to others, the machine is great.For me, not worth the price and not something I would buy for less, either. I’d prefer getting what I want and I’d be happy to pay the same or more to get it. So I can’t recommend this machine.