Braun BrewSense 12-Cup Drip Coffee Maker Stainless Steel - PureFlavor Fast Brew System - Three Brew Modes -

I'm 58 years old and my family loves coffee. We love good ole plain American Style, Black, Scalding Hot Coffee. We buy quality beans, grind them fresh, and brew 2 pots of coffee every morning and sometimes in the evenings if we have guests over. To enjoy properly brewed coffee the brewer must get the water hot enough and spread that hot water evenly over the grounds to extract the full coffee flavor. It does not matter how good your beans are, if the water isn't hot enough and the grounds aren't saturated, the flavor will be off and just not there. Simple right, how hard can that be? Well apparently harder than we thought. Most drip makers struggle with the water temperature and saturating the grounds properly. This Braun has no problem getting the water hot and delivering on flavor. I burned my tongue for the first time in a while on my first cup and was satisfied to feel the heat and taste the full bold flavor. So yes this makes a very good cup of coffee. It also looks and feels as premium as it really is. It is almost fully stainless and has a really nice stainless lid replacing the standard piano black that most of us are familiar with. Also, the carafe is one of the finest I have ever poured from. It pours nice and smooth and does not drip on the counter or on the back of the heat plate. As a matter of fact I don't get any coffee or water on my counter top. It does not drip down the back when you open the lid like every other brewer I've owned. One thing that is important to some of us as we get older is the carafe weight. My last brewer was a 14 cup and while it made more coffee per brew it was heavy and awkward for the first couple of cups for my wife who is developing some arthritis in her hands. The carafe also transitions in and out of the brewer smoother than any I've owned. It does not catch on the brew basket or heat plate. I also find it extremely easy to fill. I like the ladder design of the water fill indicators they make it easy for me to see how full it is and works better for me than the usual fill window. It is also accurate to the pot markings so for those of us who fill our brewers with a anything other than the carafe you are safe from overflow. It brews fast, 8 minutes on regular brew and the coffee is perfect for our tastes. Lastly, the one thing that most of us always overlook is if these brewers have been independently tested in a lab for safety. The Brauns are ALL "UL" listed. This is a designation that people almost always overlook or don't know the meaning of. Underwriters Laboratory (UL) tests appliances and other products to see if they are safe. They use and abuse them to see what it takes to make them fail and what happens when they do. In my quest for a new brewer I had a brand new Cuisinart (not UL listed) leak overnight, short out the brewer, and when it came on auto brew in the morning it caught fire on my counter top. Thank the powers to be that I was up and present when it started brewing as it was not going to stop burning on its own. It filled my kitchen full of toxic plastic burning smoke and I had to quickly unplug it and run it out to my driveway. That literally scared me to my senses and made me realize the value of independently tested appliances. Good luck I really hope this helped. Read more

After a few years of pour-over coffee and extensive overthinking, I decided to purchase this coffee machine. There were a few things I deemed important in my coffeemaker search. First, I wanted to be able to schedule my coffee to brew just before I wake up and zombie-shuffle into my kitchen. Second, I wanted a machine that could make more than 6-8 liquid cups. When family visits, the pour over carafe capacity is never enough so we’re constantly making third or fourth carafes of coffee daily. That gets time consuming and very annoying. Third, it was important to still have great flavor. Pour over and has a great taste and I did not want to lose that. Finally, I wanted the coffee to stay hot. My glass pour-over carafe cooled too quickly and I’d have one mug of hot coffee before I had to begin microwaving, which doesn’t keep coffee hot for very long, either. I decided to buy this coffeemaker after reading reviews on several machines at a few different online stores. I chose this Braun after reading many pretty good reviews. The price was doable and I really liked the aesthetic I saw in the pictures. I got the machine yesterday and set it up. It came with a charcoal water filter (lasts a year) and a cone shaped, reusable mesh coffee filter. The charcoal filter is not necessary to the operation of the machine but IT’S A FILTER, people. Although I already have a water filter attached to my kitchen faucet, the charcoal filter comes with the machine, so I’m using it. There are specific instructions on how to activate the filtering properties of the charcoal pod so be sure to read those in the manual before inserting it into the machine. The reusable mesh basket looks very nice but I haven’t tried it because I have several paper filters (cone, size #4 fits perfectly) and I like the flavor of the coffee when I use them. When I run out, I’ll likely switch to the reusable filter. When I set up the machine yesterday, I ran the machine through once with only water, as recommended by the manufacturer, to remove dust that may have settled into the machine. I timed this cycle for funsies (on the “regular” brew setting) and it took a little under 10 minutes to fill the carafe. I have not tried the bold or fast brew settings yet. After this initial cleaning cycle, I washed the pot and mesh filter. Setting the time, water hardness level, and the auto-brew function was easy with the manual, but you do have to push the power button before you can activate certain features. I feel it is pretty important to read the instruction manual. Side note- after I set the clock, I unplugged the machine while I poured water into the water tank (because I don’t want to get electrocuted, plus the manual says to do this). I did not have to set the clock again after I plugged it back in. That was a neat little function. Last night, I set the auto-brew function to make coffee at 8:30 am this morning. It worked great, the coffee stayed hot, and it tasted awesome! And if you, like me, slowly go through a pot of coffee throughout the morning and early afternoon you can turn the warming plate on again. Press the power button, then the “brew” button and it will keep the plate hot for another 2 hours. All in all, I have no complaints so far and I’m very happy with this purchase. Read more

Good coffemaker. Basically the same as a Cuisinart. The opening for pouring water in could be bigger. It is so small of a target, it makes pouring coffee kind of messy unless you're really careful. The carafe is very good. It's glass all the way to the top, with no plastic or metal band. That means you won't eventually have a leak where glass and plastic/metal band meet, like with other carafes. For me, this is a must with any coffeemaker. The only bad thing I've found about it is that the clock in it is very low quality, and it loses time. It seems to lose about 2-3 minutes per week. I am constantly re-setting the correct time on it, which is annoying and the reason I can't give it 5 stars. Overall, I'm happy with it, though. Read more

The media could not be loaded. We drink so much coffee, this coffee maker has served us well. Somehow the coffee has a cleaner taste to it. It is programmable so we have our coffee brewed and ready to go each morning. It has multiple flavor settings (regular and bold). It has a fast setting to brew the coffee even faster for you. The temperature is perfect each time. A minor complaint-it is preset for the clean sensor to come on after so many brews. For us, it comes on every few weeks. I don’t clean our coffee maker that often. When I do, it’s an easy process of half a bottle of Braun cleaner mixed with water run through the machine on the cleaning cycle and then a few carafes of regular water to rinse it out. Overall, super pleased and would order the same model again. Read more