Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker | 10-Cup Insulated Thermal Carafe | WiFi Enabled Voice-to-Brew Technology | Smart Home Kitchen Essentials | SCA Certified, Barista-Quality Brew | Matte Black

After about six years of faithful service from my Bunn coffee maker, it decided to start leaking. Not bad considering we make at least one pot of coffee a day, and often 2-3 pots on Saturdays. As much as I loved the Bunn, I was ready for a coffee maker I could program to start brewing while I was getting ready in the morning, and didn't take up quite so much counter space. I had one specific requirement for out new coffee maker. It needed to be SCA Golden Cup certified. After much research it came down to this GE Cafe and the Breville coffee maker that was also Golden Cup certified. The ultimate deciding factors were that the GE Cafe (as expensive as it is) was still about $100 less than the Breville, and it was compatible with my SmartHQ app that I already use with my GE range. I ordered the white Cafe. Not the color choice I really wanted, but definitely easier to convince my wife to purchase it than to spend and additional $40-$50 to get either black or stainless. I know it will take extra care over time to prevent (or, at least slow down) the coffee stains... but it is, what it is. What it is, is a beautiful piece of equipment that certainly dresses up my 80's countertop and log walls. Right out of the box the coffee maker feels very high quality. It was very easy to set up as well. The instructions were easy to follow, and within minutes I had it connected to SmartHQ and brewing the first pot of coffee. Speaking of coffee, it is fantastic. Even though the instructions did not specifically say to, I did run a pot of water through the coffee maker before brewing my first pot of coffee. For my first pot, I followed the instructions to the letter. I used 1 scoop of coffee per cup. I chose the Gold setting to brew according to SCA standards. The coffee that came out was strong, but not bitter. It was stronger than my wife and I both prefer, but still extremely pleasant to drink. Every pot I have made since then has used the ration of 1 scoop for every 2 cups of coffee. That equates to 1TBSP per cup. Not near as strong and black, but still an absolutely perfect cup of coffee to start the day with. I know the SmartHQ is an added bonus that is certainly not necessary. However, I find it very easy to use. I used it to set up an auto-brew schedule for Mon-Fri, and another for Sundays. For Saturday, I don't have auto-brew set, but it is still nice to sit in bed, pull up the app on my iPhone and tell it to start brewing the pot I set up the night before. I know I will have a hot pot of coffee waiting on me. I have only been using the Cafe for just over a week, so I certainly can't speak to reliability over the long haul. I have my reminders set to update this review in 6 months and a year. I will try to update with either pluses or minuses based on how reliably the Cafe is still working for us.

Tl;Dr - I wanted to like this coffee maker but after several failed attempts to produce a good pot of coffee (and some other worrisome quality issues) I'm giving up and returning it for a refund. I'll start with the few positives. The first is that this is a good looking coffee maker. We opted for the black thermal carafe model and I think it is handsome, however as noted by others here it really is more of a "space grey". It really is nowhere close to black so not sure why they would call it that. The other surprising positive is the Wi-Fi connection. The fact that it can get it's time from the network so I don't have to worry about power outages or daylight savings messing up my brew timer is potentially great even though I generally feel like smart appliances are "one more thing to break". Okay onto the bad...first, upon unpacking I found moisture in the machine. I probably should have just stopped there and returned it but I kept going. Upon setting it up, I noticed that the acrylic piece on the front where the knob and buttons are was popping out and not flush as I would expect. I was able to push the piece in and it felt like it clicked in but after running a few brew cycles I guess the thermal expansion of the surrounding metal(?) caused it to pop back out again. On that note, there is a lot of plastic here and based on deep-diving into other reviews I do have concerns about the longevity/durability of the coatings, particularly on the copper bits as I already notice some spots on the carafe handle that look questionable. Most of this so far is cosmetic but all of which should be pristine particularly given the relatively high price of this maker. Ultimately though, this is about the quality of the coffee and I just could not brew a pot that came close to what I was getting from my 10+ year-old Behmor Brazen Plus, which still works but was getting a little long in the tooth. I tried it on Gold and Bold at 2 different brew temps using the same water/ground ratio as I had been in my Behmor and everything tasted watered down. My only explanation is that this brews much faster than the Behmor, and the Behmor has an adjustable pre-soak duration which I found no mention of with this Café model having at all, let alone be adjustable. I believe the lack of pre-soak also leads to the grounds overflowing the paper filter almost regardless of how much is in there. I first tried to make a 10 cup pot with 75g of grounds and the included paper filter could not contain the grounds. I then tried an 8 cup pot with 60g of grounds and still had grounds cresting the filter (and weak coffee). For comparison I use 56g for 8 cups (the max) on the Behmor and get perfect strength and nowhere close to overflowing. I do not have the equipment to measure, but my suspicion is that the flow on this thing is just too fast. I could keep going but the bottom line is that this coffee maker is not good at any price let alone $200-300. Based on most reviews I'm not the only person with this experience but it's also puzzling to see so many good reviews which makes me wonder if there is an overall quality control issue which again, shouldn't exist with an appliance marketed at this premium level.

Beautiful machine that makes great coffee.

This comes up in your search results from the UK but it is not clear it’s a US product with a US electrical setup. Maybe I should have guessed from the 110v but to be honest I didn’t actually remember what UK voltage was, I had to look it up. Anyway, after blowing up two adapters, I finally found out I need a £99 step down transformer, which is huge and expensive, in order to power the thing. It makes great coffee, it does. However you have to prop the water and coffee areas open every day to dry them out, otherwise it’s going to make dank coffee really soon. I had raised my coffee-making ability to an 8/10 using thermal carafes, descaling, using filtered water and really good, fresh beans. This machine takes it to 10/10. Is it worth the hassle to get the upgrade? With a UK plug yes, but for me I wish I hadn’t bothered.

Me encanto mi cafetera. Además de lo obvio, que es ser una cafetera muy bonita prepara un excelente café. Tienes opciones para adecuar la temperatura deseada, el nivel intensidad buscado y se puede configurar via WIFI. Aún no la he integrado con Alexa, basicamente por que no le encuentro utilidad a eso. Mi ritual de café tiene un nuevo aliado con esta maquina.

La cafetera llegó en perfectas condiciones, el embalaje es perfecto, se nota la calidad desde que ves la caja, al abrirla todo se encuentra perfectamente bien empacado. Debo decir que se nota la calidad de los materiales, tuve que pensar mucho y mucho para decidirme por este modelo, ya que estaba entre la Breville y la Oxo que también son certificadas, leí muchas reseñas de las tres, y este modelo no cuenta con mucha publicidad como los otros 2, todas con buenas y malas referencias, pero no hay como vivir la experiencia propia. Definitivamente es un gran salto de una cafetera de 300 pesos que compré hace ya un par de años a este modelo que no es precisamente barato y aun mucho mas para mi país México. Instalé la app en mi celular que fue relativamente sencilla probé con agua solamente mientras tanto, no la he probado como para dar algún otro comentario por lo que por ahora puedo decir que las primeras impresiones cumplieron mis expectativas. Estaré actualizando este comentario conforme la vaya probando

About 1 year in I started getting "err 3", which apparently has to do with the boiler, and 6 months later the pump started dying. For example if I set 6 cups, it would brew 3. Then I'd go back and brew 3 more separately. Super annoying. For the price it is definitely not worth it. Been trying to have it warrantied (the boiler issue) But getting a complete run around for months with no success. It's beautiful and I love the wifi start but would not recommend.