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 | Stainless Steel

So after reading some reviews here I was hesitant to buy this machine due to some reviews saying how messy it was. We'll let's just get this out of the way. I have yet to see a mess from this machine and have posted photos showing how good the coffee bed actually looks. In the photo, that is 69g of fresh roasted beans ground right before brewing using a Fellow Ode grinder. Not even close to a mess!Now getting into the actual review. My have to haves for this machine were a timer for auto brewing for the weekdays, SCA approved and a thermal carafe. I have owned other SCA approved machines in the past like the Breville Precision Brewer, the Bonivita 8 cup and the latest was an SCA approved Ninja Machine. If the Ratio 6 had a timer that would have been in the running this time around. Unfortunately it does not and this machine checked all my boxes so I decided to give a it a try and so glad I did!Without touching on all it's options yet, the one thing the machine needed to do in order to make it a keeper was make a great cup of coffee! If it couldn't do that, then it wouldn't matter how high tech this thing was and all the fancy stuff it could do, it was going back. Well I am happy to say, this machine makes one delicious cup of coffee! My first reaction to my first brewed sip was WOW, this cup is smooth! It was super smooth, sweet and delicious! An 8 cup pot finished brewing in just about 5 minutes which is pretty fast.The thermal carafe definitely kept the coffee hot for an hour after brewing and was even drinkable 2 hours later. Some reviews mentioned they were upset there was no hot plate. No thermal carafe machine comes with a hot plate! That is the reason for going with the thermal carafe. So your coffee doesn't cook and continue to change in flavor. If you want a hot plate, you need to buy the glass carafe. That goes for any coffee machine. If you want your coffee to stay the hottest in the thermal carafe, run hot water in the carafe so when you brew your coffee, you won't be brewing into a cold carafe which will cool the coffee down quicker. Also, the more coffee left in the carafe the longer it will stay hotter for. If you only have one cup left in the carafe, it will cool down quicker then if you have say 4 cups sitting in there.The machine allows you to choose the gold standard setting which sets everything to the SCA approved cup of coffee and no settings can be changed when set to this but for those who like to tinker, the machine also allows you to set the exact temperature of the water from 185° to 205°. You can also change the brew strength between 3 settings, light, medium and bold. I am not sure what this setting actually adjusts as it's separate from the temperature setting. I haven't brewed on anything besides the gold setting so far but I am definitely going to test the other stuff out but the Gold Setting brews a great cup.The wifi option is such a bonus on this thing! It makes setting everything up super easy. Being able to set a schedule for weekdays means I don't need to program the machine every night. If something changes, can just go into the app and change what I need. Have grinds and water in the machine but don't want to brew yet, can just start the brew from my phone when I am ready. It's great. Also hooked up to Google Home with no problem. Like I said though, if the machine didn't brew a great cup of coffee none of this other stuff would have mattered!Bottom line, yes the machine is expensive but if you are reading this review around the time it's posted, it's $100 off right now putting it much closer in price and even better then some of it's competitors! And it make a great cup of Joe!*8 Month Update - Machine is still working great! Have not had any issues and still producing a great cup of coffee. I basically have kept it on the Gold setting and found there is really no need to play with the temp and strength as the Gold Cup produces a great cup. I have been using an 18:1 coffee to water ratio based on the ounces listed on the water reservoir. Fresh roasted whole beans and weighed out. During the week I prep the night before and have a schedule setup in the app for weekdays. In the morning the coffee still comes out great even with grinding the night before. I have yet to experience any mess with grinds overflowing as others talk about and have made pots using up to 74 grams of coffe. Still recommend this machine.

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.