CaféSpecialty 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

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.

The media could not be loaded. UPDATE:DO NOT SPEND YOUR MONEY ON THIS.THREE days receiving this and putting it in the auto broom mode I woke up to an empty carafe. Thought maybe it lost Wi-Fi signal so I tried to do a manual brew. When I would press the button it would ask how many cups I would say three cups and hit brew again and it would pump out less than one cup of coffee/water. I tried this three times. Each time resulting in the same thing. I called Amazon support and they basically had no answer other than cleaning the output of the water. I could hear the pumpkick on for maybe 15 seconds or 10 seconds and then would cut out then it might pump for another 5 seconds after that and then cut out. So for the price point of this machine I was very upset. This is a G.E. company so they should have much better quality than this.But come on ! 3 days of use of only one time of three cups per day? Absolutely ridiculous that it failed so quickly.The unit has a clean design. The water reservoir is too small. The mesh coffee grounds basket is a pain to remove the used grounds and get clean. Instructions say items are NOT dishwasher safe. The face has 3 buttons to do various programming. The problem being, they aren't back lit. So when it's on the counter and you are looking down at the machine, it's nearly impossible to read the words. The auto brew works well. It's a way to program the machine to turn on at your chosen time, amount of cups and strength of brew. This is where they failed. You download the app which is somewhat easy to use but there are no clear instructions either with the app or with the machine. Without the app, you push the brew button and it comes on. You push it again and begins to brew. My question the first time using the app was, do I need to push the button once so that the blue light around the brew button is lit so it can communicate with the app? (by the way, pairing with the app and devices was a breeze) Does it automatically power up? When using the Autobrew in the app it says, brewer is Off. So it makes you think, how is it going to brew in the morning even though I have the app programmed? Since I was unsure I called customer support. 45 minutes of a call to not get an answer of which was the correct way to run it. First the first rep was just a general rep. Nice but this was beyond her knowledge. She said, I will transfer you to out Smart Electronics team. They didn't know. They transfered me to a third guy. He didn't know. All 3 said they were aware and have complained that their own owner's manual was terrible yet the company has not made any changes. I also asked, how do I turn off the autobrew programming on the unit if I set the app to a different time so it doesn't accidentally run twice? No answer. This is actually a GE company so you would think they would do better with customer support knowledge and with owner's manual content. I ended up running the first Autobrew directly off of the machine. It worked great. I accidentally found out, DON'T leave the glass carafe on the hot plate after you pour your coffee. It stays hot enough while cooling down that it burns the liquid coffee to the bottom of the carafe. Apparently this isn't true with the outrageously more expensive insulated carafe that will only keep the coffee warm an additional 2 hours. So to setup the next day, to eliminate the AutoBrew programming in the actual unit, I unplugged it to clear it of programming. Then I set it up with enough water (there is no way to empty the reservoir if you needed to) added my coffee grounds and made sure the glass carafe was placed under the outlet correctly. The instructions say if it's not, the coffee will overflow the grounds basket. I then entered the app, made sure my programming was correct. At the top it says brewer off. At the bottom of the next page for autobrew, you do all the progamming and at the bottom it's misleading. It has a button that says, Start Brewing. Which to me meant it would brew immediately. Nope, that allows the autobrew program to run. Well that's stupid designing. The last thing I'll say is, there is supposedly an ideal temp to brew coffee beans at. So if you want a piping hot cup of coffee, this won't do it. Maximum temperature allowed is 205 F which is warm but not piping hot. At that temp...it doesn't take long for a standard cup of coffee to cool right off to luke warm. For this price point and if you choose the Thermal Carafe being nearly an extra $50 bucks for the upgrade....it's a miss for me...I would think twice if I was in the market again.