Cuisinart touchscreen coffee maker review

Ever wake up to the smell of fresh, brewing coffee? Is there any better way to start your day? For a coffee drinker, definitely not. And the new Cuisinart touchscreen coffee maker can make that your reality every single morning.

With its easy setup, gorgeous modern design, and programmable features for effortless coffee every morning, there’s a lot of great things to say about this coffee maker. But that doesn’t mean it’s the perfect choice for every kitchen (including my own).

Let’s get brewing!

Get ready for your first brew with an easy, intuitive setup

When you first take this touchscreen coffee maker out of the box, you’ll find a handful of parts that need to be put together. But thankfully, this setup is less daunting than it initially seems. Cuisinart’s instructions will intuitively guide you through the short process, so you should be able to start your first brew in about 15 minutes.

Set up includes soaking and inserting a charcoal filter, setting up the filter basket and your choice of filter, and running a water-only cycle to get everything cleaned out. Just make sure you’ve added the filter basket before starting that cycle. The filter basket is what connects your brewing coffee seamlessly to the opening of the carafe. I missed that part and ended up with hot water all over my counter.

You can skip this part if you want to get brewing right away, but it’s a good idea to get the clock set up. Thankfully, this is easy too. If your clock isn’t set, you won’t be able to easily use one of this coffee maker’s most exciting features, but we’ll get to that a bit later.

Brew your pot with the filter of your choice and no fuss

One thing I love about this coffee maker is that it makes brewing your pot of coffee simple and easy. When you add your water, a gauge on the side clearly marks the amount of water you’re adding, so you’ll get the exact amount you wanted in your brew. This is great if you’re adding water directly from a filtered pitcher, for example. Personally, I’ve dealt with coffee makers that don’t make it nearly this clear, so this was a breath of fresh air.

Another great thing about this coffee maker is that it offers you the choice between paper filters, or its provided gold-tone reusable filter. I know a lot of people prefer paper filters to reduce the amount of grounds that get into your coffee, but I’ve tried out both kinds of filters on this machine, and honestly noticed no significant difference. Both filters produced a tiny amount of grounds in my coffee, which is pretty fantastic. I preferred to use the reusable filter to reduce my waste, and save some money on single-use filters. Cuisinart provides a few cone-shaped #4 filters in the box, so you can try it both ways before you decide.

Now all you need to do is select your coffee options on the touchscreen, and then hit Brew. Simple, easy, good coffee from a machine that looks amazing!

Coffee how you want it, when you want it

But there’s more to this coffee maker than simple brewing and looking cool. It also has a few helpful features so you can get coffee the way you want it, when you want it.

While this machine rocks a huge 14-cup capacity, it also has a 1 – 4 cup setting to your perfect, smaller brew. And if you like your coffee a little stronger, it has a Bold feature to extract more flavour from your grounds. Though, as someone who loads my coffee with cream, I didn’t use that feature very much!

You can also control the heat in the warming plate just below the carafe. If you leave the machine on after brewing, the plate will stay hot at your chosen setting, keeping your coffee warm. This one really blew me away–I kept the heat on Medium, and when I came back a whole hour later, my coffee was still almost as hot as fresh brewed! This is great for keeping your carafe hot if you want to have a few leisurely cups throughout the morning without having to rebrew. 

And of course, there are always those moments when you need your coffee NOW. Those moments call for the Brew Pause feature. At any point during the brewing process, simply pulling the carafe away will pause the machine mid-brew, giving you a chance to pour your first cup as soon as possible. The brew restarts as soon as you place the carafe back in the machine. Never wait in caffeine-deficient rage again!

Wake up to the smell of fresh coffee with Auto Brew

But of course, the crown jewel of this coffee maker is the Auto Brew feature.

Do you dream of waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee every single morning? With a little bit of preparation, now you can. With the Auto Brew feature, you can schedule your next brew to start up to 24 hours in advance, automatically. All you need to do is set up your grounds the night before.

To test it out, I set up my grounds and preferred settings right before I went to bed, and set Auto Brew for about 10 minutes before I planned to wake up the next day. When I got out of bed, I had a carafe of fresh coffee waiting for me in the kitchen right away! It will also remember the time you chose, so you can wake up to the smell of coffee at the same time every day. It doesn’t get much better than that!

One small consideration about the Cuisinart touchscreen coffee maker

It’s clear I think the Cuisinart Touchscreen Coffee Maker is a great, but sadly I’d have to pass on keeping this one in my own kitchen. And that reason is that it is BIG. When closed, it sits at about 1’ 2” (35 cm) tall, but rises to just under 1’ 10” (55.8 cm) when you open the lid. That needs a fair amount of space in your kitchen! 

My kitchen has overhanging cabinets, and sadly there just isn’t enough clearance to open the lid enough to set the coffee up. I also live in a household of two, so we would almost never need to use its full 14-cup capacity, making a machine this size not only challenging, but unnecessary.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there’s a steam vent in the back of the lid. Even if you have a good spot in your kitchen, you should make sure there’s nothing behind or above it that could be damaged by steam or moisture.

A coffee maker that works good and looks good

If you have a spot in your kitchen that can accommodate this monolith of a machine, then I can only say good things about it. Cuisinart’s Touchscreen Coffee Maker makes coffee simply and easily, and with a ton of useful features to get the most out of each and every brew. I still can’t get over that Auto Brew feature! And of course, its sleek look and LED touchscreen will elevate your kitchen’s look into the modern world.

Or if you’re not feeling too hot about this one, you can always check out Cuisinart’s other small appliances to find the perfect coffee maker for you on BestBuy.ca. Stay caffeinated!