Capresso465 CoffeeTeam TS 10-Cup Digital Coffeemaker with Conical Burr Grinder and Thermal Carafe

First let me qualify myself as a coffee drinker. I owned the Coffee Connection for several years in the 90's and one thing I love is a good cup of Joe. I have only had the Capresso 465.05 for 3 mornings now, and for the last 3 mornings i have had the best cup of coffee in years. I find reading the reviews interesting, usually i read the middle reviews (3 stars) first. People that give this machine 1 star because the light is to light, or it steams when making coffee, or some of the grinds sitting in the machine are already a day old, I appreciate. On the other hand, i go back to why I bought the machine, not as a night light, but as a way to make great coffee in the morning or when I want a cup of coffee.The machine was pretty simple to set up, I made a few coffee-less pots just to get the system working and get the oils cleaned out. Then my first morning, I made my coffee with the following settings.8 cups, bold, 8 on the water setting, my first cup of coffee was almost sweet it was so good. In the early 90's, i owned a grind and brew Toshiba which made good coffee, sort of. Late 90's I bought my first Melitta Grind and Brew, unbelievable good coffee. I realized what Melitta had done, they made the water very hot, which is what is needed to make good coffee. It also starts with beans, so you are starting with fresh coffee. My system broke, so I bought a Cuisinart grind and brew, thinking finally someone made a coffee maker that can replace the Melitta. Nope, because I use french roast coffee beans which are very oily, the machine did not work. It constantly jammed, was hard to clean, and not worth the effort so I sold it right away. I found another Melitta online and bought it right away, then one day I saw a Melitta with a thermal craft, so I bought that one. Over the years I kept my machines working when I found a source of parts online. The latch on two of them broke, I was able to buy new lids, but they also broke. Still made good coffee, but as they got old, the blades on the grinder would get very dull. So the coffee is being bashed, not cut. Now on to the Capresso, I researched for several months, trying to find a way to replace my still sort of working Melitta. I knew I needed something that could get water temperatures up to 200 degrees, something that would not heat the beans when grinding them such as a slur burr grinder, and finally something that was easy to clean. That machine of course is the Capresso. Remember the first priority, a machine that makes a great cup of coffee, nothing else really is as important as that. If you can't get a good cup of coffee, you may as well stop and end right then. As it stands right now, I'm getting a fantastic cup of coffee every morning. I couldn't find this machine anywhere with a discount that made sense, buying from Amazon made the most sense.Paying over $200.00 for a coffee maker does make sense. Consider something you are going to do almost every single day of the year, at a cost of $220.00, for the first year your cost added to the product cost is about 60 cents a day. The second year it drops to 30 cents a day. So here is the question, is it worth 60 cents a day for a great pot of coffee? We are really talking about 6 cents a cup, if you only paid $59.00 for your machine, the savings would only be 4 cents a cup, not worth it no matter how you look at it.If in the next year something changes my feelings about the Capresso 465 coffee maker, I will update you.This is an update to my review.I've had this machine a couple of months now, I think I would still give it 5 stars for the coffee, which is the main purpose of buying the machine. But I would only give it 4 stars for functionality. Something drives me crazy that has been mentioned in other reviews. Mainly, no sight glass so you can see how much water you have added to the machine. I have to use a flashlight to see the water level when I am setting it up to make coffee. The other main problem is if you want to switch beans from regular beans to decaf, you have to be careful because you can't get the regular beans out, and you have ground coffee sitting on the belt waiting to be fed in. It's not like I make decaf a lot, but the regular coffee tastes so good, I wanted to have coffee at night, not an easy thing to do with this machine.But the machine does make the best coffee I have ever tasted, worth the two problems I have listed to have great coffee every day every pot, every time.Larry

INITIAL REVIEW:We are returning this coffee machine after spending way too much time on the phone with the company and fiddling with it for two different problems that developed within a month of purchase.1) REASON FOR RETURN: coffee grinder stopped working after less than a month of slightly-less-than-daily use. The company acknowledged that using "oily" coffee beans could be the problem.2) OTHER PROBLEM (THAT THE COMPANY FIXED): we had to call the company the first day we used it because it was inoperable due to their having installed a coffee basket that was intended for a different model. To their credit, they did fix that particular problem by immediately sending us a new one, which solved that problem.UPDATE: I had the machine packed up with Amazon return label on it at the time I wrote the review above, but then, after realizing that the coffeemaker I would have replaced it with (a Cuisinart) apparently requires regular cleaning of parts, I decided we'd give this one another shot. BIG MISTAKE! Capresso replaced the old machine, and the replacement machine's grinder subsequently stopped working just as the first one did. It is now too late to return it to Amazon - oh, stupid me! The customer service rep I spoke with today confirmed that, based on my complete story, our problem is due to oily coffee beans (we use Sumatra). Rather than admit that the only solution is to fix the machine and then change coffee bean type, he said we should "dry out" the coffee beans for a couple days on a paper towel before putting them into the machine. Ridiculous! As I already spent over $150 on the machine I will not purchase another, but will have to resort to using the "brew" function exclusively and grind the beans separately in my inexpensive, 25-year-old Waring burr grinder - still going strong - kicked the wimpy, overpriced Capresso's coffeemaker butt!!After having used the machine now for a few months, these are my final comments, which are congruent with many others' criticisms (I thought that the gentleman who wrote a comment on Feb 14, 2014 comparing the machine to a Yugo summed up my thoughts quite well, however):1) CON: Grinds up a TON of beans yet produces relatively weak coffee. Don't bother trying to make a full pot unless you like watery coffee; I was embarrassed to serve guests light brown water the first time we did this. For hubby and my daily coffee, we set the grinder to grind the 10-cup, i.e. maximum, quantity of beans (which nearly completely fills the filter basket - yikes!), on the strongest setting (i.e. the little darkly-colored coffee bean icon), and filled the pot to the 8-cup line to get an acceptably strong cup of coffee (which is not at all strong by many standards!).2) CON: Wastes grounds - after brewing coffee, a small mound of dry grounds remains in the basket, close to where the grinder chute comes into the basket. Even if you redistribute the grounds evenly around the basket as soon as the grinding step is complete, the coffee, for whatever reason, does not come out nearly as strong as it should given the quantity of beans used. Not sure why (unless I'm imagining this part)...3) CON: Grinder defective - see above4) CON: Grinder loud? Some folks complained about this; IMHO, coffee grinders are loud in general so I have no particular gripe with this machine on that front. We have a 4-month-old baby at home which makes a loud coffee grinder suck, but we like our freshly ground coffee so we deal with it! :)5) CON: Company sucks. The customer service reps are friendly, but have apparently been carefully instructed to not admit to certain inherent defects in the machine such as the fact that it simply will not tolerate certain coffee beans (every time a rep tried to explain to me about oily coffee beans, when I asked if we simply needed to change beans, the answer was NEVER "yes". Instead, I was provided with some type of runaround ridiculous pseudo solution like filling the coffee bean reservoir less frequently - which is impossible since it requires refilling every 2-3 days given its huge appetite for coffee beans - or drying out the beans on a paper towel before putting them in the machine (dude, are you kidding??!?).6) PRO: Very low-work freshly ground coffee CONCEPT (repeat: CONCEPT) is great. Easy to use; it's a dream to be able to simply keep the grinder full of beans and pour in water every nite and wake up to freshly ground coffee that starts grinding at the time we set it to do so. We had considered Cuisinart as well, but chose this one instead because the former machine apparently requires regular cleaning of grinder parts. Too bad this product is poorly designed and that the Capresso company sucks. Given another chance, I would absolutely have purchased the Cuisinart instead!! :(