Cuisinart is a well-respected and established brand name in the world of kitchen appliances, and they are particularly well known for their high quality coffee-makers. Whether looking for a coffee-maker for your home or office, Cuisinart has enough quality products in its bag to make sure that customers of every taste and class are satisfied. Cuisinart is known to take its coffee-maker business very seriously, and the attitude shows in their products.

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The Cuisinart DCC-2600 Brew Central 14-Cup Programmable Coffeemaker rapidly became a best seller and it was not without good reasons. It serves as a more than worthy successor of another Cuisinart hit, the DCC-122 and comes at a very satisfactory and affordable mid-level price (currently priced at $103.93 at Amazon.com). The Cuisinart DCC-2600 markets itself as a highly qualified automatic coffee-maker, what with its fully programmable features and functions. Some customers complain about it having a “boxy” look but we think it looks sleek and stylish (and efficient) enough to fit in any kitchen. Detailed review and analysis of the DCC-2600 is given below for your consideration, hope you find it useful!

Key Features of the Cuisinart DCC-2600

 
1. Extra Large Capacity – The DCC-2600 has one of the largest brewing capacities among all the coffee-makers available on the market at this price range. The extra-large capacity means that you can easily brew up to 14 cups of coffee (each about 5 oz) simultaneously, making it ideal for a coffee guzzling household or an office or if you often have guests visiting you!

2. 1-4 Cup setting – Even though it is designed to brew 14 cups of coffee at a go, there is an additional brew setting available on the machine that allows you to choose lesser number of cups of coffee. This is very useful considering most of us do not need to brew 14 cups of coffee frequently. While it allows to make coffee with minimum ration/water, the 1-4 cup setting does not compromise with the coffee quality in doing so (the flavour and smell is in fact a bit more heightened, and the temperature stays perfect too!).

3. Purified Water – To ensure that a poor quality of tap water doesn’t ruin the taste of your coffee, there is a high quality charcoal filter fitted in the Cuisinart DCC-2600, which helps to filter out high level of chlorine and other unwanted minerals and impurities. Filtering out the minerals also ensures that your machine remains that much more free from clogging by any unwanted build ups inside its system. However, it is recommended that the charcoal filter is replaced regularly (every 60 days or 60 uses) as the filter itself will get clogged from all the filtrates and the charcoal itself. A very cool shower-head is used to sprinkle this purified water evenly over the ground coffee.

4. Brew-Pause Setting – This handy feature allows you to pause the brewing process (for 30 seconds max) and pour out a cup of coffee, in case you are in a tearing hurry and cannot wait for the brew cycle to complete! All you have to do is remove the glass carafe (this stops the flow of coffee from the basket) from the heater plate and pour the half-brewed coffee in your cup. However, as with all hurried up things, the coffee you will get after pausing the brew cycle midway will taste far inferior to what you get after the brew cycle is finished properly. This is because the extraction rate varies during the brew cycle and taking out the coffee midway means that you only get to taste half the real flavour.

5. 60-second Reset – The DCC-2600 is pretty loaded with nifty features and the 60-second reset is one of them. This particular mechanism allows the coffee-maker to keep in memory the settings which you selected before you started brewing the coffee. So, in case the coffee-maker gets accidentally unplugged or if the power goes off and there is no backup or the backup takes some time to boot, you wont have to select the settings once again. However, the machine can only hold on to the settings memory for a duration of 60 seconds, after which it resets the settings back to the factory default.

6. Ease of Use – It is equipped with several minor/major features which make the job easier for you. There is an easy-view water level window on the front (missing in earlier models), which allows you to check the water level in the tank while filling it up, thus avoiding any spill. Since, the DCC-2600 is fully programmable, it allows you to set up the machine up to 24 hours in advance, so that you can find a hot, fresh cup of coffee served as soon as you wake up.

7. Additional Features – There is a very useful digital LCD panel given at the centre-front which displays the time since the coffee-maker has not been in use, the strength of coffee to be brewed, number of cups to be served and when it is time to do a clean up of the machine. A function knob is provided to control these features – Auto On, 0-4 Hours Auto Off, Brew, Digital Clock, Audible Tone. The Auto On schedules the coffee-maker to start brewing at a pre-scheduled time, while the 0-4 Hours shuts it down at the scheduled time after the brewing is done. An audible tone (5 beeps) is heard after the brewing is over.

Pros

• Extra Large Capacity;
• Brew-Pause feature;
• Easy View Water Level Window;
• Excellent Value for Money.

Cons

• The Gold Tone filter basket can be a bit difficult to clean;
• Performance degrades over time if used quite frequently (*Most Common Consumer complaint);
• Consumer complaints about a leaky carafe lid while pouring;
• Consumer complaints about sub-optimal water temperature (doesn’t feel as hot as it reads).

Conclusion

 
The Cuisinart DCC-2600 comes fully loaded with impressive features, with a trustworthy brand name to boot. While some of the features definitely stand out (Brew-Pause, Auto Shut Off), the number of consumer complaints on Amazon are too high about certain performance features. Although, even then the DCC-2600 still has earned a very respectable 4.3/5 customer rating on Amazon.com! What about us? Cuisinart DCC-122 still remains most people’s favourite (including ours), and DCC-2600 is actually an improvement over it, so we are naturally inclined in favour of the DCC-2600. At the discounted price of $103.93, we will definitely recommend it to you and ask you to give it a try, as most of the complaints registered appear to be a case of negligence and poor maintenance. So for us, Cuisinart DCC-2600 remains the best coffee-maker at this price range!