Get better tasting coffee at home

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Jamie and I drink a lot of coffee at home, so if there's anything we can do to make better tasting coffee at home, we're going to try it!

Let me tell you about our coffee maker buying and owning habits. Before we were married, we had a crappy $20 Mr Coffee that I grabbed at Target or somewhere. It was all plastic and generally kind of sucked. When we got married, we registered for a received a lovely Cuisinart brewer, and it served us well for a few years. Three or four years after we got married, our gifted coffee maker died, and we bought the same one, used, from a neighbor for like $5.

That machine also served us well for a few years, and then it too died. Jamie and I were both working from home full time then, so we were drinking a LOT of coffee every day. In typical Jamie fashion, he did a deep dive into research and learned about the Technivorm Moccamaster, the home machine that America's Test Kitchen calls the BEST automatic coffee maker.

I wasn't familiar with the brand, and balked a bit at its $300+ price tag, but agreed to give it a try.

And from the first pot, we were hooked. It makes the BEST coffee I've ever had, and at a pot (or more) a day, we're confident that it was a worthwhile investment for our morning habit.

One thing I especially love about the Technivorm is that it looks like a mad scientists lab or something, with it's industrial shape and stainless steel carafe. While the insulated metal carafe is great for keeping the coffee hot and steamy, it's also tough to get it really clean.

After a few months, I'd wash the pot every day, but it still had a build-up of coffee staining and oil inside that, no matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of. See the brown at the bottom of the carafe here? That's AFTER washing! Ick.

Enter Clean Caf Coffee Machine Cleaning powder! You simply mix a packet of the cleaner with 4 cups of warm water, and run it through the machine like you're brewing a pot of coffee.

The Clean Caf clears the inside bits of the machine, and gives you a pot full of piping hot cleaner at the end. But wait! There's more!

I drop my ringer cast iron cleaner into the carafe. If you don't have one of these for cleaning your cast iron pans, you should get one right now! It's also handy for uses like this, so I love it a ton.

Once the Clean Caf and the ringer are in the pot, I screw the lid in and shake the heck out of it for a couple of minutes. Swirls and shakes and it lets the ringer get in all the nooks and crannies inside the pot.

Then, this is the really pleasing part, you dump it out. Look at this liquid! Eeeeew! That was a CLEAN coffee pot! Gross.

Take a peek inside and you can see the dramatic difference!

The directions say you should clean monthly, but we do ours more like quarterly, and think it works just fine. Fortunately, you can put the Clean Caf Coffee Machine Cleaning powder on Amazon Subscribe and Save and have it show up every few months to help remind you to do it! You get 3 packets of cleaner in a box, and I usually do two rounds when I do it.

Run two or three rounds of just clean water to be sure to get all the cleanser out of the machine, and you'll be enjoying the best coffee ever in no time!