This Is the Best Way to Get Fresh Ground Coffee That Stays Warm for Hours

I’ve always loved a good cup of coffee. During my senior year of high school and those long college summers, instead of doing homework or or looking for a summer job, I whiled away hours at a local coffee shop in downtown Alexandria, VA, sucking back cup after cup of inky black perfection. In travels to Europe, I discovered the magic that is Spain’s café con leche. And then, sometime in the latter years of the first decade of the 21st century, my wife and I got a Cuisinart 10-Cup Grind & Brew Auto Coffee Maker and damned if we haven’t been making great coffee at home ever since.

Granted, great coffee starts with great beans, and you need to find the blend and the roast that you prefer. Once you do that, you can fiddle with all manner of pour-over fanciness, handheld grinders, and French press frustration, or you can go full auto like we did. And even after re-purchasing it multiple times over after not only breaking the grinder, but knocking the entire thing off of the counter, I can say we’ll never look back.

You’ll need to go through a few brews to lock in how you like your fresh joe – for the two of us, it’s eight cups’ worth in the carafe and the grinder filled to exactly level – but once you do, you will have amazing fresh coffee that’s pretty much idiot-proofed. Fill the reservoir, add the beans, and press the “ON/OFF” button to grind then brew your coffee. And that’s it.

But wait! There’s more! Get fancy and schedule your brew up to 24 hours out, so you can wake to a fresh cup (well, likely you’ll be awakened by the admittedly jarring GRRR WHIRR GRRRRRRR grinding noises, which are not exactly pleasant – oh well). Or you want a smaller pot so you use the “1-4 CUP” setting that makes sure your brew isn’t watery.

Finally, you can always use ground coffee too; you just add it to the permanent filter and turn the grinder off. But that kind of defeats the point here.

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