Cuisinart DCC-T20 14-Cup Programmable Coffeemaker

Me gustó mucho tiene funciones que te ayudan y simplifican su uso , puedes dejarla preparada para solo despertar y servirte café muy buena cafetera

Beautiful, modern machine that brews delicious coffee

This is my third Cuisinart coffee maker of a similar type and it is hands down the my favorite! Each of the prior ones lasted about five years. They may have lasted longer had I been more faithful to proper cleaning but they eventually suffered from hard water lime buildup. They have all made a fine cup of coffee. But pot alone, no matter the brand or cost, will turn pre-ground grocery store coffee into a great cup! I grind my own coffee right before use, measured by weight for each pot, from locally roasted beans.

So what makes it my favorite? It’s sleek and absolutely beautiful on my kitchen counter! The surface is easy to clean, with no buttons to collect dirt. It makes 14 cups, two cups more than my other Cuisinarts. And I love the digital display. There’s really nothing complicated about it if you pay attention to the instructions. Touch sensitivity is good and it holds previous settings from pot to pot unless you want to make a change. I love the side window that shows water level! With my older Cuisinarts I would…honest to gosh…have to stand on my tippietoes with a flashlight to look down into the water well and make sure I didn’t overfill.

The purchase of pot alone includes a reusable filter, no need to buy that separately, but be aware that those filters will allow sediment to drip through to your pot and spoil the cup. It also includes one water filter, which is quite easy to change, but after filtering my water in a Brita pitcher I find no need to refilter the water. The pot works just as normal without it.

It arrived extremely well packaged. In fact it was almost like opening a Russian Matryoshka doll with a cardboard box inside a larger cardboard box and inside those was the store display box with the pot inside protected by more cardboard…no Styrofoam…bonus! I doubt anything less than a truck running over it could have broken the glass carafe.

Like my previous Cuisinarts, settings allow you to turn off the burner as soon as the coffee has dripped through. Or you can choose H, M or L temperature if you like but leaving coffee on a hot burner makes for burnt tasting coffee very quickly. Much tastier to rewarm in the microwave if it has cooled. There’s a wide range of settings, so it’s easy to personalize in a way that meets your needs. How long it will last is hard to say but my previous Cuisinarts served me well for years and hopefully this one will too.

When my Hamilton Beach coffee maker decided to stop working after 7 years of daily use, I took a peek at Consumer Reports to see what they recommended – and saw the Cuisinart DCC-T20 among their top-rated. That very day, I ordered one from Amazon, along with a package of Melitta #4 Cone Coffee Filters. I’ve used the same brand of coffee beans and the same grind (I have a burr grinder) for years so I was able to compare the “quality of the cup” easily. I can without reservation tell you that the Cuisinart DCC-T20 coffee maker, paired with the Melitta #4 filters, makes an outstanding pot of coffee.
Controls on this model are pressure-sensitive “buttons” hidden behind a shiny black face-plate. A gentle tap on the always-visible On/Off “button” makes all of the others light up. The options available are self-evident and I found the black face-plate surprisingly resistant to greasy fingerprint smudges. I drink my coffee black and use a dark roasted bean, with my grind set between expresso and drip (medium fine?). I prefer to taste the flavor of the coffee beans – and *not* cream and sugar (bleh), so I always tap the “bold” setting on. I also make 8 cups at a time, so I’ve never used the 1-4 cups setting. I did have to prepare a pot very early in the morning once, and relied on the timer to fire-up the machine at 4 AM. It worked flawlessly, thank goodness…!
The coffee maker comes with about 30 seconds worth of assembly required: a small water filter that looks like a miniature oval Keureg cup must be (unwrapped and) pressed into its holder at the base of a plastic wand. Once this done, the wand itself is inserted into the open corner where water is poured. The base of the wand slips snugly into a hole at the bottom of the water reservoir. You’ll have to pass a couple of carafes of plain water through the coffee-making cycle in order to remove any charcoal dust from the filter element. Once you’ve done this, you’re all set.
I included a photo – untouched and unabashedly displaying all its early morning glory – of what the cone filter looks like after making my standard 8-cup pot. You can see that the spent coffee grind never approaches the top of the filter, so there’s never a chance that you’ll find any stray grinds at the bottom of a cup. I can’t vouch for the same result if you use other filter size/brands.
My only complaint is a minor one: the corner opening where the water is poured into the reservoir is, by design, a bit small when using the carafe itself to fill the reservoir. There is an opaque plastic window that runs up one side of the DCC with a scale that matches up perfectly with the 14-cup scale etched onto the glass of the carafe. So if you use a separate vessel to fill the coffee maker, you can use this and be assured that your water volume is accurate – and doing so would eliminate this complaint. BTW, the footprint of the coffee maker is about 7″ X 9″ X 14.”