Cuisinart 14-Cup Programmable Review

The Cuisinart 14-Cup Programmable is a dependable machine that makes a good-tasting cup of coffee. With its larger batch size brewing capabilities, this brewer is perfect for anyone with a household full of coffee drinkers.

Performance Comparison

Brew Quality

The Cuisinart 14-Cup essentially brews a basic cup of coffee — nothing really stood out. It gets close to but does not reach the industry standard for water temperature, an important metric for extracting the most flavor from your coffee. Water distribution is also an important piece of brewing great coffee. Unfortunately, this brewer ranked below average in water distribution. After brewing, the grounds have a deeper than normal dip in the center of the brew bed, suggesting water channeling through the center.

Keep in mind that water quality is also crucial to brewing a quality cup. With this in mind, Cuisinart provides a charcoal filter in the water tank of this brewer, an added feature we really appreciate.

User Friendliness

In our user friendliness testing, the Cuisinart fell into the large group of average performers. 14-Cup Programmable interface is difficult to navigate without reading the instruction booklet first. There is a lot to remember with this brewer; in the beginning, you will likely need to reference the booklet often.

The 14-Cup Programmable comes with many customizable features, including; an adjustable warming plate, adjustable automatic shut-off, and a 1-4 cup smaller brew size option. This brewer also has an adjustable tone that indicates when the coffee finishes brewing. Other features include a bold brew setting and a separate button for the cleaning cycle.

Ease of Cleaning

The Cuisinart was fairly easy to clean in some aspects but not so much in others. It lost points for its reusable mesh filter. While we love that a reusable filter reduces waste, this undeniably adds more effort to the cleaning process.

The outside of the brewer requires some more rigorous cleaning. Dark plastic brewers are better at hiding fingerprints than the metallic material on the 14-Cup. The carafe is easy to clean, and both it and the reusable filter are dishwashers safe for periodic deep cleaning. With left-handed folks in mind, measurement markings are printed on both sides of the carafe. The descaling process took a full hour but was fairly easy to do.

Consistency

In order to ensure consistency, we brewed exactly five pots of coffee to measure the water temperature stability, brew time, and flavor preservation of this coffee maker. The 14-Cup Programmable averaged a temperature fluctuation of slightly over two degrees. This coffee maker performs quite well in brew time consistency as it has only a one-second difference between pots. The 14-Cup receives did not retain its flavor well, which isn't surprising without a hotplate or thermal carafe to keep the coffee warm.

Value

The Cuisinart 14-Cup Programmable certainly isn't a cheap machine. It will produce an adequate cup of coffee — but nothing that wowed us. We recommend looking at other models that perform similarly at a better price point.

Conclusion