In an age of aesthetically pleasing morning routines, a cheap electric coffee maker can feel a little out of date — something to use reluctantly in the office, not a gadget that brings joy to your kitchen. While I love fancy coffee gadgets that require manual, multi-step rituals, there’s one thing that makes me turn to the standard Mr. Coffee maker every morning: its incredibly simple “brew now” button that instantly starts caffeinated into my body.
Single-button operation means I don’t have to navigate complicated brew temperatures or ratios while I’m half asleep. I just press it and it lights up and the machine clucks, heats the water and pushes it up the tube over the coffee grounds I add to it. The only decision I had to make was how much coffee I needed to get through the day.
Indeed, the waiting was the hardest part.Photo by Mitchell Clark/The Verge
While its controls are as simple as Keurig’s, Mr. Coffee does require you to do more than just pop up a pod and press that button. At the very least, you have to get out a paper filter, scoop some coffee, and fill the tank before pressing at some point to brew. (Although this can be done the night before.) The simplicity of Mr. Coffee lets you complicate the process with hand-ground coffee, reusable filters, and more, if you want, but it doesn’t Require More Instagram-friendly mokas, philharmonic presses and rituals from Chemexs.
While there are many other coffee makers with more advanced features that also turn on with the push of a button, it’s hard to imagine a better version of this button than the one on my Mr. Coffee. It’s big enough that you don’t have to be precise early in the morning. It also sounds unbelievable, but it’s mostly due to the loud “click” the machine makes as it starts to heat up. But because it turns on as soon as the button is pressed, my brain interprets the click of the electronics as the click of a button (sort of like how the new AirPods play when you squeeze the stem).
Add filters. Add coffee. add water. Push the button.Photo by Mitchell Clark/The Verge
This might come as a surprise given how good the buttons are no The expensive coffee machine we are talking about. My Mr. Coffee, a five-cup version, is one of the brand’s cheapest offerings. (Note: Mr. Coffee’s “cup” is not the same as the US measure of volume – it means five ounces, which means my machine can brew about two cups of coffee).My Best Buy order history tells me that I bought it for around $25 last year, just as I started edge And realized my mornings were getting too busy for my Chemex ritual. Since then, somehow, the coffee maker is $4 cheaper.
While there are other coffee makers with buttons that look the same, when you upgrade to a more expensive model, an interesting thing starts to happen: you run the risk that the buttons actually get worse. I’ve seen coffee machines with brew buttons that are small and part of a crowded panel. The scary thing is that some even have touch-sensitive buttons.
I wouldn’t judge anyone for choosing a fancier model to decorate their countertops, but that’s not for me. I love that I can operate the machine responsible for giving me caffeine with only 2% of my brain capacity. May the “brew now” button endure a few more years of sleepiness – like the snooze button that I may or may not hit a few times before finding Mr. coffee.