Review: GE Café Specialty Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

If you want to know what the best coffee machines on the market are, you should look at the Specialty Coffee Association's list of certified home brewers. To get on the SCA's list, a coffee maker has to be able to hit some exacting standards like brewing time, water temperature, and even an easy-to-understand instruction manual. It's a high barrier to entry, but a great way for consumers to know the machine can make a good cup of joe.

The SCA list is excellent but not infallible, which I realized as soon as I saw the huge box for the Café Specialty Grind and Brew, an exciting machine made by GE that has a built-in coffee grinder. Fill the tank with water, pour beans into the hopper, and hit Start. Fresh grounds flow down through a cutout in the showerhead, straight into the filter. You decide how much you want, from a cup to a carafe, and the machine doses the beans and the water and starts brewing. Unfortunately, it's big and not as versatile as you might think.

Big and Tall

I instantly thought of aircraft carriers when I pulled the machine out of the cardboard, as it's about 14 inches wide, 10.5 inches deep, and 17 inches high, which is on the high end of ginormous by coffeemaker standards. Think twice unless you have acres of counter space. Part of this volume comes from having a built-in grinder, yet something similar like Breville's Grind Control is notably smaller.

Still, I was intrigued. There are enough bits and bobs that figuring it out takes more than a second. On the left side is a large water tank in the shape of a lava lamp. On the right is an extra-tall looking brewer, that height masking the built-in bean hopper and grinder. Underneath the brew basket is a large thermal carafe that pours quite well.

The range of options is impressive. You choose the volume of coffee and strength you want, and it controls the amount of water and grounds used. You can tweak water temperature and grind size, and can opt to use the bloom function, a grounds-dampening pre-funk that allows them to release carbon dioxide before the real brew cycle begins. A delay brew function allows you to wake to a hot cup. You can also choose between using a metal or paper flat-bottomed filter. There's even an app that's pleasingly pared-down and utilitarian.

Using French Sumatra beans from Seattle's Lighthouse Roasters, a favorite dark roast of mine, I made my first full pot. Imperfect coffee on the first go is normal, but what was a little more troubling after brewing was finding spent grounds on the underside of the brew basket lid and, more impressively, coating the underside of the showerhead, both of which were a total pain to clean. This came either from static created during grinding—a common problem with grinders—or from grounds being belched upward during brewing. I asked a company rep about this and they confirmed that it could be either, but was "normal." (Facepalm.) Thankfully, this didn't happen every time, and you might be able to get around some of the static by misting beans with a bit of water pre-grind, but when it's a mess, it's a hot one.

From there, I played with temperatures, volumes, and the six grind size settings, working my way toward a cup I liked. There were quirks, but it could make good coffee and I liked playing with the temperature and tasting the effect on the coffee. The machine also has a tiny filter basket which you can use to brew between 6 and 24 ounces of coffee. Full-size brewers that can also make great single cups are an excellent trend over the past few years, but I just got frustrated with this one. The coffee came out thin and depressing, and despite all of the machine's options, it couldn't seem to fix it. If I woke up to a mugful of this, I'd be angry.

Yet this machine's unforgivable sin is the lack of dishwasher-friendliness. It comes with a veritable stack of parts, yet none can go in the dishwasher. Of course a thermal carafe can't go in there, but being able to throw the filter basket, either of the metal filters, and the showerhead in the dee-dub sure would go a long way to tamping down the resentment.

Looking at the Numbers

With testing going up and down, I was happy to bring the Café to the lab at Olympia Coffee Roasters in Seattle, where I was eager to get co-owner and award-winning barista Sam Schroeder's take. Sam noted that combo brewers are simple, but unfortunately if one or the other breaks—the grinder or the brewer—that makes the whole machine useless.

He immediately went ratio hunting, first weighing out the amount of water it ran through in a coffee-less cycle, followed by the amount of dry grounds it made for the same cycle, and determined it was a 1 to 16 grounds-to-water ratio. That was perfect, actually—exactly what it says to use on the bag of Little Buddy beans we were brewing.

Using a spectrometer and a coffee-nerd app, Sam verified that it hit its marks with a total dissolved solids score of 1.4, meaning it was the right strength, and the extraction percentage was 19.26, meaning the coffee was balanced. More importantly, it tasted great. A lot of home brewers can't get the water hot enough, or give the grounds too much or too little time in contact with water. Here, you can press a button and it does well.

Unfortunately, things started to quickly go downhill. For batch two, it ground 88 grams of coffee instead of 85, an unavoidable flaw with a grinder like this that works based on the amount of time the burrs are spinning, not the weight of the beans it grinds. With batch three, it ran out of beans in the middle of the brew cycle and kept going like nothing was wrong. We lost a bunch of coffee and had to start over, a big downer. When I checked in with a company rep about this, they said it should automatically stop, but that they had realized it wasn't sensitive enough and were going to update the software, and hopefully that would fix it.

We also tried the single-cup brewing, which really did not work well. The basket is peculiarly small and metal mesh filter only; using a paper filter really isn't an option. The small filter basket isn't even mentioned in some of the literature, making us wonder if it was added on at the last minute. The first cup came out poorly. Subsequent efforts were better, but Sam noted it doesn't compare to full-pot quality. To put it bluntly, Sam said, “This isn't a single-cup brewer. I'm not sure it's able to be good.”

We were all still impressed with the Café's full and even half-full carafe brewing capabilities. We liked playing around with the temperature, a rare ability in a coffee machine and a coffee nerd's delight, and found that while there were only six grind settings, they were enough for a drip machine. We also found its styling to be what you might call "divisive." No one could go as far as calling the Café "good looking." That, combined with its size, reminded me of something you might see on a countertop in McMansion Hell. (If you have never visited that website, you're welcome.)

If you like coffee, don't mind an initial bit of tinkering, and want that push-button ability of having a grinder built into your coffee machine, this could work well. It offers fun features to take advantage of, but the app could be souped up a bit. Asking a few questions following a brew—whether the coffee is too strong, weak, sour, or bitter—then making or suggesting changes for the next batch would be incredibly helpful. (Midea's forthcoming Barista Brew is supposed to do something like that.) In fact, I was feeling kindly about it, until I remembered the lack of dishwasher-able parts and my lack of an aircraft runway to store it. A six it is, then.