Melitta 10-cup Manual Review

The super-cheap Melitta 10-cup manual may be less convenient than an automatic pot, but unlike any budget automatic, it earns almost perfect ratings from consumers. It's basically a large, plastic cone that sits on top of a 10-cup carafe and holds the brand's cone-shaped filters. Users must boil water first and pour it directly onto the grounds. Melitta manual reviews at Coffee Geek declare this method the surest way to make good coffee. A blogger posting at Java Jenius explains that the Melitta gives you more control over the coffee-making process: If you pour water through the filter all at once, you'll make a weaker but smoother coffee. Pouring carefully and slowly yields a stronger brew.

Saturating the grounds with just-boiled water extracts more flavor from the coffee than automatic drip and results in a fuller-bodied brew, according to the experts at Coffee Review. Coffee purists can also stir the grounds as they steep.

Melitta manual reviews indicate that many adherents came to this contraption after becoming disgusted with automatic-drip machines' lack of durability. In a Melitta manual review on Amazon, for instance, one consumer says she used to go through one every two years. Another did a back-to-back taste test with an expensive automatic-drip machine and found that the taste of the coffee from this little low-tech device was far superior -- smoother and less bitter. A purchaser who posted a Melitta manual review at Walmart points out that it can come in handy during a power failure. Both pieces are top-rack dishwasher-safe.

There are some drawbacks to using a manual coffee maker, of course. Perhaps foremost is the inconvenience of waiting for water to boil in a separate kettle and having to stand over the cone to pour in the water, rather than having it drip through automatically. That means you can forget about waking up to an already-brewed pot. There is also no heated plate on which the carafe can sit. (However, you can always brew coffee into an insulated pot or directly into a cup, rather than into the included carafe.) Note that if you buy budget coffee in a can at the supermarket, you will not see the benefits of the Melitta 10-cup manual, which requires very finely ground coffee.

Provided these disadvantages don't faze you, you can't buy a better coffee maker for the money -- or even for a lot more money.