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Okay, straighten this out once and for all.

Most consumer electric coffee-makers now have a valve that closes off the brewing coffee flow when the decanter is removed. Put the decanter back, the valve opens and drip continues.

I can't see any reason for this valve to exist except for one:

To allow a user to pour a cup of coffee before such time as the entire pot is finished brewing.

Yet, I have found myself in knock-down drag-out fights over use of this common feature. You wouldn't believe the shit I've heard.

Don't do that, it's not done brewing. Well, enough of it is done to pour a cup. Why do you think the valve is there?

Don't do that, it makes the rest of the pot taste bad. No, it doesn't. I've tested it. An "early" cup tastes no different than the last cup to come out of the pot (unless the late cup has sat there exposed to air for a long time)

Don't do that, you're taking the "good" coffee. No, there's not any difference between taking the first-brewed liquid and the last-brewed. If there were, there's be a difference in taste between the first-brewed and last-brewed coffee and there isn't (unless there's a lot of air exposure as mentioned above). Plus, coffee doesn't "stack", it mixes.

Don't do that, it'll spill. No, it won't spill because there's a valve there. To keep it from spilling. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Don't do that, it violates the EULA. Okay, I'm kidding about that one.

-r

Just get the Keurig one-cup coffee makers. Stick in a little cuppie of your favorite brew, push a button and you've got yourself a fresh cup. Your flatmate or office co-worker can then get his own cup immediately thereafter.

"Flatmate"? What, are you British now?

That bugger got me in a world of hurt.

I don't drink coffee. I don't like the smell. I really have had nothing to do with coffee my entire life. This would change when I started interning at a studio. There it was expected I somehow knew things about this mysterious brown liquid that appeared quite precious to members of the music industry... this liquid called "coffee."

Now, never before in my life had I made a cup of coffee. I am, however, not retarded, and it seemed pretty intuitive. When I was asked to 'brew a pot' I thought to myself, "I have no idea what makes a good pot of coffee good, but I can atleast make one." So I pulled the blue bag of expensive looking coffee that had the address of a local coffee shop in old city out of the freezer. Filled the filter, filled the water, and went about my way.

Minutes later the engineer ran down to get a cup. He returned empty-handed and said to me, "The, uh, coffee machine needs to be... uh... dealt with..." I went down to find coffee foaming out of the top of the machine and running down the sides onto the table and finally the floor. Not a drop in the pot.

You can guess what I did wrong. Thinking "Well, the coffee will drip into this pot as it brews, I had better leave the top open." Therefore never opening the valve to let drip. The water filled the filter area until it started spilling over the sides as well as back into the water chamber, where it would be pumped back up and the cycle continued.

Some embarrassment and some serious cleaning shortly ensued.

I power down at least four cups of joe each morning. I take it with milk/cream only. I get headaches when I don't have coffee, which means I'm probably fully addicted to it. I've been drinking this much each day for about 25 years.

Even I can wait for a pot to brew before I grab a cup.

The interrupt valve is a useless addition to the drip coffee maker, and only makes the machine more complex and more likely to break.

Crap. No foods.

zom-zom wrote:"Flatmate"? What, are you British now?

If by 'British' you mean 'recently-maced-with-his-own-pepper-spray' then yes, he's British now.

ubercat wrote:Even I can wait for a pot to brew before I grab a cup.

The interrupt valve is a useless addition to the drip coffee maker...

Well, of course you can wait - in fact you have to wait because for some reason you think the valve doesn't work.

But why should I wait, since I know the valve works? Skatingbasser knows the valve works, and he hates coffee.

I took co-worker complaints seriously enough to taste-test and found using the valve does nothing, zip, nada to the taste or quality of the remainder of the pot. At all.

So what am I supposed to do, pretend I'm doing something wrong when I and the engineers at Braun, Krups, Sunbeam et al. know otherwise?

-r

The only situation where it is excusable to steal the first cupsworth would be if you are the sole person to be drinking from that pot of coffee.

The first cup of hot water will have extracted a greater amount of the beans goodies relative to the water that follows. If you can't taste the difference than you're surely not worthy of the flavor cup, and you're selfish .

bluegreengold wrote:The first cup of hot water will have extracted a greater amount of the beans goodies relative to the water that follows. If you can't taste the difference than you're surely not worthy of the flavor cup, and you're selfish .

I thought that might be true and it might pan out on professional equipment. But not anywhere I've worked lately. Consider a questionably-kept drip maker with unfiltered water in a 1920s office tower - it doesn't make great coffee at any point and the difference between first and last cup (as consumed right after brewing, so there's no lengthy air-exposure of the latter cup) is undetectable.

At the last office, we did blind taste-tests with three people (not all at once, informally, over a few weeks) and I wasn't the only one who couldn't spot the difference. We defeated the valve and brewed right into a cup, then put the decanter back and poured a cup from that. At a blind tasting, nobody could tell a difference except one woman who liked the later cup better. No results supporting the don't-use-the-valve complaining.

I was suspicious that people were reacting negatively to seeing someone using the valve, not because they tasted any difference. And even after it was basically proven that they were reacting to their eyes rather than their taste buds, they still kept up the complaints.

-r

I get the impression, from all the blind taste tests and coffee discussion, that you work in IT.

I don't know about better. The coffee solution will obviously be stronger at the beginning, and weaker by the time it reaches the end of it's flow, averaging out in the pot. This is probably more noticable in a larger pot.

But if they've proved they can't tell the difference, then they should probably get over it.