Description
Description
Bring the coffeehouse home with the Ninja Specialty Coffee maker. Combine super-rich Coffee concentrates with hot or cold frothed milk to create delicious coffeehouse style drinks or enjoy flavorful Iced Coffee that never tastes watered down. Brew anything from a single cup to a half carafe or a full carafe using your favorite grounds—no pods requireSPECIALTY BREW: Brew super-rich coffee concentrate that you can use to create delicious lattes, macchiatos, cappuccinos, and other coffeehouse-style drinks.
ICED COFFEE: Brew fresh over ice for flavorful iced coffee that’s never watered down.
6 BREW SIZES: Brew anything from a single cup or travel size to a half carafe or a full carafe in your coffee maker
NO PODS REQUIRED: Up to Dollar-200 in annual savings using grounds vs pods Based on a 2.5-cup daily average consumption of popular coffee brands
FOLD-AWAY FROTHER: Turns hot or cold milk into silky-smooth froth
WHAT’S INCLUDED: Ninja Specialty Coffee Maker, 50 oz (10-cup) glass carafe, Fold-away frother, Gold-tone permanent filter, Ninja Smart Scoop, Removable water reservoir, Recipe inspiration guide, Quick start guide & Owner’s Ninja 10-Cup Specialty Coffee Maker, with 50 Oz Glass Carafe, Stainless Steel
guided
Don Kirkpatrick –
Coffee and Tea Back to Back:
So… a lot of times when you hear about coffee makers that also make tea, all I think about is the awful taste of having coffee grounds in your tea >_<. Tea is often an afterthought for a lot of manufacturers. That's not the case with this machine.
They really thought this design through and I am able to use it for both coffee and tea back to back without any extensive cleaning. The trick? The entire brewing basket comes off and they have two separate brewing baskets, one for coffee and one for tea. At no point will the water will touch any component that has touched any coffee grounds when you have the tea basket in, and vice versa. I've seriously made a cup of tea immediately after my husband brewed a cup of coffee without having to clean or even rinse anything. I just swapped the baskets.
Tea Basket:
So, one thing I will say is that the tea basket is a pain in the ass to clean when brewing loose leaf tea. There's a filter that clips into the bottom to prevent tea leaves getting into your cup, but it doesn't do that great of a job at keeping the leaves out. Granted, I've been brewing maté that's been cut very fine so that is definitely a factor. I'm sure if you were brewing green tea or earl grey, it'd be fine.
The other problem is that the brew basket does fill most of the way up, and the tea will tend to float up with it, then stick to the sides when it drains. This is what makes it hard to clean. They don't really concentrate on the bottom (again, this also may be more pronounced with the maté) so you really have to clean the whole thing, and dumping the tea can be difficult.
However, I did come up with a great solution that fixes all of this. I just remove the filter at the bottom and use my old tea infuser in the basket. This solves all of these problems completely. No mess and no leaves in my cup. I just dump the tea from the infuser straight in the trash when done and then rinse the infuser and basket. Way, way easier to clean and it's how I recommend brewing cups of tea in this machine. If you're brewing a half carafe or a full carafe, then the cleaning hassle would be worth it for that large quantity.
Coffee:
We bought this machine after a lot of research when our Keurig broke. We were done having to buy pods. I We definitely didn't feel good about the amount of plastic we kept having to throw away (we don't have recycling where I live) and it's also much more expensive. However, I don't think, with the cost of this brewer, we're going to make up the cost of pods anytime soon.
It brews a great cup of coffee, though. We found that the reuseable filter it came with doesn't do a good job, so we switched to unbleached paper filters instead and we have been able to reproduce the consistency and flavor that we liked from our K-cups with it. My husband drinks his coffee black, no sugar, and very much enjoys the flavor of the coffee now with the paper filters. For the record, we were a big fan of the Dunkin' Original, medium roast k-cups and are using the same brand and flavor ground coffee from a bag.
The paper filters also make it easier to clean. Just throw the filter out and rinse the basket. It's only slightly more inconvenient than using a pod because we have to scoop out our own coffee, but even then, the included scoop makes that super convenient as well.
Features:
This machine has a ton of great features. I've used all but the cold brew feature with both tea and coffee and it works great. Want an iced tea? You can have it in minutes. Same with iced coffee. It's really simple to use and everything works as advertised. We bought the version with the thermal carafe because we're not big fans of how coffee tastes when it's been sitting on a burner for a while and the thermal carafe does a great job at keeping the coffee warm for a while.
Overall:
I highly recommend this brewer. I find it worth the $200 we paid for it and its been a huge upgrade to our mornings.
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