January 11, 2013 - Cleaning the Coffee Pot

Stephen has been gone all day to Chicago and is on his way home now. Since he wasn't going to be home all night I had to find a way to entertain myself. I'm such a wild girl that I cleaned our coffee pot.

Stephen keeps complaining about my "rank" coffee. I don't know what his problem is! Just because I drink the Dollar Tree coffee to keep our grocery budget down... and then Mom and Dad supplied me with an abundance of chocolate, vanilla, and hazelnut coffee for my birthday! The point is, he keeps saying how bad it smells and that it affects the flavor of his coffee. I realized today that I'm not quite sure when we last cleaned our coffee pot. So I got to it tonight.

This is a super easy task and should be done about once a month.

Step 1 - Pull out your carafe. Take a picture and try to figure out if it really is too dank to post a picture on your blog.

Throw out the coffee filter (if you have one in there already). Rinse your carafe (i.e. the glass container that holds the finished product). Put a clean filter in the machine.

Step 2 - Fill the pot with one part white vinegar to two parts water. In our 12-cup coffee maker I filled it up to 4 cups with vinegar and the rest of the way with water. Pour this into the coffee maker's reservoir.

Step 3 - Brew it. Once it's done, shut off the coffee maker. Let it sit in the coffee pot for about 20 minutes. This will loosen those hard deposits.

Step 4 - Throw out the vinegar and water. Rinse the pot and put it through the entire cycle two more times with nothing but clean water. Let it sit for about 15 minutes in between each cycle. This will rinse out the vinegar and any other residue.

Step 5 - Wash everything with warm water and dish soap to remove any residual staining.

Step 6 - Cringe when you really start to think about how long ago it was that you cleaned this coffee pot. Never again!!