While most coffee makers are capped at 10- or 12-cup capacity, the Cuisinart DCC-3200 gives you a little extra volume by brewing 14 “full” cups of quality coffee.
I put “full” in quotation marks because a cup, by Cuisinart’s definition, is a 5 oz serving. That means the DCC-3200 will brew up to 70 oz of coffee. For someone like me, that’s more like 5-7 cups — but the overall point holds. Those 2 extra cups gives you another 10 oz of coffee.
With a cone-shaped filter basket, a brew strength selector, and a special brew setting for 5-20 oz servings, the DCC-3200 is capable of tailoring the brew to your specifications with a reasonable amount of customization.
There isn’t a temperature selector or high altitude setting, but this coffee maker will brew sufficiently hot coffee north of 190°F for those under 5,000 feet of elevation.
The DCC-3200 has a Brew Pause feature that lets you pause the brew process to pour your necessary first cup as soon as its ready. It’s a nice feature, but note that the Brew Pause feature doesn’t stop the flow of water into the filter basket. Cuisinart warns that pausing for more than 20 seconds could result in basket overflow.
It takes about 8 minutes to brew a full 14 cup, 70 oz pot. On the surface that seems like quite the wait, but it averages out to 8.75 oz per minute. That’s comparable to some of the faster single serve K-Cup style brewers that deliver a full cup of coffee in 60 seconds. The 8 minute wait is the price you pay for having 14 cups of brew capacity.
I used this coffee maker for 3 weeks and had absolutely no issues with it during that time. I was impressed with its build and it was extremely easy to clean. I especially loved the 1-4 cup brew size selector, because I didn’t always want a full 14 cup pot. Programming this coffee maker is easy (instructions below) and it makes great tasting coffee, thanks in large part to the cone-shaped filter.
My supplemental research turned up similarly impressed Cuisinart customers. In fact, this coffee maker is one of the highest-rated coffee makers on Amazon with most users giving it great marks because of its durability, simplicity and quality of brew.
