Review: GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker

In my mind, GE is a manufacturer of big, boxy appliances. They're the folks for reliable and relatively affordable stoves and the manufacturers of the monolithic silver Monogram-line fridge  that I once carted across town with my brother-in-law. That kind of thing.

I don't usually think of them as Mr. Coffee's competitors, yet their new coffee maker is. Part of the company's artsy, tech-savvy Café line, it's also one of a small group of coffee makers to have Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) approval, a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal for coffee nerds that fairly guarantees a good cup for consumers. It's a fairly attractive coffee maker, but for the price, it just doesn't make a very interesting cup.

Worn Off White

At first glance, the GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker is easy to like. Pop it out of the box and you'll be able to make a pot without looking at the instructions. The GE Café has an app, and you can connect it to your Wi-Fi network, but all of the key features are accessible on the machine, so you can leave the app in the App Store if you're not interested.

There are four brew strength options: Light, Medium, Bold, and Gold, the latter being set to SCA specs. The water temperature for the non-Gold settings can be adjusted between 185 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing you to dial in your brew. (In the GE, the Gold setting is the same as the Medium setting, but the temperature is locked in at 200 degrees.)

It's good-looking thing, available in stainless, matte black, and what I might call “Tatooine kitchen” white. My review unit was one of the matte white models, and while that finish looks cool, it's a peculiar option considering coffee's ability to stain.

Plus, with a rectangular footprint and controls on the long axis, it forces you to position it on your countertop in a way that hogs space, a trap that my personal favorite, the OXO 8-Cup Coffee Maker (9/10, WIRED Recommends) avoids. And while the OXO has dishwasher-safe parts, the GE has none.

Tinkering With Taste

Good coffee is the result of a host of factors like bean and roast quality, grind size, brew time, water temperature, and water quality, to name a few. Start from a good base and you can tweak your way to perfection, one variable at a time.

In my test kitchen, comparing it to nothing but itself, that base felt solid—the SCA approval at work! The coffee was good, but I wanted to go deeper with my friends from Olympia Coffee in their Seattle lab. I met co-owner Sam Schroeder and retail trainer Reyna Callejo, who had brought her Breville Precision Brewer Thermal coffee maker (7/10, WIRED Review) from home, which was a big help. It's an excellent machine and direct competition for the GE Café, perfect for head-to-head testing.

Sam and Reyna immediately did the thing coffee nerds do around a new gadget, hovering over it, enthusiastically pressing all the buttons, opening and closing anything that could be open and closed, marveling at the little replaceable water filter, appreciating the nice, wide shower head—the part where the hot water emerges above the grounds—and wondering aloud if it would actually distribute the water evenly. Looking back, it was about here where tiny metaphorical cracks in the matte plastic began to show.

The key tests we'd do would be straightforward: make large and small batches where all variables would be as equal as possible between the two machines, then compare the quality of the resulting coffee. Doing that turned out to be a little more of an issue than we anticipated. While the Breville brews all the water you put in it, you can fill the GE's tank to the brim and tell it how many cups to brew. This can be a nice feature, but without getting lost in the details, Sam and Reyna figured out that it spits out more than it says it does.

Thankfully, it's consistent to itself, so you'll be able to dial it in at home. As they brewed, Reyna also appreciated the relative silence of the GE as compared to her beloved Breville.

We brewed a few batches of different (matching) sizes, then would taste, make notes, and compare them. Big batch or small, the machines were impressively consistent to themselves; A cup from a big batch tasted like a cup from a small batch.

Between the three of us, our opinions were consistent too. Big batch or small, the Breville produced a better, more interesting, more nuanced cup. The GE coffee tasted good until you compared it to the Breville. Our descriptions of the GE coffee ranged from “toasty” to “oversteeped tea,” and also included “flatter,” “sharp,” and “coppery.” Compare that with “more nuance” with the Breville's coffee, which we also considered “honeyed,” “fuller,” “richer,” and “rounder.”

A post-perk peek inside the brew basket provided potential clues. The damp grounds in the Breville remained fairly flat, while in the GE, there was often a divot in the center, as if something had splashed into the center and grounds had washed up around the edge. Sam and Reyna also determined that the wet grounds in the Breville weighed more than those in the GE, indicating that the GE's were less evenly extracted.

“That coppery flavor we picked up on is a classic indicator of over- and underextraction,” Reyna said, explaining how grounds in one part of the basket—often the center—have too much contact with water, while other areas like around the top edge, are barely damp.

You'd hope that at the $300-$350 level, they'd both make equally fantastic coffee out of the box, but our testing and taste buds found otherwise. When you consider that additional competition like the OXO 8-Cup costs $170, and an Aeropress is about $30, the math is pretty bad.

This isn't to say that you can't tweak your way to a good, or even great and consistent cup that you'll be happy with for the life of the machine, but if even seasoned coffee professionals can't quite figure it out, that doesn't bode well for the average coffee drinker. “We're coffee professionals, and needing to figure out all of this stuff is not a good sign,” Sam said. “A really good home brewer shouldn't require all that figuring out.”