Waking up in the morning is a truly Sisyphean effort. If you, like me, are committed to being a morning person purely out of an impulse to be a Real Adult, you probably solve this by filling yourself with coffee as soon as humanly possible. After years of searching for the most efficient way to inject caffeine into my bloodstream without literally doing so, I’ve found The Perfect Coffee Machine — and it is so unbelievably sad.
Back in June, I bought a Hamilton Beach 12 Cup Programmable Coffee Maker as a way to stop spending exorbitant amounts of money on coffee.
The $44.99 machine is cold, gray, and uninspiring, like the kind of coffee maker you’d expect a little league coach to use to “fuel up before the big game.” Seriously, this spartan robot is so frills-free its style name on Amazon is simply “coffee maker.”
In any case, I ordered the machine on Prime expecting nothing but a vessel for my caffeine addiction — and hell was I wrong. You don’t have to read the directions to know just how this bad boy works: simply fill the carafe with water, pour it in a container in the back of the machine, fill the basket in the front with some coffee, and press “on.”
The coffee is ready within minutes and it’s perfect every goddamn time, presumably because there are tiny wizards tirelessly working inside the machine. There is no other explanation for this weird, wonderful coffee maker made for the lowest common denominator of morning people, myself included.
The beauty of the Hamilton Beach caffeine sorcerer is that it knows exactly what it is. All coffee machines basically function the same, but none of them are as clunky and terrible-looking as my java maker. Sure, it has an alarm feature, and different options for the strength of desired coffee brew, but at its core, the Hamilton Beach knows it doesn’t have to impress anyone. There’s something to be said about this strong, silent type and its almost insulting levels of simplicity. You can’t help but respect it.
There will always be a time and place for bells and whistles. The bottom of my purse will forever be a graveyard for fancy coffee house receipts and matte lipsticks. But if you’re a person who gets up every morning not by choice, but by a sense of duty — to go to work, exercise, or just run after other people’s dogs — the Hamilton Beach coffee machine is meant for you.
If you liked this article, check out this video of “Flippy,” the burger flipping robot.
