The typical red-blooded American coffee drinker gulps three cups a day – pity most of it is basically flavorless brown water. Allow us to explain: the longer ground coffee sits, the more it loses of the precious bodily fluids that produce its rich, sophisticated flavor. And most commercial coffee is ground up in some far-flung processing plant, loaded onto a truck, and piled up in some warehouse until it’s thrown onto another truck for the trip to your supermarket. If you’re drinking pre-ground coffee, we estimate that you’re only tasting 10% of what we call “flavorcy”. (And please, let’s not even talk about instant “coffee”. It’s just too painful.)

The Cuisinart Grind and Brew leaves the flava intact for a full-contact coffee adventure with each of the 10 cups in its carafe. How, you query? By integrating a lean, mean bean grinder. It’s the shortest possible path between whole coffee beans and super-flavory, mega-fresh, scalding hot java. The thermal carafe will keep coffee hot for hours, so you won’t have to brew a new pot and miss a key moment of your team’s thrilling first-round NHL playoff games. And just in case you’re one of those weirdos who only wants a cup or two at once, a 1-4 cup setting will produce even hotter coffee with less energy than a full brew cycle.

There are a few catches to the Cuisinart Grind and Brew’s comprehensive coffeelicious superiority. The black stuff flows a bit sluggishly from the stainless-steel thermal carafe, the better to keep it hot, my dear. Some observers may find the grinding action a little loud for their delicate ears. Finally, the added grinding apparatus makes cleanup a proportionately more involved process. But once you absorb the bud-blowing flavor majesty of freshly ground coffee, you’d have to be ridiculously impatient, skittish, and lazy to get hung up on these minor drawbacks.

Best of all is the atomic-stylin’ retro-futurist look of this Cuisinart Grind and Brew, bringing a little class to any kitchen, office, or abbatoir. It’s like something you’d see in a diner in Godard’s Alphaville, or Lang’s Metropolis, or Verhoeven’s Robocop. With a caffeine appliance this fiiiine, you can convincingly pretend that your taste is as good as your coffee’s.

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