While packing to move for Small Town I donated my coffee pot to a men's halfway house in Big City. I did this because I knew the Boyfriend had a super fancy coffee pot at his house. Super fancy is a relative term. Mine was about $15 from Target. Because I'd only used it a few times while we were dating, I did not know that the coffee pot was several years old, and had a tendency to include grounds into every cup of coffee.
Gross.
I
posted about it one day, and Mrs. Anna let me know that contrary to what I thought, the coffee pot was not BROKEN, just needed to be cleaned.
Thus, instead of heading to JC Penny (our best choice here for those sorts of things), I got out the vinegar and Googled my heart out.
As it turns out, running vinegar through your coffee pot works miracles. Not only that, it is super easy and if you have even one bottle of vinegar around (for some reason we have several), it is free. FREE!
Step One: Fill up your coffee pot with one part vinegar to two parts water. So I did four cups of vinegar and 8 cups water to fill my 12 cup pot.
Step Two: Pour it in the water well like normal, and start the coffee maker just like you were making a pot of coffee.
Step Two(b): Don't be like me and forget to put in a coffee filter or you will have 12 cups of water/vinegar all over your counter. Make sure you put in a filter - just no coffee, like Anna said above.
Step Three: After it's done, let the water/vinegar mixture sit in the coffee pot for 15 minutes, or until it's cooled down.
Step Four: Realize your house now smells terrible. Spray some air freshener. If weather permits, open a window. Do not do this while baking cookies. It will totally defeat the purpose of having delicious cookies and a house that smells like you're Martha Stewart.
Step Five: Rinse your pot, and repeat the process. See how gross it looks in Step Three? That should be clear. If yours looks like this, you should repeat the process three times. Everywhere I've read said you should do this every month. I have failed at that. However, unless you haven't cleaned yours in three years, it probably won't be this bad.
Step Six: You're done! Your coffee pot should look like this now, and be coffee ground free! Not to mention, the coffee really did taste better than before I cleaned it! Just make sure you've gotten all of the vinegar out by running plain water through at least once. If you can still smell vinegar, you'll end up with vinegar flavored coffee in the morning. Sick.
I hope this helps those of you who are coffee ground adverse! And really, why wouldn't you be? yuck.
Have you used vinegar to clean things around your house for nearly free? How did it come out? Did you try this on your coffee pot? I'd love to hear about it!
