Cleaning a Coffee Maker

When you brew your own coffee regularly, you will eventually wish to clean the brown stains that build up inside your coffee maker.  However, you don’t want to use soap and risk having a strange soapy taste in your coffee.  A dirty coffee pot, though, will also brew a strange tasting cup of coffee.  You do need to clean your coffee pot at least once a month, but you should use vinegar to clean without leaving any taste.  Let’s look at the best way to make up a cleaner solution and clean your coffee pots.

Any coffee pot that is used regularly needs to be cleaned at least once a month.  However, if you clean your pot with baking soda, you should probably try to clean it once a week.  You can also bleach the coffee pot by pouring a ½ cup of bleach into hot water and allow it to sit for 15 minutes. Vinegar is a good cleaning agent because it has no toxins.

Vinegar is perhaps the best solution because it has certain acids that remove lime scale, mineral build-up, and coffee bean oils from the coffee pot.  You should soak your coffee pot in vinegar, and then run the coffee maker with the vinegar still in the pot.  Once the coffee maker has run through once, simply remove the coffee filter and rinse it off.

Drip filter coffee makers often build up hard water deposits, which a monthly vinegar cleaning should rid.  For these, you can make a mixture of one part white vinegar to two parts water and use this mixture to fill up your coffee maker.  Add this mixture where you would normally pour the water, and make sure the coffee maker is full. Let the coffee maker run through a complete cycle, and you will have a freshly cleaned coffee pot.  Using one of these cleaning methods is the best way to have a clean coffee pot without leaving any nasty soap scum or bitter taste in your coffee.