I have this cuisinart coffee machine. It’s got all these different parts that must be put in place including the coffee pot which somehow collects the coffee through its plastic lid. While it’s running i hear all these sounds like gears grinding so obviously there are some sort of tiny coffee elves transporting the coffee from the filter to the pot.
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Well, it’d help to know which model. But assuming it’s a drip coffee machine:
You put water in a tank, and that water drips down into a little compartment near a heating element. Usually it’s the same heating element that warms the pot, but it can be separate.
When you start the machine, the heating element warms up. As the water near it gets warmer, it starts to boil. There’s a valve near the water tank that stops water going back out that way, and when it boils it wants to go somewhere. There happens to be a big vertical tube WITHOUT a valve so the water goes up that. When enough water leaves, the chamber releases the valve and more water comes in. So that’s part of the noises: the boiling water and valve opening and closing. (There could be a pump involved with fancier coffee makers, in that case instead of the boiling making it move, the water’s probably heated while it’s being pumped.)
At the top, the water comes out of the tube and falls on the coffee grounds. It takes a while for it to soak through and reach a hole under the grounds. That hole leads down to the coffee pot, and while the water was soaking in the coffee grounds it sucked some flavor out of them that comes along for the ride.
OR, if you meant you have little coffee “pods”, that’s why you’d have a pump. The water gets squirted into that pod with a bit of pressure. When the water is pressurized like that, it picks up flavor compounds faster and doesn’t have to soak so long. The water tends to squirt more forcefully into the pot/mug after that.
Those are the two major cheap ways coffeemakers are made. If you’re talking about something really fancy like an espresso machine it’s similar principles but higher-quality everything and potentially more doodads like a grinder and steam wands.
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