Why do some coffee makers require the carafe to make contact with the tray for the coffee to drip?
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I am stupid and can’t function before I’ve had my first coffee in the morning. Because my caffeine addiction impacts my brain like this, sometimes I mess up a step of preparing my coffee. If I don’t put the carafe in properly and hit brew anyway, the coffee would brew and spill all over my counter. The people designing the coffee pot were smart, and knew that dumb people like me exist, so they installed the contact drip to prevent me from ruining my counters.
This is an anti-drip feature. The carafe is placed on a heating plate to make sure the coffee keep warm. But if you remove the carafe while there is still a tiny bit of liquid going through the filter the last drops of coffee will drop down on the hot plate making a foul burning smell. To prevent this some coffee makers add an anti-drip feature which shuts off the flow of coffee through the filter when you remove the carafe. Some are automatic and will only be open when the carafe push it out of the way and some are manual allowing you to better control the speed of the extraction. However make sure to clean the anti-drip system regularly as it often gets pieces of dried coffee in it preventing it from sealing. So a dirty coffee maker may drip even with an anti-drip feature.
They are designed this way so that you can remove the carafe while there is still water percolating and dripping on the grinds without it making a mess everywhere. The alternative is that water would just keep pouring out without anything to catch it and that is just a waste of coffee and pain to clean up.
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