Product Features

• Die-cast metal housing is smooth and modern

From the Editors

Enjoy cafe-style coffee from the comfort of your home. The PRO LINE? Single Carafe coffee maker offers commercial performance for great tasting coffee every time. Full dispersion shower head saturates grounds with hot water for extraordinary flavor. Advanced ion-exchange water filter reduces chlorine and other contaminants. Two-year, hassle-free replacement warranty. Model KPCM050PM
Product Description

Customer Response

Good design, Well built coffee maker
Purchased the ProLine about 8 months ago and have been making at least two pots of coffee every day since. It is nice to own a coffee maker that makes great coffee that works well and is well made. It looks like it will last longer than a year or two. I have no objection spending money when I get a quaility product in return.

My single complaint about the maker is not with the maker itself but with the water filter that fits inside the machine. Yes, the coffee tastes better using the filter. We are heavy coffee drinkers and need to replace the filters frequently (every 60 pots or so). The filters cost about 9 dollars each and it seems impossible to buy just the replacement carbon filter. You get stuck buying the big plastic holder with the carbom filter inside. Not environmentally friendly. Why can't I buy just replacement carbon filters?

Love the coffee maker, glad I bought a spare pot so we always have a clean one ready to use while the other is in the dishwasher.

good coffee from a poor coffee maker
Nov '08 Update from prior review in next paragraph - Even though it fell apart 6 months after warranty expired, I was pleased that Kitchenaid sent a brand new machine. It did not require any ranting over the phone so I have to applaud their customer service.

I have had mine two years and the thing is completely falling apart now. the entire plastic unit around the 'shower head' has practically crumbled. prior to this event it made fine coffee. I will attempt an exchange through their customer service but it may be just beyond the two year limit. We'll see how they respond. A $300 coffee maker (at willams sonoma) should last more than 2 years, i think.

Great coffee, poor quality, good customer service
We purchased this coffee maker about 6 months ago. As I write this review I am looking at the box that arrived yesterday with our 3rd new coffee maker. We were excited when our first one arrived but as we started to use it the coffee would get so hot, setting on the hotplate on low, it would develop a burnt taste and was really too hot to drink. Customer serivce was contacted and a new maker was sent and the old one returned. After a few months with our second new maker we started to notice the paint on the top of the maker near the water fill starting to bubble up. This continued to spread across the entire front of the water fill opening. Again a call to customer service and with no difficulty another maker was sent. So now we will unpack the new and pack up the old and return it once again.
Bottom line on this maker is it makes very good coffee but for the price the quality is far from what I expected. Customer service is very good but I would rather have a product were I did not need to contact them.

Nearly perfect
It's all Starbucks' fault!! It started one morning about five years ago while on vacation in Scottsdale. An early morning, pre-dawn visit to the local Starbucks led to a chat with the area/district manager, whose offer to brew up several pots of coffee and to teach me just what it was I was, and was not, tasting was gladly accepted.
So, like many on this site, I set out to get off the annual "replace the coffee maker" treadmill. I went through a multi-year process of replacing various drip makers - progressing from my Costco Cuisinart to a Krups to a Capresso; each one progressively more expensive than the past. But I wanted to get my money's worth. I scoped out this and other boards and found that, although the KitchenAid seemed to give the most bang for the buck, it was still $200 - a wee bit too much just for a coffee maker for this boy. But I was fortunate enough to be able to snag one on a post-Christmas sale that, once a coupon mailed to she-who-must-be-obeyed was applied, brought the cost down to $130. This permitted me to purchase the Capresso burr grinder I wanted and still keep the cost of this little "hobby" under the aforementioned magic $200.
Ok, to the unit...while much of the previous criticisms are valid, I can honestly say I only have a few, all of which I have come to terms with:
(1) the lack of a drip stop mechanism to permit mid-pot pouring is the most glaring. I do have to wait for the entire pot to complete the brew cycle and only than can I pour. I have learned first shake the brew basket to get all the dribbles off the bottom first (come on men, you know what I'm talkin' about!) and either take the brew basket away together with the pot or, these days, I place the mornings' business section (it's so depressing) under it to catch the last few drops.
(2) the lack of a thermal carafe is a non-issue for me. I have yet to experience one that is worth a damn as far as I'm concerned. They are all metal and do not hold the heat long enough. So, I merely pour our first cups of the morning and then pour the rest into a pre-heated glass lined carafe, which keeps the remaining half-pot toasty hot all day.
Whatever the rest (blah, blah, blah), it makes the best cup of coffee I've EVER had out of a home machine. Even my genius friends who spent "like thousands, dude" on their automatic, hard piped mocchiato frappucino latte espresso cappucinno male-compensation-devices with the dual exhaust and four-on-the-floor are now kicking themselves. I know some that spend $30+/lb. on Illy beans (I kid you not -- it IS Lon Gisland you know!) and have no idea what they're doing. I, on the other hand, being the humble soul that I am, go to my local coffee guru, Georgio, who roasts a very, very nice $8/lb. Colombian that even HE cannot believe I am able to brew to such near-perfection in this KitchenAid (he's a Bunn sort of guy).
So, that 's my story. Not-so-sad but true. And remember: grind, grind, grind ... every day, fresh. Don't let me catch any of you using that night-before timer thingy, it's for the taste impaired. I'll know if you do (just think Karnack the magnificent) and I will find you!

First-Class Coffeemaker
I'd really like to give this 5 stars, but I have to go with 4. It's solidly built and does what it's supposed to do really well, but you can buy an automatic drip coffeemaker for 1/10 the price that will also do the job. Of course you can buy a Hyundai Accent for 1/10 the price of a Mercedes Benz S-Class. Both will do a perfectly good job of getting you where you are going, but given a choice, you'd probably want to get there in the Mercedes. This is a "Mercedes Benz" quality coffeemaker.

A few things I really like:
- Attractive, clean, industrial style design.
- Brews quickly and quietly.
- Well built, with an excellent fit and finish throughout. No cheap, flimsy parts.
- Looks impressive on the counter.

A few things I'm not so crazy about:
- It's huge.
- Expensive.
- Basket style filter.
- Digital clock and "Time Since Brew" display detract from the "industrial" look.

My main criticism is that it uses a basket rather than a cone style filter. Cone filters yield more flavor with less grounds. The basket style drawback is somewhat mitigated in this coffeemaker by the use of a shower ring that distributes the water evenly over the grounds instead the single hole design found on most coffeemakers. The shower ring works quite well, but I still find myself using more grounds than I did with my previous coffeemaker which had a cone filter (see customer images for a better look at the brew basket). Another drawback is that this has a footprint that's nearly double the size of most other 12 cup coffeemakers. It's also a couple inches taller. If you have a small kitchen, and counter space is at a premium, keep that in mind. If you don't like small appliances (in this case, not so small) sitting on your counter, be aware that this thing is really heavy. It's not the type of appliance you simply pick up and tuck away in the cupboard when you're not using it. It dominates the counter where it sits, but it looks great sitting there. Price and basket style filter are where I dock it a star. Although it's expensive, the price includes an outstanding warranty and top-notch customer service from KitchenAid, so I think it's a pretty good value.
One thing that pleasantly surprised me about this coffeemaker is the lack of noise when it's brewing. It makes none of the slurping, burping and whooshing noises I'm accustomed to.
I've owned a number of automatic drip coffeemakers over the last 35 years. I haven't had one recently, regardless of brand or price, that has lasted more than a few months to a year. After dealing with flimsy coffeemakers and so-so coffee, I decided to bite the bullet and go first-class. Time will tell if I made a wise choice with this coffeemaker. If it lasts beyond the warranty, I'll have come out ahead of buying several cheap coffeemakers over the same period.
Does this make a good cup of coffee? Yes. Is it as good as you would get at a coffee house (e.g. Starbucks)? Not quite, but even the most demanding coffee lover should be satisfied with the results.
If this is the coffeemaker for you, I would also strongly recommend The KitchenAid Pro Line Gold-Tone Filter. KitchenAid KPCGTF Pro Line Gold-Tone Filter for Pro Line Coffee Maker

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