Steps to Cleaning a Coffee Maker
Clean Coffee Maker with Vinegar
Soak your coffee pot with vinegar, and wash your mesh filter with soap, if you have one. While you're doing this, you might as well do some aesthetic touch ups on the outside of your coffee maker and the heating element at the base. Do this with vinegar as well. The reason I soak the coffee pot is because I own a particular kind of pot that functions as a thermos, rather than constantly heating the coffee while the coffee maker is on. I soak it for about 15-30 minutes.
Fill the coffee pot with the vinegar and run the coffee maker. Now, if you haven't gotten the chance to clean the filter, what you can do is take the coffee pot out from under the filtering mechanism so that the hot vinegar collects in the filter and cleans that as well. The acids in the vinegar should clean away the scaling and mineral deposits that eventually clog and strain your coffee maker. Sure, it smells bad, but it works!
After the coffee maker has run once through, remove the coffee filter and rinse it off. If you have a mesh filter, you may notice a whole bunch of junk that came through the machine. That's the stuff you're trying to get rid of: pieces of old coffee beans, residue, oils, and minerals built up from the repetitive evaporation of non-deionized water.
Remove the coffee pot and pour out the remaining vinegar. Once you've done that, rinse out the coffee pot a couple of times to make sure you've gotten rid of all the particles that came through the coffee maker. Now, you've completed the first in a series of three cycles you're going to run before your coffee maker is clear for inspection.
Refill the coffee maker with vinegar and run the cycle one more time. Because the vinegar works at the lime and mineral build up by a chemical reaction, there is a possibility that without scrubbing the machine you didn't get all of the grime. Repeating the process one or two times more will ensure a good, clean coffee maker. Then, for your final cycle, run pure, deionized water through the machine to make sure you get all of the vinegar out.
Clean Coffee Maker with Vinegar
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