How to Use Vinegar to Clean Your Coffee Maker |On Coffee Makers

How to Use Vinegar to Clean
Your Coffee Maker?

* Soak your coffee pot with vinegar. If you have a permanent filter, wash it thoroughly in warm, soapy water. Let the coffee pot soak with vinegar for about 15 to 30 minutes.

While waiting, unplug your coffee maker, and clean the exterior. Use vinegar and wipe the exterior parts where coffee might have spilled in the past.

After letting your coffee pot soak for 30 minutes, plug your coffee maker back in.

* Run a cycle on your coffee maker (at half capacity if the coffee maker allows it), but instead of using water, fill up the water tank with a 1:1 ratio of vinegar and water.

The vinegar solution will clean away any contaminants within your machine. If you haven’t cleaned the filter yet, you can do so by making use of the pause-and-serve function (if your coffee maker has a pause-and-serve function).

Remove the carafe from the coffee maker, this allows the diluted vinegar solution to remain within the filter basket and clean the filter.

Questions on how to make coffee without machine?

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Return the carafe back into the machine so that the vinegar will flow into the coffee pot.

* Once the cycle is finished, remove the coffee filter and wash it thoroughly. If you look closely at your coffee filter, you will notice all the nasty stuff that has been cleaned out of your machine.

Make sure that you also rinse the carafe properly as well, since it also contains contaminants that have trickled through the coffee filter.

As you can, this "How to Use Vinegar to Clean Your Coffee Maker" process is long because of the repeating nature of it.

* Run another cycle of a 1:1 ratio of vinegar and water (if your coffee maker ran a cycle at half capacity beforehand, then run another half cycle to empty the water reservoir).

There is a possibility that there are some contaminants that still remain within your coffee maker. This is why we’re running another cycle. This will ensure a clean coffee maker.

Make sure to wash your coffee filter and coffee pot thoroughly after each cycle. You can run more cycles if you wish, if you really want to make sure that the coffee maker is thoroughly cleaned.

* Then, for your final cycle, use fresh water. Using fresh water will make sure that all of the vinegar will be rinsed out.

It’s not a bad idea to run another cycle of fresh water after 10 minutes, just to make sure that none of the vinegar remains inside the coffee maker.

Make sure to wash the coffee filter and coffee pot thoroughly after every cycle to remove all traces of the vinegar.

How frequently you should clean your coffee maker depends on how often you use it. As a general guideline, when you use your coffee maker on a daily basis, you should clean your machine after every two-dozen brewing cycles.

Otherwise, if you use it less frequently, cleaning your coffee maker once a month will do.

What if this "How to Use Vinegar to Clean Your Coffee Maker" is not for me?

However, if you’re a bit iffy about using vinegar on your coffee maker or if your coffee maker hasn’t been cleaned in a long time.

Then you need something less natural and with more industrial strength to remove the hard mineral deposits that have accumulated inside your machine, feel free to use any of the commercial coffee maker cleaners (although in this case, you might need to replace your coffee maker instead).

Among the three brands mentioned above, Urnex Cleancaf is the most popular, probably due to its packaging size, which seems to be quite reasonable for a price of $3.95.

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OCM (OnCoffeeMakers.com) was started in 2007 with the first webpage about coffee machines. And for a number of years, we focused on helping people find their desired coffee machine (we still are helping folks with that! So, if you are looking for coffee machines for office or restaurants - check out the link).

In 2010, we started getting enquiries on restaurant marketing and we start to help food and beverage brands with their marketing. Below are campaigns and events that we have done over the years:

OCM's campaigns: F&B Marketing Ideas by OCM

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Check out this restaurant marketing guide to learn more about the many campaigns and companies we have worked with.

Since then, we have also created many marketing workshops and classes for the F&B industry. Many of these modules are still running in tertiary institutions such as Temasek Polytechnic Skillsfuture Academy and also ITE College East COC classes, below are some snippets of our lectures and workshops:

OCM’s F&B workshops: Food and Beverage Marketing Lectures | Workshops - click to watch classes on customer journey map, JTBD and more.

So, if you are looking for industry practitioners to help you scale your coffee or F&B businesses, do drop us a message or book an appointment. Do also check out our various social media platforms on regular F&B and coffee market updates:

For regular coffee (F&B) related videos: OCM Youtube

For Daily Coffee Inspiration (fun coffee content): OCM IG

For insights into the coffee (F&B) industry: OCM LinkedIN

PS: For the coffee lovers, we continue to share coffee articles (and videos) and have also started a free coffee class section (with free online coffee training supported by coffee partners).

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How to Use Vinegar to Clean
Your Coffee Maker?

Questions on how to make coffee without machine?