Food & Wine’s Coffee Maker Cleaning Rule: Descale Every Six Weeks

Food & Wine thinks you should be cleaning your coffee maker more often than you probably are. In a new cleaning guide, its writer says her coffee started tasting off even though she washed her carafe and milk jug after every use, and she points to coffee makers as one of the five germiest spots in the home, with yeast, mold, bacteria and old coffee oils lingering inside.

The answer, per the guide, is daily upkeep plus a deeper clean every few weeks. For any machine with a water reservoir, it says to descale every six weeks if the machine doesn’t prompt you on its own, and it recommends filtered water to slow down the scale. Drip owners get the classic routine: fill the reservoir with half water and half white vinegar, run half a cycle, let it sit for up to four hours, finish the cycle, then run plain water through twice. A commercial descaler does the job just as well, the guide says.

Pod machines get only a line. Cleaning capsules, the piece notes, help keep the showerhead and water path of single-serve brewers clean. Most of the rest is product picks for espresso machines, grinders, moka pots and the like.

Our take: on a Keurig, the grime that actually hurts the coffee collects in the needles and the reservoir, so start there. Our guides to cleaning Keurig needles and keeping mold out of a Keurig cover both, and how to descale a Keurig covers the rest. If your water is hard, the six-week descale is a sensible habit even when the machine hasn’t asked.