If you are a coffee drinker, you may feel like coffee makers are the best invention since sliced bread.
With a high-quality coffee maker and excellent coffee beans, you can brew all the coffee you need and avoid those long queues at your favorite coffee shop.
What happens when you wake up one morning, start the coffee brewing cycle, and come back only to find your coffee is not hot enough.
Any coffee lover knows how awful lukewarm coffee tastes like. It’s disappointing when your coffee maker brews cold coffee, especially if you take lots of it in a day.
A good coffee machine should brew coffee at between 197 -200 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything less than that, and you’ll be dealing with under-extraction and end up with a cup of coffee that’s lukewarm and not flavorful enough.
Although coffee makers sometimes brew coffee at extremely high temperatures (which burns the coffee beans), the problem that many coffee drinkers complain about is not brewing coffee that’s hot enough.
Once this happens to you, the easiest solution you may think of is to buy another coffee maker.
That will be a waste if you don’t find out what’s causing the problem in the first place. Good coffee makers are expensive.
So, you should only throw out a malfunctioning coffee maker if it’s beyond repair.
Does that mean there is something you can do to make a coffee maker hotter? Yes. Here are some solutions you can try.
What to do When your Coffee Maker is not Hot Enough
1. Preheat it before brewing coffee
When a coffee maker is left unused for a long time, its individual parts, such as the carafe, get cold.
Coffee experts advise that you pour boiling water into the coffee maker to warm it up before starting a brewing cycle.
You can also run it through a water-only cycle before brewing your coffee to heat its components.
These efforts will preheat the coffee maker, ensuring your coffee is brewed at the right temperature and keep it hot for longer.
2. Look at the Settings
You could automatically assume your coffee maker is on the right temperature setting when it’s not.
That often happens when you’ve just bought a modern coffee maker (such as a Keurig) that comes with lots of features.
It takes time to know how to set the temperature in such a coffee machine to make your coffee as hot as you like.
So, before you assume your coffee maker is broken, look at the user manual. It will guide you on how to set the right temperature for coffee brewing.
You could have the temperature dial on a low setting, thereby unknowingly lowering the temperature of your coffee machine.
And while it may seem like a funny solution, check the electricity settings at the plug. It may be delivering insufficient power to the coffee machine.
3. Fix the Heating Element
The heating element of your coffee maker is responsible for boiling your coffee water to the right temperature. It is located beneath the heating plate of your coffee maker.
These elements sometimes get short-circuited, corroded, or worn out, which lowers the temperature of a coffee maker.
You could find your coffee is cold while the temperature setting on it indicates it should be hot.
An electrical technician can fix the heating element in your coffee maker or put in a new one if it’s beyond repair.
And because broken elements are a common cause of malfunctioning coffee makers, it’s essential to avoid this issue.
Accidental spills are the commonest causes of malfunctioning heating elements in coffee makers.
You can prevent them by keeping water or coffee from getting to the heating element of your coffee maker during coffee brewing.
4. Find Out if your Thermostat is Faulty
If the coffee maker’s heating element is okay, the thermostat could be the problem.
A coffee maker’s thermostat controls how your coffee maker’s element works by automatically shutting off when the temperature gets to a set level.
If it shuts off when the water in your coffee maker is not properly heated, you’ll end up with lukewarm coffee.
A coffee maker thermostat can malfunction if it gets stuck in the wrong setting preventing enough electricity from reaching the heating element.
The only way to solve this problem is by asking an electrician to change the thermostat for you.
Once it’s back in good shape, ensure you take care of it by plugging your coffee maker into a surge protector. That will keep it from breaking down whenever there’s an unstable power supply.
5. Increase the Pressure of your Machine
If you use an Espresso machine and notice it is not getting hot enough, it could have a pressure problem.
The best coffee is brewed at a pressure of 7 -10, with 9 being the optimum pressure measurement. If your coffee maker brews the coffee at a lower pressure, it will take longer to heat up.
You can recalibrate your coffee machine by adjusting the screw on the external pump as you pull a shot of Espresso. Turning the adjustment screw anticlockwise will decrease the pressure, while the opposite will increase the pressure.
Once you set the pressure of your Espresso machine to the desired point, the coffee maker will be able to pressurize the coffee brewing water correctly, resulting in a flavorful brew. You’ll notice that your coffee maker gets as hot as you like too.
6. De-Calcify your Coffee Maker
After using your coffee maker for some time, you may notice a buildup of mineral residue in it called limescale.
The commonest kind of mineral buildup in the water reservoir or carafe of most coffee makers is whitish in color. Others are reddish or brownish, depending on the minerals in your tap water.
A heavily calcified coffee maker will not heat up properly. It would help if you deep clean your coffee maker to get rid of any buildup of minerals from your tap water.
Once it’s clean, try brewing coffee with it. If the temperature is back to normal, you’ll know that the mineral buildup was the problem.
Then you can make a habit of deep cleaning your coffee maker the same way once every month to avoid similar issues in the future.
Conclusion
Now you know the answer to how to make a coffee maker hotter.
Having a coffee maker that brews lukewarm coffee is a waste. You need a machine that will heat up the coffee water to at least 195 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you measure the temperature of your coffee brewing water and find it lower than this, you are drinking under-extracted coffee.
Use the solutions we’ve given you to fix your coffee maker, and you’ll appreciate how flavorful coffee gets when brewed at the right temperature.
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