I can never get coffee made at home to taste that good. It might be my coffee maker. It is a cheapo Mr. Coffee. But I can’t even get Dunken Donuts level coffee. What am I doing wrong? I have tried using all different measurements. I am grinding the beans right before use. But it always tastes weak. Last time I used 2 tablespoons of ground coffee per cup. But still it is weak.
I can’t find any better coffee anywhere I have ever been than what I make at home. I use:
1 Bodum French press coffemaker
5 heaping tablespoons illy medium grind for drip coffeemakers
Water, absolutely as hot as I can get it (as in, I put it off the boil and dump it in the maker)
Steep for 3 minutes. Press. Pour. If you like cream in your coffee, pour 1 tablespeen of heavy whipping cream into your mug a few minutes before pouring in the coffee.
Nirvana. 
Anyway, my guess would be that either your grind is not fine enough, or your coffeemaker is not getting the water hot enough (most likely).
The Mr. Coffee style pleated filters and the drip makers that use them will never make decent coffee IMO. I tried for about a year after returning from my first trip to Vienna. If you grind the beans fine enough for good coffee, the pores in the filter plug up, and the basket overflows. This might also be because the water is fed too fast, or not hot enough. Whatever the reason, you will not be able to make proper European strength coffee in one of these.
If you get a maker that uses the stitched cone (Melita) style filters, and grind the beans really fine, you can make pretty good joe. As a test, you can get one of the single cup funnel things that hold a #2 filter for a couple of bucks. IME, the unbleached filters leave a wet straw taste in the coffee. I tried them for a while, but have decided the bleached filters are better. The discount brand filters seem to work as well as genuine Melita filters. The #10 (?? I think??) filter version comes with a pot, but you still boil the water in a kettle. I understand you may want to let the water cool just a bit before pouring on the coffee, but living at altitude, I find I want it boiling as it comes out of the kettle.
If you want a drip maker, get a European brand. The one non-Euro brand one I have had(I forget the brand…west bend maybe?) fed the water too fast. Krups and Braun seem to make good coffee.
I had this octagonal shaped coffee maker that made really good coffee on the stove.
I overheard a customer complaining about that at Starbucks. The staff told her that their water is triple-filtered.
Problems with cheap coffee makers
- Water not hot enough (a lot of the flavour from coffee comes from volatile oils. If the water isn’t hot enoughthey fail to join the mix
- Dirty mechanism… your filter holder should be washed REGULARLY - (I am not martha stewart, but i put it through the dishwasher every few uses), also your water probably leaves a deposit on the inner workings of calcium carbonate, various metalic oxides and “other stuff”, this “gunk” will affect/diminish your coffee’s taste.
3)waiting time. Coffee is best FRESH. anything more than 15 minutes old has gone through a series of chemical reactions that will diminish enjoyment.
hope this helps
FML
Same problem here, but I’m simply too lazy to follow all the correct procedures to get coffee-shop-quality coffee. It’s still better than instant, which I drink when alone in the morning during the week. Since my wife and I have different schedules during the week, we save the good coffee for the weekends and the odd holiday when we’re home together in the morning. So even though it’s not as good as Starbucks or even Dunkin’ Donuts, it’s better than what I have during the week.
We use a Braun coffee-maker and wash the basket after every use. Other than that, we don’t do that much.
Get really good beans. Get a Braun coffeemaker and a gold filter. Use water from the Brita or some other sort of filtered water. Just about nobody makes coffee to my taste but me. Starbuck’s is an abomination - burnt-tasting, bitter; vile stuff.
Your beans will make the biggest difference. Go to a proper coffee shop and tell them what kind of coffee you like and ask which beans will produce something similar. If you haven’t tried a variety of beans, do. You’ll be surprised at how different they are.
Also: Dump the grounds out as soon as the water is done running through them. They can drip bitter oils into the coffeepot.
When I worked at a Waffle House in Athens, Georgia, circa 1992, I was told during my training to dump the grounds. I made sure to do it whenever I made coffee (which none of the other employees did), and customers were constantly commenting on how good the coffee tasted.
(Love the username, Andrew Bird!)
I would think water. I’m not such a coffee snob, but I hate coffee made with nasty tasting water. blech.
I gotta say, tho: doesn’t coffee made at home taste better just because you don’t have to get up and get dressed to go get it? 
I have the opposite problem: coffee I buy is never as good as the stuff I make at home.
There’s two tricks: good coffeemaker, and good beans. I swear by Capresso machines. They heat the water hotter than other coffee makers, and the result is definitely tastable. We went through a phase after our first Capresso broke where we tried Krups, Bruns, KitchenAids, etc. and nothing was even half as good as the Capresso.
Next, you need good, fresh beans. Best is if you have a local roaster and grind them yourself. If that’s not possible, look for good quality packaged coffee. We use Illy in a pinch, and it’s very good.
It’s the water, or the temperature. Drip coffee makers with few exceptions really get the water to the ideal temperature.
Assuming a good quality coffee the grind has to be just right for the method of preparation. A fine grind is more efficient at utilizing the coffee, no waste.
A fine grind will “plug” the typical drip coffee maker as they are designed to dump warm-ish water very fast through coarse coffee. In fact, quite a bit is diverted around the filter and coffee and directly into the pot.
Try boiling a kettle of water on the stove and reduce the heat to a simmer. You want “just boiled” temps. Take the filter and coffee bail from your drip maker and set that on the pot/carafe and pour the just-boiled water through the bail and coffee into the pot. This is essentially the Melitta way of making coffee, very popular in Europe and makes an outstanding cup. Good coffee - fine grind, hot, hot water = good cup of coffee.
We like our Bunn. It’s nothing fancy, but it gives us a full pot of hot coffee in three minutes. We use Folgers Colombian.
French Press and filtered water. Contrary to what Necros does, we let the water “rest” for 15 seconds after it boils, because we’ve found dumping boiling water on the grounds tends to burn them. YMMV. Also, buy good coffee. As in, hop online and find a coffee retailer on line. Who knows how long that stuff they sell in the grocery store has been sitting on the shelves.
We were using Green Mountain, but we’ve found some Florida coffee retailers, so we get the shipments quicker. Coffee has a short life, so don’t buy stockpiles…you need as fresh as you can get it.
I’ll second the idea that a conical coffe maker with a mesh filter has produced far higher quality coffee for me than other kinds.
Make sure you are using enough coffee and that it is ground finely enough.
We use rusty tap water and we LOVE our coffee! In fact, I don’t drink coffee outside my home. I tried some shitty instant coffee (some Mexican blend…but still instant, so still sucks) at my Dad’s and I almost hurled.
We have to clean our coffee maker more often than most people because of the mineral deposits, but plain ol’ vinegar takes care of it so we don’t care.
If you used two tablespoons per cup and it’s still weak, my guess is your water isn’t hot enough.
Have you cleaned out the pipes of that calcium carbonate and gunk that Full Metal Lotus mentioned? If your answer is, “Huh?,” How To Clean A Coffee Maker.
If your coffee’s still weak after that, your old Mr. Coffee may be broken. Try making cowboy coffee:
Boil some water.
Turn off the heat and wait a few minutes. (Coffee is best made with water not quite at the boiling point.)
Add grounds.
Stir for 45 seconds.
Wait 10 minutes.
If that doesn’t work, I’ll try to figure out how to stream my Costa Rican La Candelilla across the internet to you.
Agreed. To calibrate, I’ve used a small timer and a thermometer stuck in the end of a kettle to measure the time it takes for the water to cool to 200 degrees – about 10 seconds on my kettle with the usual amount of water.
It’s been years since I’ve had any coffee, so the numbers may be slightly misremembered, but that’s the general idea when using a press. It’s especially easy to experiment with different temperatures and decide for yourself which you prefer.
Another vote for this method. I don’t use filtered water, because my tap water is fine, but a French Press is excellent.
Amen. Exactly the same here.