Viking Coffee Makers – A Good Buy?

A few years ago, Viking coffee makers were a popular choice for anyone wanting a professional looking and performing machine for home use. However, these days the company has moved away from making smaller kitchen appliances, instead choosing to put their focus on larger home appliances. With their line of coffee makers now discontinued, is it still worth buying one if you come across some older stock for sale?

In this article we are going to take a look at one of their most popular coffee makers to help you decide, and you can skip onto that section in the table below. First though we are going to be talking about Viking as a brand, so read on to find out more about them.

Is Viking a trustworthy brand?

Viking is a relatively new company, which was started by a man called Fred Carl in 1980. He had moved into a new home, and was looking for a range of upmarket appliances to furnish his kitchen with. Having found none that really fitted what he wanted, he decided to start making his own. Working with a local company, he spent 7 years refining the products which were eventually released under the Viking brand in 1987. And this is how the Viking Range brand was born. Over the years their reputation began to rise, as they catered for a rather niche gap in the market. Fast forward a few years, and their products were in hot demand.

However, the company did have a major setback towards the later part of the 2000’s though, as they produced some refrigerators between 1999 and 2006 which were deemed “unsafe” by the CPSC. A recall for these products was finally started by the company in 2009, but it had done some serious damage to the reputation of the company. Many questions arose about the company, as some speculated that Viking were aware of these issues but chose to ignore them. Sales soon begun to decline, and the future of the company looked to be in doubt.

In 2013 the company was taken over by The Middleby Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer of kitchen products in the USA. The company was reorganised and relaunched, and they honoured the warranties of older products in order to show that the company was committed to customers who had previously trusted the brand. This has clawed back some of the public trust issues which had hounded the company the past few years, and the company seems to be on the rise again. The reorganisation of the company reduced their smaller appliance product range, and unfortunately Viking coffee makers were some of the products which were discontinued.

So now the big question is whether or not these coffee makers are high quality like some of their earlier products, or whether they suffer from some of the much publicised quality control issues which plagued them a few years ago. Lets have a look at one of their most popular model to see how it has held up.

Viking Professional Coffee Maker VCCM12

Is it as good buy today?

With all those nice features and extras, it does sound quite enticing to buy doesn’t it? However…There have been some complaints about this Viking coffee maker, so it seems fair that we should mention those too. The first and foremost issue seem to be the dreaded flashing “DCL” message which gets displayed on the machine, essentially rendering it virtually useless. The flashing DCL message on the lcd means it is time to descale the machine. The problem many folks face is that even after performing the descaling and clearing the message, it returns after a few hours or days. This can be a huge nuisance, as the descaling procedure can take a while to perform. For anyone that has a machine that displays the DCL message, the way to get rid of it is to press the On button, and then hold down the Brew button for a few seconds. This should get rid of it, but make sure you descale the machine first if you haven’t already done this. If you are one of the unlucky ones who can’t seem to get rid of this error message even after descaling, then there doesn’t seem to be another obvious fix unfortunately.

Something else to worry about is the machine overflowing. A common issue is that the filter and intake pipe can get gummed up, which makes the unit overflow. A suggested solution to this is to avoid finely ground coffee, and only use medium and above sized ground coffee. There have also been some reports of the unit leaking where the water tank connects to the machine. However, there is no clear reason for why this happens.

Another common complaint about this model is it tends to be a bit noisy. This is only during the brewing phase however, but we see this as only a minor issue as all coffee makers tend to make some noise.

Summary

So that is a look at the VCCM12 coffee maker, one of the best sellers of the Viking coffee maker models. As you can see it has a number of good features, but there have also been quite a few complaints and issues with this particular model. Looking at the Amazon product page, the current user rating is a rather unappealing 2.6 stars, so clearly these issues are quite common if you read some of the user reviews.

For that reason alone, it is hard to really recommend this model at the full retail price as it seems like a bit of a hit and miss as to whether you get a “good” model or not. If you see a cheap second hand model, then it’s certainly worth a look if you aren’t spending too much cash.
This is one of the last coffee makers that Viking made, and perhaps that is for the best.