Patent ID: 8613245

Claim:
In a beverage brewer with a hot water tank, means for maintaining a supply of hot dispense water at a preselected temperature and a brew basket for holding ingredient to be brewed during a brew cycle into a preselected quantity of beverage by dispensing a preselected total quantity of hot dispense water into the brew basket, the improvement being an automatic rate selectable dispense system, comprising: a variable rate dispense valve assembly capable of selectively passing hot dispense water from the supply to the brew basket at different preselected, continuous, non-zero, nonintermittent flow rates; means for selecting one of a plurality of selectable brew cycles with a plurality of combinations of predetermined batch size and dispense period of predetermined duration; a start brew switch; and an electronic controller responsive to a single momentary, actuation of the start brew switch for automatically performing the selected brew cycle, said controller including means for automatically determining, based on the brew cycle selected, a plurality of nonintermittent, continuous flow rates at which hot dispense water will be passed to the brew basket during different preselected portions respectively, of the dispense period associated with the selected brew cycle; said selected brew cycle being performed by the controller providing to the variable rate dispense valve assembly, in accordance with a preselected brew cycle program, different preselected control signals representative of different non-zero, positive, continuous, nonintermittent flow rates of the variable rate dispense valve assembly at preselected different portions of the dispense time period of the selected brew cycle to cause the valve assembly to pass all the preselected quantity of hot dispense water of the batch size of the selected brew cycle to the brew basket at different, preselected nonzero, positive how rates respectively corresponding to the different preselected control signals during the preselected portions of the dispense period of the selected brew cycle, the dispense period being the entire period of the brew cycle during which all the quantity of hot dispense water of the batch size associated with the selected, brew cycle is passed to the brew basket, and automatically ending a predetermined time after the single, momentary, actuation of the start switch.