It's amazing how coffee can go from smelling really good, to smelling very bad after spending only a few hours on a hot element.
I need to try an (admittedly subjective) experiment some day. I'll brew a small pot of coffee and then have some fellow coffee-lovers stop by and smell the coffee every ten or fifteen minutes, rating their impression of the smell from "delicious" to "vomitus", and noting the time. I could then graph out their impressions to find the intersect point at which the coffee turned from good to bad. That data would allow us to set a timer to alert us when it is time to make a fresh pot.
I need to try an (admittedly subjective) experiment some day. I'll brew a small pot of coffee and then have some fellow coffee-lovers stop by and smell the coffee every ten or fifteen minutes, rating their impression of the smell from "delicious" to "vomitus", and noting the time. I could then graph out their impressions to find the intersect point at which the coffee turned from good to bad. That data would allow us to set a timer to alert us when it is time to make a fresh pot.