The Best Home Coffee Brewing Machine

hi there today we're going to look at these little home batch brewers little automatic coffee makers is one of these better does it make better coffee is it a more enjoyable experience to use that's the question we're going to ask here now i've got six brewers i wanted seven but i could only get six and i'll talk you through what i've got first up on the end here the techniform classic brewer had to be included great design beautiful brewer but but how does it brew in comparison to the others this costs 230 pounds in the uk now often i'll review wilfred products that make people very cross in the u.s because they can't buy them you know the other way with this one this is the oxo 9 cup brewer it's 210 and they only build it for north america you cannot buy this outside of north america but i really wanted to test this having heard a lot about it next up is the sage or breville precision brewers the same thing in the uk it's 250 pounds i've reviewed this in full on the channel in the past it's back again next up is the latest wilfer brewer so you know the reverse of the oxo this is available in europe it's not available in the us this is a little bit more expensive at 285 pounds now the cheapest brewer here is the it's the brazen plus three and that was a hundred and fifty pounds in the uk and last up on the end here by far the most expensive is the ratio six now in the uk that is 375 pounds nearly a hundred pounds more expensive than anything else here this is also the european version that has the conical basket not the flat basket inside it that just seems worth bringing up right at the start what i'll do now is i'll clear some space for myself and i'll tell you how testing today is going to work so i'm going to break down the testing into different sections and cover different bits and i've done a lot of testing before the video there'll be a little bit during the video too so first thing is we did some temperature and extraction testing so this was pretty simple we put two temperature probes into the machine one right into the shower heads of each of the machines to detect the temperature of the water coming out and then out of interest i left a probe in the coffee bed that's actually less useful than i thought it was going to be for a few different reasons we're really going to talk about the exit temperature of the water when it comes to each machine and then we did a very simple extraction test if we give each machine the same amount of water and the same weight of coffee at the same grind setting and then just have them brew well how does their own way of brewing impact extraction do some extract notably more than others and also we tracked their brew times how long was water and contact for and there were some pretty big differences so i'll talk you through those machine by machine in just a second after that a few simple tests the tank accuracy test trust me it's a thing the carafe test because they all have carafes and i have opinions about carafes and then we'll do a blind taste test just just for kind of interest as much as anything else and then we'll wrap up with a kind of overview of the ux ui features what you get for your money what works what doesn't work what makes me across what delights me and at the end of all this hopefully we know which one is maybe not necessarily the best but the best one for you the one that meets your needs be it budget be it features be it coffee quality so first up let's talk about the technivorm now the techniform is one of three brewers that use very similar technology it's the sort of heat loop displacement system inside this cold water goes in it's heated up and as the water is heated and steam is formed it's pushed out and up and over the coffee this sort of system is used in very cheap brewers but can be done well or done badly and in this case it's done pretty well though what was interesting to me in watching this was how long it took to get up to the final temperature so it's a fairly slow creep up to temperature if you look at the chart you can sort of see the pulses happening and you'll see it took about 30 seconds from starting to brew to getting up to those kind of higher temperatures of the upper 90s in terms of degrees celsius and there it sits quite comfortably when it's brewing water's coming out of the little spout here at about 97 98 degrees celsius which i think is a good thing now this kind of tech is very simple robust this brewer itself has been around for a long time it's been refined a little bit but it is just kind of go that's it you've got no control here you just brew now we did measure extraction i don't want to get into numbers the extraction being what percentage of the ground coffee that we put in the basket ended up in the cup below and in theory the higher the extraction for a fixed grain size and a fixed kind of recipe then the more even or effectively the brewers is extracting coffee this did a very good job this extracted pretty high compared to most of the other brewers it certainly wasn't on the lower end of things so from an extraction perspective it did very well and it did it in a fairly rapid time it's a three and a half minute brew time it seems to me that the water comes out with enough force to create a little agitation which really helps bump its extraction up so the way the oxa brewed was really interesting again similar technology the kind of displacement going on with around the heating element but it brewed very differently to say the technoform if you look at the temperature chart you can see that it has periods of brewing it has a kind of bloom phase and it stops then it has a kind of brew phase then it stops and then it kind of brews again temperature wise yeah very consistent very stable there's a bit of creep overall towards the end where everything gets just a little bit hotter what's notable really is is how slow this brew is the technical i think was three and a half minutes this was five and a half minutes to deliver the same amount of water so a much longer contact time and as a result an increased extraction this was the second highest extractor overall so it was pulling a bit more out of the coffee than most of the other brewers solid temperature interesting approach to brewing pretty impressed especially for the money now the sage or breville brewer is different to some of the others it's a pumped brewer so it's not using the same sort of heating technology as other ones here that we've talked about and it runs a pretty continuous flow after a bloom phase and i brewed this in its kind of gold cup sort of brew setup which is uh this sort of default i guess if you use the machine temperature wise pretty stable in the mid to upper 90s the whole time you can dial this machine in to do very precise temperature control i can't without finding a better way of doing temperature readings than i was you know just a probe inside a shower head confirm how accurate the machine is if you make a one degree c temperature adjustment i suspect you know you will see an average drop in temperature being the fastest brewer of the group and it was pretty fast i think just under three and a half minutes it had the lowest extraction that i measured of the group now that isn't the end of the world i might just grind a bit finer for this brewer i have used this a lot in the past i've never really had problems with it an extraction when i've measured it so i'm not hugely concerned by it being lower but it's just interesting that a faster brew time relatively low agitation resulted in what might be expected which is a lower extraction overall so the wilfa is a little bit like the sage in that it's a pumped machine though it works a little differently from a temperature perspective than the other ones too what's notable if you look at the temperature chart for this machine is that it starts a little bit hotter and then runs a little bit cooler the rest of the cycle that might be considered desirable you know the start you want it to be as hot as possible to get everything up to temperature and then don't keep it too hot have that temperature come back a little bit for the bulk of the brew that's their approach anyway now to note in the extraction testing there is a flow restrictor at the base of the cone here i had it set to the 0.75 liter setting that you would in theory use this is designed to kind of compensate so you can use one grind size and everything i picked 0.75 because i was using that much water the brew time overall again pretty quick in about three and a half minutes uh the extraction though that little bit higher extracted very nicely made you know what i thought was good tasting coffee but certainly a very solid extraction from the wilfer so this brewer the brazen again has a different technology for heating water and it's a little bit more kind of brute force essentially you put your water in the top of the machine your desired amount put the lid on close the lid and then it heats the whole water tank up to your desired temperature then it opens a valve and lets it out over the coffee through a spray head pretty simple now this was set to 90 degrees c when i did the test which was sort of out of the box setting and what's interesting in my temperature data is that it spiked above 90c i suspect this heats until it detects 90 degrees c in the water but some residual heat in the heating element may cause it to rise above that and overshoot a little bit so if you look at the temperature chart you'll see that while it starts quite hard it does decline towards the end which is interesting and potentially quite desirable it's a it's a little bit slower as a brewer around four minutes to brew 750 grams of water and the extraction solid so last up is the ratio and this was interesting this uses that kind of again that displacement technology there's no pump in here powering the water over the coffee so it brings quite gently temperature wise pretty impressive it does a bloom phase at the start that you can see in the temperature data and then once it's brewing it brews at a pretty consistent flow and a very consistent temperature when it came to extraction this actually came out higher than any of the other brewers which is interesting not by much not i think in a significant way but it is at the top end when it comes to extraction which is notable what's interesting about this is that the brew time overall was actually relatively slow it's four and a half minutes so not the slowest of all the brewers but but still relatively slow but seemingly there's enough agitation despite the slow flow that you do get that bump and extraction so overall a very good brewer on a technical level i should note now actually this little piece here there's a piece right at the top of the brew basket that's designed to maintain temperature it looks like that really does work judging by the temperature going on here judging by the bed temperature that we measured that's definitely a piece that works but we'll talk more about that piece a little bit later on this next one's kind of a weird one but i think it's actually really important when you fill the water in the tank to the lime that says 750 mils is it accurate because i've felt in the past with sunbrellas i've weighed my water because i'm a bit weird and i poured it in and it hasn't matched up i took each brewer placed it empty not entirely empty there's still water inside the system but no water in the tank placed on the brewer and i filled to the respective lines and i saw what weight of water it required to get there and on four of the six brewers those lines matched up perfectly so on the auxo it was accurate on the techno form it was accurate on the wilford it was accurate and on the b more it was accurate two brewers however were quite shockingly out and that was the sage brewer and the ratio i noticed pretty quickly that these were out and so i did multiple measurements to see what was going on so i'll start with the sage brewer and i'll tell you what the lion said and what weight of water we got so at 450 we got 510 grams of water at 600 it needed 690 grams of water to fill to get to the 900 line i needed 1020 grams of water to do that and to get to the 1200 line i needed 1 320 grams that is 10 out and that is unacceptable similarly for the ratio that has cup lines right 2 4 6 8. to get to the first 2 cup lime took 470 grams of water so a cup apparently is 235 grams of water but if we double that and go to 4 cups well that took 815 grams so a cup goes from 235 down to just under 204 the six cup lime took 1100 grams which is about 183 grams per cup of water a little bit more shrinkage again and then to get to the a cup line was 1370 grams which meant your average cup size was down to like 171 so so your cup goes from being 171 grams to 235 grams of water depending on which cup line you use it does really bother me and it doesn't set you up for success in the morning if you're trying to use the guidance that they give you to fill the brewer now let's talk about carafes now here's how the craft test is going to work i'm going to pour a cup of coffee and then i'm going to pour everything out of the carafe that i can and put it back on the scale which has been set up for the weight of an empty carafe and zeroed out so whatever it shows is how much has been trapped in the carafe that is unpourable it just bothers me in craft design first up is the technical a bit messy if i'm honest i've never had a great time with the techniforms craft design it's always been a bit of a messy pour a bit of coffee on the spout here let's see what it retains one gram very good low attention but not great for pouring i'd score it probably a 4 out of 10 on its quality of pour the oxo oh very good very good pour oh no little drip down the front loses some points there it's just messy and annoying the little top of this carafe is actually a little bit difficult to hold it doesn't really have any grip points anyway let's just empty it out see what we've got 15 grams ding for some points there poured very nicely not perfectly but very nicely but 15 grams of retained coffee is quite annoying pouring with the sage carafe very good pour nice controlled no drips very good what's left 14 grams of retained coffee again just an annoying that's just like annoying as an amount so the wolf is the only one that doesn't have a thermal carafe it's a glass carafe which makes people feel a certain way how does it pour very well how does it do for retention a gram a gram of coffee residue inside there which i think is pretty acceptable so that's the i guess the upside of a glass carafe they're just easier to get all the liquid out of be more a bit a bit spattery i've got a bit of liquid kind of spattering around the place it's a bit messy that's not a great poor experience retention is actually only two grams in this carafe but it really needs a good shake and you need to kind of backwards and forwards it a little bit which is not ideal so the ratios carafe has a lot going on and i've had some issues with it here you've got a button that lifts a little stopper in the exit spout and and that seems nice in principle but but i've had issues with the stopper not seating properly when it goes up and down and that's caused problems this is actually the second attempt of filming this one section because i had an issue with the carafe let's start again anyway it doesn't pour very well i i i feel i'm not trying to play this at the dramatic effect this carafe makes me feel quite stupid like i feel like i let the stopper go it should seat back down it should seal the unit i should be able to tip it up and yet you know having had this in white for a while and used it a fair bit i've never managed to pour without some coffee running on the front of this it's not usually this bad this is uh it feels unfair and i'm not trying to you know make it seem like a worse problem that it is but i have repeatedly had issues with the design of this carafe and the neatness of its pouring and i just want to flag it and and i haven't seen that talked about in many other reviews but it has been an issue for me and it might just be one bad lid but but it's it's it's definitely an issue so far six grams of retained liquid which isn't that bad but getting all the liquid out was not particularly easy so now we'll do a quick blind tasting i don't want to put too much stock in this it's just mostly for interest and i feel like you'd all be mad if i didn't taste the coffee from all of them side by side so once you have a quick taste see where we're at you get one slurp so the most important thing right off the bat if you own one of these brewers then don't worry about upgrading right because they they all brew coffee slightly differently but none of them is brewing coffee in a way that is a noticeable leap forward in quality right like you're not getting a massive improvement by picking one of these brewers and again this is the same coffee same grind setting all of that kind of stuff they're all set to the same temperature if they have temperature control of 97 was where i was sort of going because the ones that don't have that temperature control are brewing around there there are other aspects of these brewers the the usability that we need to talk about a lot more but from a brewing perspective it's pretty pretty similar there's differences there's differences this bowl feels probably the least extracted to me or or amongst the lightest this one here very textural right like it's um very full bodied very kind of rich and round very sweet i do probably my favorite bowl this one here this is nice like a little less texture but still sweet and actually very similar to this bowl and then i say these two feel a little bit lighter on the end there but there's not much in it right like this is really not it's blind but it's not like a truly useful insightful tasting i don't think but let's see what the results are that is indeed the sage so um i think i talked about before it for a given grind setting does extract a little bit less that seems to hold true here i'd be interested if this then correlates to the ratio it does it is the ratio okay really consistently a very good performer when it comes to coffee brewing these two i liked which were the be more and the welfare and then this would be the old mocha master and the oxo on the end here also performing very well i have no real complaints about the way that these brewers brew but an interesting opportunity to taste side by side and i don't really know why the sage extracts a little bit less for a given ground setting and the ratio extracts a bit more but that does seem to hold true across multiple tests and tastings and that kind of stuff so let's start wrapping up these brewers right i'll give you some overview thoughts take up the last few little details on them and talk about those too the the mocha master the techniform mochamaster really there's not a lot to say about it in a kind of good way this thing has no extra features it has an on button and that's kind of it you know yeah there's a stopper under here so if you pull the carafe out it doesn't drip but that's really it and yeah it is outshone from a features perspective by a number of the other brewers who do all sorts of fancy things they have more control more options more more settings more stuff this doesn't when it comes to brewing coffee yes technically other brewers are more temperature stable you know extracting a little bit more from the coffee but i like the coffee this thing makes i've liked it for a long time it makes nice coffee you can do stuff to do a better job with it there's techniques that kind of stuff maybe we'll talk about that one day but but buying this feels like an emotional decision rather than a highly logical decision you buy this because you love how it looks you love how it feels at 230 pounds there's a little brand tax there but it's an old company they built a lot of these things and they have a great reputation still and so while it is in the middle of the pack for pricing or features or all that kind of stuff it is a solid reliable performer it's highly likeable it looks great and i wouldn't have an issue recommending one if you liked the look and feel of it and it was something you wanted to own so the oxo the nine cup brewer i'm very glad i got to test this i've heard a lot of good things about what they're doing in coffee as a company and this was definitely uh interesting enjoyable and a contender in this particular grouping now all product design involves compromise right you've got to compromise somewhere otherwise everything you build would be expensive and beautiful and unaffordable by almost everybody what's important is to compromise in the right places and i feel like they've done a good job with that here right with this brewer it feels metal where you want it to feel metal but they're using plastic in other places i think the design is nice in terms of features it does the barest of minimums it's got a clock and therefore you can set it to brew at a certain time in the morning that's a nice thing and you've also got two settings depending on how much coffee you're making so like two to five cups or five to nine cups it will brew a little differently in terms of how it delivers water in those things and that's really it it's 210 which i think is is actually a very fair price you get a lot of good quality brewing it brews well it's temperature stable it extracts well it's quite slow but if you you know having it come on for you at a certain time you can account for that the little dial is the cheapest part of it in terms of feel like if i was to nitpick this isn't a beautiful dial it feels a little loose compared to everything else it just doesn't feel wonderful and it kind of betrays a little bit of the compromise in terms of materials in the machine but the coffee's good and that's probably the most important thing so i think if you are a little budget constrained and you're in north america this is definitely worth considering i think you get a lot of bang for your buck you get everything you need and kind of nothing more i don't mind that there's no temperature control on this it's nice to have but it's not essential it makes nice coffee so overall i'm a little bit impressed with this i think it's a good brewer so the sage or breville precision brewer i have made a whole video about this before it's linked in the description if you want to check that out so i'm not going to rehash the whole thing but it's a very sage product a very breville product there's just a ton of features crammed into this thing it's a conical and a flatbed brewer but i'd recommend the conical you can adjust brew temperatures you can adjust bloom time bloom volumes flow rates all of these kind of things you can have gold cup brewing presets or you have your brew presets it's got a timer it'll come on first thing in the morning the list goes on it's a good brewer i've had good results from it it's interesting to me that compared to others it extracts less from the same grounds but i'd always just dialed in my grind setting to to get what i needed to with the brewer when i've used it so that's kind of interesting one thing seems to be true is that the the european version of this has more features than the us one that seems entirely weird to me i don't really understand it and i don't understand why they can't get the markings on a water tank right that's just really weird to me too so it's not a perfect brewer but it is a good solid reliable one packed full of features and i think is very good value for money the wilfur i think looks great it's striking it's beautiful it feels minimalist there's a lot about this designed to like if this kind of thing appeals to you if it doesn't then you just hate it and that's okay points to wilfur for being the only ones to do this why is that so hard why can't i have a detachable water tank they can do it why can't everyone else do it because i love detaching the tank take it fill it if you've got good tap water life is easy often these things are under kitchen cabinets i don't want to you know maneuver a jug under there that's just it's just awkward this is nice the tank is accurate it's nice that it tells you how much coffee it recommends and that i agree is nice so so that big win the hot plate slash glass carafe thing is much more contentious now in reviews of uh let's say the sage in the past a lot of people have complained that brewing into a thermal carafe actually takes too much heat out of the coffee and they hate that the first cup they get is not hot enough i've never had that problem but people do and that's kind of confusing to me but it is a thing that people repeatedly say this does fix that problem but know that heating your coffee for a prolonged period of time will make it taste worse so so i don't recommend that for a kind of long-term storage but at least those first few cups will be piping piping hot one small complaint about the brewer is that this cone here hangs on the central thing and actually getting it on and off it's not it's not beautiful like it's a touch awkward i know i did that quite easily then but you can find yourself kind of searching for the little hook to get it in and that's not my favorite part of this brewer there's no settings or adjustments here outside of the little collar here which is a flow restrictor underneath the cone there's just an on off button and again if you like that you like that if you want more you'll be frustrated for the money i might have hoped for a little bit more maybe that's temperature control maybe that's an auto start or kind of timer function in there but something for the money i feel would be justified because it is expensive right it is expensive for a brewer but it is a kind of design piece that brews great coffee so the brazen is a very different feeling brewer to all of the others it is unconventional in comparison it is big it feels big unwieldy and if i'm honest for me personally it's not my favorite design of the brewers here like i i i find the kind of shaping styling the lines on it they're just not for me i would have gone with a kind of cleaner thing with less lines less shapes less textures less stuff going on it does feel top heavy and it feels kind of weird to have a kettle on legs above your coffee and you boil that up it just feels weird to me to have it this way around but it is a kind of brute force solution and elegant in its own way of of having temperature control relatively easily it's got the extra features you might want you could control things like bloom time and those kind of stuff and and kind of pre-brewing you have an altitude compensation to help you make sure you can actually boil the water or get the water to the temperature you need wherever you are in the world it's got a clock and auto starts and those kind of things the the mesh metal basket is a nice one as they go i'd probably want to put paper in there long term but that's just me and my preferences and it's 150 pounds which is the cheapest of all of them but it does feel it the buttons don't feel particularly premium the materials don't feel particularly premium but that's the decision that's the compromise here i think for many people it would be the aesthetics that are the hurdle to clear like do you like this enough it does how it looks how it fits into your kitchen but i do like the coffee that it makes i think it does a good job plenty of features for your money so overall i i don't really have any big issues with this brewer at all so the ratio i as you might expect have pretty mixed feelings about this in a pretty strong way it looks great right like it feels premium it's expensive but it's all metal the shape is lovely the design is nice you don't have to have it in kind of matte white there's a matte black this is like kind of shiny silver one too i i think it is a very good looking brewer very feature light right you have a button you have a go button and that's kind of it it'll bloom for you whether you're brewing 20 grams or whether you're brewing 80 grams it's it's going to bloom the same way regardless and that to me feels like a bit of a missed opportunity though i don't know how you you know i have a solution for the ui of setting those things anyway the experience of using it is kind of frustrating to me it's just got a lot of bits and and not all of them are in at any one time right like so to brew you have this stack of three things and getting in and out it is awkward right like you've got your open carafe your brew basket and then your your sort of heat shield at the top here and this really keeps the heat in that seems to be potentially the secret source of this brewer but but maybe not but it definitely brews well but manipulating in is awkward that doesn't feel good and then straight after brewing when i pull it out the rubber flicks back at me and often flicks a little bit of what is ultimately cold water at me but it i just don't like that part of the experience and then having taken this off you then need to sort of rebuild it so this comes off and goes on the little base thing here and i'm going to put my lid on here and then you know you've got this carafe that i think is not great as a carafe i think this lid is a real problem in addition to what i've said the lid when you wash it can get water stuck inside and that's just gross like two days later you move the lid around and water of an unknown age comes out no that's that's not okay so this there's so much right here this makes really great coffee it looks really good but for me it falls down in a couple of areas that as someone who reviews things kind of winds me up maybe more than it does other people like i said i've watched lots of reviews of this brewer and people aren't mad about the same things that i'm mad about which means either i'm having an unusually bad time or other people just don't think about this stuff the same way and it's hard to know which is which ultimately right so so i like this brewer but i also have some substantial issues with this brewer in the uk i think it's a bit more expensive comparatively than it is in the u.s which which maybe hurts a bit more to have it at 375 pounds but it you know like i said i don't feel like it's been um compromised in terms of its materials or construction or performance or all those things and honestly i feel like the tweaks and fixes to this are relatively simple i don't think i'm ever going to love the stack of three things to slide in but i think you could definitely fix the lid of this carafe and and have a better experience and that would be for me an actual massive improvement in the overall experience i do feel a bit like i've picked on this brewer more than the others but it it it's just doubly frustrating when it performs so well and then falls down in these little places that that are for me kind of issues with all of that out of the way let's move to recommendations i feel like when you're shopping for one of these things you're kind of looking at either the best quality coffee from something the best looking the best kind of design experience or their kind of best bang for buck and i would say on the last one the best value for money for me probably is the oxo actually i think at 210 it does lots it makes nice coffee big capacity i think that's that's great value and i can't imagine spending 210 in a better way to to get a cup of coffee in the morning from an automated brewer if your goal is um quality of extraction and nothing else then i would say the ratio um certainly the welfare um the the be more actually probably all of them are all in contention as the the kind of um the most feature-rich i think the sage if you want everything in there in the kitchen sink the sage breville brewer is it and if it is really just about design well that's that's in the eye of the beholder right it's between the ratio the welfare and the mocker master i think are the three strongest pieces of visual design of product design from just an aesthetic perspective but of course i don't get to keep these all of these brewers are going to be given away to my patreon supporters they give me the budget every month to go and buy these things just buy them outright like a normal person and review them and give you my honest feedback and my honest impressions i'm very grateful to them for letting this channel do what it does but now i want to hear from you down in the comments below especially if you have one of these brewers is there an aspect to it that i've missed is there a flaw that you've found that i've missed is there something you loved that i didn't talk about are you thinking about upgrading what matters to you the most in a coffee brewer let me know down in the comments below but for now i'll say thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a great day

Channel: James Hoffmann

Views: 1,389,077

Keywords: james hoffmann, james hoffman, jimseven, coffee

Id: t8eYs2vxT-8

Length: 30min 27sec (1827 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021