(upbeat music) - I love coffee just as
much as the next guy. Well, maybe not as much as Mr. Adam Ried, but I would never spend
more than a hundred dollars on a coffee maker. Now, Adam, I know you're a coffee guy. Would you spend a lot of
money on a coffee maker? - You know, I love coffee, Julia, but I'm a cheapskate at
heart and I'm with you. I don't really want to spend that much on a coffee maker either. The last time we tested
high end coffee makers, it was a $300 machine that won. Makes really good coffee, but it begged the question in my mind and it sounds like yours too, can you have great coffee for less money? And we have this lineup
of nine machines here with a price cap of a hundred dollars. - [Julia] It's a lot of machines. - A lot of machines, but only
a hundred dollars or less. We know from experience that the ratios of coffee to water that get recommended in the manuals are all over the place, and we wanted an even playing field. So we used the recommendation of the Specialty Coffee
Association of America. Their ratio is one part
coffee to 18 parts water. We also used tap water because most people at home will use tap water, and we use medium roast
beans that we bought in bulk and ground in batches
in a commercial grinder. Now let's talk about timing
and temperature a little bit, temperature first. You don't want water at the full boil when you're brewing coffee. You want it to be between
195 degrees and 205 degrees to get all the right flavors
out of the coffee beans. You also don't wanna brew
it too fast or too slow. A whole pot should take no
more than eight minutes. So we looked for guidance again from the Specialty Coffee Association, measuring the temperatures of the water as it goes into the brew basket, measuring the temperature
of the finished coffee, and timing the brew cycle. And it was sort of
surprising what we found. that temperature range of 195 to 205, a lot of the machines never
even made it into that range. - [Julia] Really? - They fell short of the range altogether. Some of the machines that
did make it into the range only spent about 10% of
their brew cycle there. The one that did the best,
that made it into the range and spent 71% of its brew
cycle, was this one right there. The next tests, our testers
put on their coffee geek hats and they got out their
coffee refractometer and they measured the total
dissolved solids in the coffee, which will give you an extraction level. And that's just talking about how many of the compounds get
dissolved in the water, and that really reflects
on how the coffee tastes. What you're looking for there
is a range of 18 to 22%, and this one machine that did well with the timing and the water temperature was right in the sweet spot, 21.6%. Some of them were as low as 11%, which resulted in weaker coffee. So in the end, this is actually the one that we loved the best. This is the Bona Vida Eight-Cup
One Touch coffee maker. It's 94 bucks. As I promised, less than a hundred. Makes really good coffee. It's simple to operate. One switch turns it on and off. The parts are easy to pull out and clean. It's got a thermal carafe, which we loved and it was also the best buy in our high end coffee maker testing. Above and beyond that, there's an even better recommendation. Our director and his wife, who
are coffee machine skeptics, love this machine, so it gets a solid real world recommendation. - All right, so this is the all star. If you're in the market
for a new coffee machine, try out the Bona Vida Eight-Cup One Touch coffee maker for just $94. - Thanks for watching
"America's Test Kitchen." What'd you think? - Well, leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make, or you can just say hello. - You can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description. - And don't forget to
subscribe to our channel. - See you later. - I'll see you later.
