Drew Barrymore s Coffee Machine Is it Good

Today, we're talking about this, Drew Barrymore's new coffee machine. Why would we talk about that? Well, to be honest, one reason. It's a $99 bean-to-cup filter coffee maker. For under $100, this thing is grinding and brewing whatever beans you want to put into it. And that, as a category, as a product, seems very exciting to me. I want that to be a thing that is good. But is this good? Because if you were to buy a good grinder and a kettle, say even a cheap V60, that's gonna run to probably twice the price of this. So there must be compromise, right? And today, we're gonna walk through how this thing works, because I think those compromises are kind of interesting. And at the end of all of this, you can decide if this thing is worth $99 to you. Now, for a little bit of context and what they might call inside baseball, this is part of a line of products called Beautiful from Drew Barrymore. And you can tell here on the logo, it's a big B for Beautiful, and then a little D and a big B for Drew Barrymore. I love it. It's a collaboration that's sold exclusively in Walmart. It's all sort of labeled as designed by Drew. However, the manufacturer, to make this confusing, is a company called Made by Gather. And you can see they tend to make products that look like this, kind of nice, sleek, modern-looking products. And so this is a kind of collab with Drew, Made by Gather. And I guess, to some extent, Walmart, it's hard to know. I do quite like how it looks. I think it looks clean and neat, and it's a lot of stuff in a relatively small package. There's some interesting colors there. I think for $99, the fit and finish feel pretty good. The detailing is kind of nice. I'm surprised at how much I liked it getting it out of the box. It doesn't feel substantial and heavy, but I didn't expect it to. But it doesn't feel cheap and flimsy and terrible either. So a quick walkthrough. Here at the back, you've got a big detachable water tank. This thing will brew up to a 16-ounce brew. This is a few liters of water in here, which I think is actually a surprisingly good thing. In the middle here is your grinder's little lid here. This will hold up to 180 grams of beans. I have to get this rant in now because I love it. It makes me very happy. This machine will only refer to liquids in ounces. Everything is ounces. You select your drink size in ounces, or the manual refers to ounces. It's ounces. However, every single time the manual or anything in this machine references coffee, it's in grams. It's in grams. They're mixing the old imperial metric, which is terrible, but it makes me feel like coffee is winning the war for metric to be the answer. Sorry, America. Grinder here. We'll get into the grinder in just a second. And then on the front, you'll see this little clock. You know what that means? It can do brew later. It can wake you up in the morning by grinding and brewing coffee for you. A lovely comfort feature available for under $100. I think that's good. Way too many domestic coffee brewers that brew nice coffee do not have that feature, and that is a shame. It's worth the small loss in quality of grinding the night before. But this thing doesn't even do that. Grinds fresh. Amazing. So the front of this thing is a kind of combination of a touch panel and a display. To get things going, we push this button here. You can select your brew size. You can select to brew later. You can change the strength, which is gonna be how much coffee it grinds for each brew. You can also then sort of turn the grinder off. If you wanted to use your own coffee, you can put that in pre-ground or from a separate grinder, tell it don't use the grinder, and it will brew the requisite amount of water slash coffee when you hit go. And obviously, there is the push go button. It does beep a little bit, and it beeps every time you take the drawer out, which is a little bit annoying. But here's your brew chamber. So it's a kind of plastic mesh filter. But as you look at the bottom of the basket, something very strange is going on here. Half of the bottom of this basket is blocked off. That's a strange decision. You surely want an even flow of water through the coffee. If you look on the other side, this bit here effectively acts as a shower screen. So the machine will pump hot water onto this piece. It'll flow out and be nicely distributed over the bed of coffee. But that bed of coffee can't brew evenly. Why would you do that? Don't worry, I'll tell you why. This part here, as the whole thing goes, this is a little cutout here. This is why you can't use paper filters in this thing day to day. And they do say you can't use paper filters. Well, it's because most paper filters would come up all the way around here. Let me show you the problem. If you took a kind of normal paper filter and popped it in here, it looks, that looks like it fits. But here's the problem. This thing injects coffee from its grinder here. And so if you put a paper filter in, well, it wouldn't be able to get coffee in. That's a bit of a flaw. Now I have tried, because of course I have, snipping out this little cross section here to allow the coffee in, but still to use a paper. But it didn't work very well. Paper is out. We're stuck with the weird metal filter. We're stuck with the half basket thing. What's this all about? Well, the answer is the grinder. The grinder is relatively easy to access because they do want you to clean it out pretty often, which is interesting. It's a little click off cover here. It's just your standard, don't let you put your fingers in the burr cover. And then inside, twist to open, out comes your burr. It's not really a burr. If you're not familiar with these, they're most commonly referred to as false burrs. Now a traditional coffee grinder burr is made of metal. It looks a little bit like this and it has sharp teeth cut into it and it precisely cuts the coffee down to the appropriate size that you need to brew with. These are not that. These are not sort of sharpened metal pieces. These are kind of like aggressively rubbing the coffee to pieces with your hands. Vaguely more effective. We've done a whole series on these kind of grinders. I'll leave a link down below. They're very cheap to buy, mostly because this part is so cheap. Manufacturing good coffee burrs, even simple small ones, seem to really elevate the price of said grinder. And so this little thing here, frankly, does a terrible job of turning the coffee beans into usable pieces of ground coffee. You'll see. Don't worry. The other downside with this setup here is that I can't adjust the distance between these burrs. That's fixed. And that really throws up a bunch of challenges, especially if you want to brew lighter roasts of coffee where you would want to grind them much finer. This machine strongly prefers darker roasted coffee beans. They will grind sort of better. They'll extract better than light roasts. If you can adjust this, I might cut it a little bit of slack, but you can't. It's a fixed grind size, no matter the brew size, whether you're brewing six ounces or 16 ounces, no matter the coffee beans. I haven't told you what I've told you. Having looked at the setup that we have here, you might be surprised by some of the claims on the box of this thing. It's a nice box. There's Drew. She's looking happy. That's good. And then the big claim, no watered down coffee extract two times more flavor. I'm not sure compared to what or how there is some sort of experiment referenced here. It does have two trademarked technologies in there. There is the perfect grind technology, which is a stretch. And then there's the extract exact technology, trademarked, of course. Sorry, it's been pointed out that there is actually a little asterisk on here next to the double flavor extraction. It says this is compared to a Keurig Classic model with a model number using Keurig's Dunkin' Donuts original blend of medium roast pods at the 10 ounce brew cup size setting. This is saying that compared to a K-cup brew, which would typically extract around 20%, you're getting twice the flavor. So they're claiming 40%, I guess. I don't even know, which isn't even possible under normal conditions because only about 30% of coffee is even soluble. Look, it's just a wild claim that makes no sense if you use flavor to mean anything sort of soluble in the ground coffee. If they mean something else by flavor, great. But I have no idea what this claim means. It's just wild. They've got their lovely trademarked things. They haven't trademarked Drew's brew. Seems like a shame to me. Let's brew some coffee. I don't have really dark roasted coffee beans here. I have what specialty would call the lighter end of medium and what commercial would call pretty light. You've just missed the segment where we lost our minds effectively. We got stuck in a loop where we programmed it to come on later by mistake and then it wouldn't let us do anything. It wouldn't let you brew. It was just gonna sort of lock you out of all functions until it was gonna brew tomorrow morning, which is a horrible piece of menu design and a terrible flaw in the software. But moving on. We've selected eight ounces. You can go anywhere from six to 16 ounces in two ounce increments, which is lovely. What I'm gonna do now to sort of illustrate some of the weirdness of this machine is interrupt it as it's brewing because once it's ground the coffee, I wanna see how much coffee is it grinding for an eight ounce brew. Tear off the drawer and start the brew. Now, interestingly, there's a little pause. It doesn't grind straight away. It seems to do a little bit of preheating first and then the grinder kicks in. So for an eight ounce brew, we got 11.6 grams of coffee. Seems a bit light to me. Does that not seem a bit light to you? Let's brew again. Let's make it bold. 16.7. So you'd think, okay, 16.7, eight ounces. It's like a 250-ish thing times by four. That's about 60 grams a liter. That's pretty good. Let me show you now, though, what's going on on the inside. It's not looking good in here. Now, it's hard to show you this without kind of upsetting everything, but all the coffee is mounded at the back here, right? Which suddenly makes sense where they've closed off half the basket because actually there's no coffee covering this bit of basket just here. It's kind of hard to see, but you can kind of see just here, strained basket, right? There's just no coverage because of the way that it's thrown coffee in here. It's sort of thrown it in, gone to the back, and you know, I'll give it a little sifting, settle it out a bit, but I'm not sure that's setting it up for success. Secondly, you can see all around here, loads of tiny, fine particles. The problem with these kind of false burr grinders is not just that they produce loads of these very fine powdery pieces that give the brew this kind of harsh, bitter taste, but it's that they also grind very coarse pieces at the same time, so you have a real spread of sizes. That's not what you want. When you buy a really nice coffee grinder, it tends to produce sort of more uniform pieces of ground coffee that are easier to extract and have things taste good. Here, there's a massive range. There's a load of these fines, and then there are pieces up to sort of 1500 microns across. That's one and a half millimeters. That's not ground coffee. That's just a piece of bean. That will really be difficult to get flavor out of. There's not much surface area exposed, and the brew will have this combination of bitterness and sourness, typically. Enough speculation. Let's actually brew. At this stage, I'm not sure I'm sold in the no more watery coffee. For early in the brew, you'd be expecting a darker stream of liquid from the bed of coffee, because that's when there's the most kind of soluble stuff available. It's looking a little bit weak from the get-go. Don't worry. It will beep when it's done. There it is. And let me just get a carafe to explain this. This machine is a rule breaker. I'm not sure in a way that is compelling or good, though. Here's the thing. When we talk about brewing coffee, we talk about how much water you're using. The whole coffee industry, most coffee equipment, talks about the amount of clean, fresh water at the start. That's what we think. We might give you a brew ratio of, say, 60 grams per liter. And so you'd brew, say, 250 mils of clean, fresh water to 15 grams of coffee. When this thing says eight ounces, it's not brewing eight ounces of fresh, clean water. It's producing eight ounces of brewed coffee. 236.5. That's problematic. Not because it does what it says it's supposed to do, right? It makes sense to say, give me eight ounces of liquid. Here's eight ounces of liquid. But all of the sort of maths of coffee brewing ratios don't work on finished liquid. So when you do the maths, our starting recipe, assuming eight ounces of water in, was more like 66 grams a liter. And then now it turns out to be 60 grams a liter. 60 grams a liter is what most people would consider normal strength in most of the coffee industry. So the fact is that this thing is brewing that when you ask it for strong, when you're kind of brewing weaker, it's been like 45 grams a liter, which historically was considered acceptable, but really in the last 10 or 20 years, that's been considered just too weak. That was when we were trying to squeeze everything out of coffee, regardless of whether it tasted good or not. The upside is more water will mean technically more extraction, but it will still be weaker than a kind of normally well-brewed cup of coffee. But is it good? It looks a little pale. You know, it's hard to sort of tell strength with your eyes, you can get kind of close, but I would say that's definitely looking like a weak brew. A bit of sediment, a bit of silt at the bottom of this brew. That's not surprising. It's metal filtered, so you'd expect a bit more texture. Not smelling great. It's one of those things where it's good coffee, it's good water. And so there's not a lot of negative tastes. It doesn't taste bad. It just doesn't taste very good. It tastes weak and it tastes thin. It lacks sweetness. And you know, we've set this on the kind of stronger setting. If I was using a much darker roast, I'd be having a different experience because darker roasts are just much more soluble. They're easier to extract. There's less soluble material, technically, that'd be too nerdy, but it's much easier to extract. You'd feel like you've got a stronger cup of coffee at the end of it. With kind of nicely roasted coffee, this thing is kind of ruling itself out. But just because you've got a sort of stronger cup from a darker roast, doesn't mean it would have done a good job of brewing it properly or that you were getting the best out of the beans that you were buying. You kind of need a more uniform grind size, not to have the kind of sour, bitter combo that this still kind of has. You can taste it with specialty coffee, but it's not. It's not a good brew. Kind of sour and reedy and kind of finishes almost dusty. It's a real shame. I want $99 to buy you access to beans from whoever you want to buy beans from. You know what I mean? Like it kind of unlocks you from the world of pods or kind of pre-ground coffee that's available. Being able to brew beans means you can buy anything you want and really enjoy the diversity that coffee has to offer. This does not unlock that experience. This will just let you access a fraction of the quality that your beans have if you're buying really nice coffee beans. It's a kind of false economy. You are saving money by buying an all-in-one that's under $100. And I get the desire there to buy a cheaper thing to have access to brewing fresh beans, but it's not really giving you that access. Saving up, I don't know if it's gonna cost more, but a proper burr grinder really is a great investment that will last years and years and years and truly give you access to the deliciousness that coffee is capable of. This sadly looks great. It's kind of nice to use. Got some weird software issues. You know, you could fix the brew ratios with software too, but ultimately it can't brew good coffee. The combination of a flawed grinder that will never sort of grind coffee properly with the challenge of then moving this very sticky ground coffee around, when you produce a lot of fines, they get stuck to things. It gets really dirty really easily. Let me just show you. One brew in, and it doesn't look great. There's the little shoot that the coffee's coming out of. It's kind of damp everywhere. It's a sticky mess. Filthy. If you're watching this, I can't come into the rest of the Beautiful range. I have no thoughts on that. I have no real comments on sort of celebrity-endorsed brewers like this. It's been a thing for forever, and that's just how it is. This, I like how it looks. I wish it was better, but it's not. But now I wanna hear from you. Have you tried this? Do you have one? Have you had a different experience to me? Do you know of another thing like this at a similar kind of price point that's doing a good job? Have I missed it? Is it out there? Let me know down in the comments below. But for now, I will say thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.