So Drew Barrymore Made A Coffee Machine and I kind of don t like it

Hello there. There is something a little bit different this week. Can you guess what it is? Well, I'll spoil the surprise for you, and it is the fact that you can see my pores in slightly higher definition than usual. We got a camera upgrade, which is very exciting. A little known secret, or perhaps widely known secret, is that for the past year and a half, pretty much everything we've ever shot has been shot on iPhone, believe it or not. We have pretty decent lighting in here, and we've just kind of been scrappy and made it work. This is my first adult camera that I've got. Very exciting. I'm very proud of it. Maybe it'll work today. Maybe it won't. I am new to it, so bear with me is what I'm saying. Anyways, let's get on to the video. When it comes to the world of celebrities, or even influencers on a slightly lesser degree, there comes a point where you jump in the world of personal branding and merchandising. I've done it. Most of the creators you follow online have probably done it, and when it comes to celebrities specifically, it turns into a much bigger thing. Frequently, it turns into celebrities putting together entire lines of products and or just creating their own company. I think the biggest example of what I'm talking about right now is probably, for better or for worse, the Kardashians. You can automatically think of the products that are associated with them. We have Kylie with all of her makeup things and paraphernalia. You have Kim with skims and also makeup and all sorts of other stuff. That's a really good example of celebrities leveraging their platform to create entirely separate and still within their personal brand companies that they then sell product under. That is all to say that a lot of celebrities do a lot of different things in that same sort of vein. Sometimes, those things tend to be coffee-related. Now, our wonderful Drew Barrymore, I say that like I know her, I don't, to be clear, has come out with a kitchen line, and in that kitchen line was a coffee machine. So I have got it. We are going to unbox it. We are going to look at it. We're gonna try it. We're ultimately going to review it to see if it is indeed a good coffee maker or just Drew Barrymore's coffee maker. So let me go grab it. Now, this is the absolute behemoth of a box that it comes with. Drew Barrymore's kitchen line is called Beautiful Kitchenware, and this was in collaboration with Walmart. Walmart, that is, is the main retailer that will sell any of her goods. There's a lot of stuff in this line. We obviously have the coffee maker, but she also has an air fryer and a griddle, skillet, pancake-making sort of thing, and she has a toaster and even, let's see, there's this picture of her. She has a kettle. That looks like something. Anyways, a lot of different things in this line, but today, we have her coffee maker. Let's just get this unboxed. Some things to note about this as I'm looking at it. This is a 14-cup coffee brewery. That is very large. My Bonavita in the back that I use pretty frequently is an eight cup, so this is nearly two times the capacity of kind of your standard homemaker. This is a lot of coffee. I imagine for a family would be the scenario that you'd use this because you are two people drinking 14 cups of coffee. I'm concerned about you. Off the bat, on the screen, it says fully programmable settings. That's something to get into. We have a brew strength selector, which is interesting and could be fun, and we have a, ooh, I love this, special cleaning cycle, so good thing so far. Now, this came in several different colors. The one I have opted to select is sage green, as you can see. About her coffee maker, Drew Barrymore says, the kitchen is my family's happy place. It's where we cook and eat and bake and laugh and share our most beautiful moments together. That's what inspired the creation of Beautiful, my new collection of easy-to-use kitchenware. Cool. Drew, I think we should just open this up and we should see what we have. I always feel a little bit like a paleontologist or something, just unearthing the bones of some old machine whenever I have to do stuff like this. This is large. All right, well, that wasn't too bad to pull out. And at the end, we only have a couple things to look at. So we have our construction manual, of course. We have this little packet right here. I believe, I will verify this in a moment when we get into this, I believe this should be like a water softening packet. This will sit inside the water chamber, wherever that is, somewhere up here. And we also have a scoop. Coffee makers will almost always include them. I will almost always never use them, but I do appreciate the thought. So thank you, Drew. Now, looking at the machine itself, there's not a lot to see. You have your main carafe here. The base of the carafe is glass. However, the rest of it is just gonna be hard plastic, all of this, even though you do have this kind of like imitation gold finish here, whatever you wanna call that. And everything else you'll see has no buttons because this, this right here, you'll see when we plug it in, is a touchscreen. So it's kind of fun. Well, inside we have our little mesh filter basket that our coffee is going to go into. Kind of nice that you can remove it. We have a water chamber back here. We have your kind of brew head where your water is going to filter out of over your coffee bed, and then it'll drip down into your carafe. Pretty standard coffee maker. Let's review the instructions real fast, and then let's plug this in. Let's start brewing some coffee. Now, already looking at this, there is a flaw in this build. This might be specifically to the one I have purchased, which is kind of a bummer. The plastic casing right here is not flush with the other plastic casing. It's kind of popped away, and I don't have really any way to pop it back in. So that's kind of a bummer. This coffee maker itself retails for just under 60 US dollars. So it's about $59 on the Walmart site, minus shipping. So do with that information what you will. The first thing we have is the safety section, which seems pretty self-explanatory if I'm being honest. Things like do not put the carafe in a microwave oven. I will make note that rule eight of the safety section notes always use fresh, cool water in your coffee maker. Warm water or other liquids, except as listed in the cleaning section, may cause damage to your coffee maker. So what I'm hearing is Drew does not want us to try Will It Coffee in this brewer. There are no promises that I will not put other liquids in here, but at least not today. I don't think I made it clear before, but because in here you have this mesh filter, you don't need to buy external paper filters to put in this. So that could be a pro or a con, depending on whether you are pro paper filter or not, but at least it makes it pretty easy to purchase this and not need to buy other things. So to be clear, no paper filter, this is gonna be perfect. Also something you can do with this, I probably won't because it's not a feature that I use, but in case you are watching this video as a full review of this brewer, you are able to preset this with like a brew time. So let's say you wanna have your coffee ready in the morning at 827, because that is when you want your coffee to finish brewing. You are able to preset that using the functions on here. So something to note. I have also discovered that in here, you have this removable filter holder is what they're calling it. You are able to pop it open. Your charcoal filter will go right in here, close that, then back into the water tank. So that's what you do there. And I think I do need to get this all plugged in so we can actually look at this, this touchscreen scenario. The buttons on here are rather faint. I'll check if you can see it better on camera. The touchscreen is on now. You do have like program, select, brew. You have a clock up here, which is kind of fun. It's very difficult to see. So let me see if you can see it. Well, the bad news is I just went and looked and it doesn't look like you can see the screen at all from where you are. And even here, it's very difficult to see. We'll see if this screen needs some time to, I don't know, warm up, but it is very tricky. Very tricky to see what we have going on here on the touchscreen. So it's not much better for me than it is for you. Having read through the instruction manual once, I think I am 100% prepared to dive into this. I think the main things we're gonna look at today are the different brew levels, because this thing has three different brew settings. If you will, they have regular, they have gourmet, they have bold. I would very much like to see how taste-wise those three differ from one another. Besides that, I think we should get kind of a general handling about how this functions and feels as a coffee maker. I think that's about all I have to say. I'm gonna go run some cleaning cycles very quickly through this. If you are buying a new coffee maker, you should always do that. Just run a couple cycles of just water through this with no coffee added just to get any dust or residue or plastic, I don't know, anything that's stuck inside. Clear? Then I will meet you back here. We'll get some coffee. Welcome back, everyone. Now, while we were away, I took the liberty of also getting our coffee prepped. Now, this is the exact same Mexican coffee because there are some lights and it's vaguely reflective, but even me being right next to this thing, it is hard to see. Okay, so I'm sproasted. I press select. Okay, all right, I think I've got it. So right now we have it set to regular. That was not too hard to do. It's a very quick process. As long as you can see what you're doing. Now, I guess we just start brewing. I think that's what we do there. There is not that much more to this. I'll also say, although this does do a maximum of 14 cups of coffee, which is quite a lot. That is like a family size carafe of coffee. I'm not gonna be doing that much. You do have the options to do smaller amounts. I'm gonna be brewing four cups of coffee. I think that is plenty for the taste test we will be doing today. As you can see in our lovely filter, we now have our ground coffee. Now inside, we kind of have these tiered levels here that indicate where you're supposed to pour your water to. So we're going up to four. We have just covered the four mark. Close this. And then in theory, I have just pressed brew. I heard a little click happen in here. And now maybe we will get some coffee in here. Just touching and handling this. I don't love all of these like plastic shell components. They don't fit super well together. Like this lid here, if you can see, doesn't really snap shut entirely. There's another problem over here, similarly to this outer one, where like this component isn't completely in line with this component, which is kind of frustrating. So that's to be noted. I guess I should get, I should get some cups right now. And the good news, everyone, is our coffee is brewing. And indeed, we do have some coffee droplets happening. I'm just gonna leave you and the coffee to have some time together. I'm gonna go get ready to taste. What do you think? Do you like it? Any thoughts and concerns now, Maisie? Yeah, that's about the face I'm making too at this point. It really drives me bonkers that this doesn't stay like completely sealed on the top. Like you can see it lifting because as we mentioned before, I'm not gonna turn this because it's in the brew stage. There's essentially like a little like plastic pipe or tube that is running the water from where it's being heated up to this top area right here. And then the water is being then dispersed over that bed of coffee, which means there's like a lot of action happening up here, which is continuing to lift this lid. So it just doesn't, doesn't stay closed. I just, just gonna do this. I'm just checking. There is no locking mechanism anywhere around here. So I'm just gonna, just gonna hang out here. All right. Well, I just heard the, oh, and there's the beep. All right, so we are done brewing. This is our regular cup of coffee. Really funny to see this amount of coffee in this carafe. Something else I'll say is that underneath here, there is a heating plate. This coffee maker does have like a keep warm setting, which is nice because with glass carafe, these tend not to hold heat quite as well as something as, let me show you, something like this. This is the carafe that comes with my Bonavita. It's basically a double wall, like insulated carafe, which means that heat is not gonna leak out of it quite as quickly as something like this glass single walled one. It might happen. So having a heating element is a good thing. Got a nice cup of regular coffee. I guess you would call it. Now, I want to brew all three of these strength settings. Then I wanna let them cool to a nice cuppable temperature, and then we'll taste them all side by side and see what the actual difference is between these. So I'm gonna go clean this. We'll empty out our filter basket. We'll continue brewing. One thing I'll also say at this point too, is while I appreciate the fact that you don't really have to deal with disposable paper filters, and that does reduce your waste somewhat, this does make cleaning this coffee maker a little bit trickier, because instead of being able to just knock out your paper filter with your grounds included, you now have to go take this over to the sink and the trash can, because you should not be putting your grounds down your sink. You should dump those either in compost or trash or wherever you put them. And then you have to go rinse this out to make sure none of those grounds remain in there. So something to keep in mind. There are pros and cons to everything, people. But you know, the good news is no matter what happens, rinsing this out does not take too long. You don't need to regularly like soap and clean this. A nice rinse with just some tap water will do nicely. Take two, real fast. We need to go. I have now set our brewer to two bars, which means we are gonna brew some gourmet coffee next. Whatever the heck that means. Coffee in, water in, lid closed for however long it will stay closed. And then we press brew. There we go. Happy to announce, we now have a pot of gourmet coffee. We have one more coffee to brew, and that is gonna be our bold coffee. I think that one's gonna be very interesting. I am curious how it differs to either of these two. So once more, one more brew cycle. We're now on three bars. We really are at a bold level here. In goes our coffee. I'm gonna fit so much water inside this bad boy. And we're brewing once more. All right, and with that, our bold coffee has finished brewing. How exciting. Now we've got three coffees here. We again have regular, we have gourmet, and we have bold. I'm gonna give these a little bit of time just to cool down to generally the same temperature, and then we're gonna cup them. Because these, in theory, were brewed the exact same way, except for whatever strange variables that this machine decided to change to in fact make gourmet coffee and bold coffee. So that will be exciting. But while we wait for that, I think we will discuss my general thoughts about this machine so far. I think the biggest detriment to this machine, at least off the bat, is the fact that this touchscreen is nearly impossible to use. And I know from a viewer standpoint, this doesn't make too much sense because you can't even see it at all, and I'm very sorry for that. But I want to explain to you how difficult it is for me, as the real person touching this machine right now, to actually see anything that is visible on this, even when it has been sitting just turned on for a while. I think I had some vague hopes that this would perhaps warm up. Some light bulbs need just some time to reach their full capacity. That has not happened. This is just pretty illegible in general. Now, the other thing I will say, and again, this could be machine to machine, but for $60, it's kind of a bummer, is the fact that there are just things about this that are not built correctly. I mean, you have this piece here, this little decal. I think I would like it a lot better if this wasn't here, but it's a pretty machine, and it's a very, very large brewer, and hopefully, we'll find out here in a second, it has brewed some nice coffee. That being said, though, for $60, you know, I'm just, I'm a little wishy-washy on it still. I think if it brews some really great coffee, I think if there is distinct differences between these three different brews, it might elevate this a little bit more, but at the moment, I'm feeling less than positive about this machine. All right, well, we have had some cooling time, so now you get to enjoy the lovely ASMR of me slurping coffee. This, again, we're starting with our regular brew. That tastes fine. That tastes entirely normal. That is a nice cup of coffee. There is nothing wrong with that. If this came out of my Bonavita, which I use on a pretty daily basis, I wouldn't blink twice at it. This is nice. We have some gourmet coffee, which I'm always down. I'm always down for a gourmet coffee. Apparently, I've also spilled some of it. Let's try the bold, because I'm having a very difficult time picking those two apart. Those taste pretty much the same. They're both nice cups of coffee, but is one more gourmet than the other? I don't know. Now we at least have our bold coffee. If I had to say anything about these three different strengths, or settings, modes, if you will, of coffee, I guess the bold is slightly, slightly more full-bodied than the regular, but it's like a negligible difference. This is not any significant difference. In fact, I would argue that the gourmet really just tastes the same as the regular. I don't know what this did differently about them. Let me get the manual one more time, because maybe I have missed something in my single read-through. Okay, in the brew strength area, it just says press select until strength illuminates, and then you can press plus or minus to alternate the brew strength, which we did. That was one, two, and three bars, respectively. The active brew strength is displayed on the control panel. Yes, I saw that. For your convenience, the last chosen brew strength will be the default for the next carafe of brewed coffee. Ta-da-da. That makes sense. I guess what I'm wondering is what happened differently between these. There is, from what I can tell, no indication or no explanation about how the brew settings change what we brew, because the instructions are to add the same amount of water and coffee each time. There's no instruction on to alternate any of those variables. All the adjustments are supposedly made within the setting that you have programmed, and that is the function of this machine. So I guess I'm a little confused. Now this whole there are three different settings thing starts to feel a little bit like a marketing ploy and not something that actually makes any significant difference, which is kind of a bummer because the idea that you could have like three drastically different light coffee brews, kind of fun. I think that's a lot of fun, actually. I just think in practice, it might not work quite as well as they're expecting it to. So this was my unboxing and my vague review of the Beautiful Coffee Maker from Drew Barrymore. Now I think perhaps if sage green is the theme of your kitchen, I think perhaps if you are willing to spend $60 on a brewer that may not do all the things that it claims to do, then I think this could be a good purchase for you. I do think the color of this is quite lovely, and I think this would go very well in some people's kitchens. That being said, if we are looking at this more analytically from a coffee perspective of, should you buy this brewer if you were expecting a really great cup of coffee with great functionality and all of that stuff? Maybe not. There are some good things, but I also think there are some very significant bad things about this brewer. And for that, I am a little bit sad because it is very pretty. I will admit that. That was that. I've now got three very similar, very decent cups of coffee. And I guess, you know what the heck, I'll just go drink the bold one because it is still the warmest and there is no real noticeable difference between any of these. So that being said, this was the video. I hope this was vaguely helpful or vaguely educational to some of you. I hope the improved ability for you to see my individual pores was nice, and hopefully it'll only go up from here. I am Morgan Drinks Coffee. Pretty much anywhere you will find me online. You can find me here once a week for a long video, plus shorts, because I do those. You can also find me on TikTok or Instagram at Morgan Drinks Coffee on pretty much any given day. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. There are all sorts of fun links in the bleh, can't speak, the description down below. I will see you all next time. Have a great day, everyone. Goodbye.