Product Comparison | Bonavita Thermal And Glass Automatic Coffee Brewers

Transcript

Hey, Chris here with Prima Coffee Equipment. Today we're taking a look at Bonavita's automatic coffee makers for the home. Let's see what these two are about. On my left here, we have the glass carafe brewer. This has a glass carafe for brewing and a heating pad at the bottom. The heating pad has an automatic off after about two hours, so when you're done brewing, the machine will turn off, but the heating pad will keep going for about two hours to keep your coffee warm. The one on my right has a thermal carafe. A thermal carafe is stainless steel on the outside, but glass on the inside. So you're not going to have any staining, no tainting of the coffee's flavor, but it's still going to stay warm for a very long time. It also has a lid with a little lever that opens it, so you can keep the lid on, keep your coffee hot, just press the button to pour through. They both have this wedge type Melitta filter, a filter cone that takes Melitta number four paper filters.

It has a little raised hole at the bottom. A single hole means it's gonna drip a little bit slower than other wedge type brewers but being raised, it's actually going to allow for a pre-wet stage. The first couple of grams of water aren't going to drip through, allowing for the coffee to wet and bloom at the beginning of that process. These two have the wedge type filter. You can also use something like a Kalita Dripper. Anything that's gonna fit on top of these will work well with the Bonavita. Kalita Dripper, throw that on top, you can use a Bee house, which would actually work better with the glass carafe because of the way the edge works. Anything that's gonna have the wide enough opening to accommodate the spray head, you can brew it. They work pretty well. We like using the Kalita in particular. Let's take a look at the brewer itself, not just the carafe. On the side here, you can see markings on the water reservoir. This is where you actually add water to brew, and you can measure either with a scale beforehand, which is what I like to do, because it's the most accurate, or you can use these little marks.

Milliliters up to 300 on the left, and then five ounce cups up to eight on the right. That's a 40 ounce total brewing capacity, a bit over a liter, so it's quite a bit of coffee and it fills each of these, not to the top, but fills each of these carafes a good bit of the way. I brewed just a half a liter in the glass carafe right here. Now if I lift this top piece off, we can actually see the spray head. The spray head comes directly from the water reservoir. I'll tilt it up so you can see that a little bit too. It has a nice, wide radius. That allows the bed of coffee to be saturated really well. It has sort of a pulse cycle, on for a bit, off for a bit, et cetera. As much water as you add to the reservoir beforehand is gonna go through. You can simply measure or weigh your water beforehand, or just pour up to the line, hit the on button, and it'll brew all that water through the coffee. These will go up to about 40 ounces or so, again. Both are the same in that regard, and they're incredibly easy to use. As you can see, you're just grinding coffee, adding your filter, pouring the water in, hitting the on button, and just waiting from there.

Because these have either the heating pad or the thermal carafe, they're gonna keep your coffee warm for a while. It's incredibly convenient. You can leave your coffee going, and then go do something else, then come back and it'll be ready. Bonavita brewers, we like both of these. One of the things that make these two stand out the most is the temperature of the water. These can consistently deliver at a higher temperature than almost any other automatic coffee maker we've seen. At the brewer head, we're seeing temperatures around 205 degrees, and in the bed itself, in the slurry, we're seeing temperatures around 200 to 203. This means that you're actually hitting the temperature range that's recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. That's what makes these stand out more than anything among other automatic brewers like them. The price is also right. If you're looking for a really convenient way to make excellent coffee, this is our top recommendation. It works very well, especially when paired with a nice, simple home burr grinder, like a Baratza Encore. It's a classic combination that we highly recommend. These are Bonavita's automatic coffee makers. We recommend them highly and think that you'll like them a lot. Thanks for watching.