How I Test Gear
Written before the results, so it cannot be rewritten to justify them.
This page describes the method for the four tested reviews. None of them have finished testing yet. When one does, its review will link back here and state exactly how many units were used and over what period.
What gets tested, and what does not
Four products: a pour-over dripper, a coffee scale, a hand grinder under $100, and a milk frother. Nothing else on this site is tested, and no other page will ever say it was. The guides explain mechanics; they are researched, not trialled.
How the gear is acquired
Fill in: bought outright, or sent by manufacturers. Whichever it is gets stated on each review, per unit. A unit provided free by a brand is labelled as such next to that product, not once in small print at the bottom.
What actually gets measured
Same beans, same water, same grinder where the grinder is not the variable.
- Drippers — drawdown time across repeat brews, bed appearance after drawdown, how much technique it takes to get a repeatable result.
- Scales — response lag under a live pour, drift over a full brew, reading stability with a hot server on the platform, and whether the display is legible with steam in front of it.
- Grinders — time and effort for a standard dose, consistency at pour-over settings, retention between doses, and how the adjustment holds after being moved.
- Frothers — time to usable foam, how the foam holds up in an actual drink rather than in the pitcher, and how it behaves with more than one kind of milk.
Test duration per category: Fill in: how many weeks. Units per roundup: Fill in: how many units.
Photography
Every photo on a tested review is taken by Alicia Pearse, of the actual unit, during actual use. Grounds on the counter and spent filters stay in the frame; the mess is the evidence. No manufacturer product shots and no stock photography appear on a review page, ever.
Guides are illustrated instead, with drawings that are obviously drawings. If you cannot immediately tell whether an image is a photograph of a tested product or an illustration, that is a bug, and worth reporting.
What a verdict is worth
One person testing a handful of units over a few weeks is a real opinion, not a laboratory. These reviews will tell you what won for a home brewer on a counter, and what it lost to. They will name what each product did well, including the ones that did not win, because a review that never says anything good about a runner-up is an advertisement.
Commission never decides a placement. See the affiliate disclosure, including the specific Zulay Kitchen relationship that affects one of the four categories.
Corrections
When a review changes, the date at the top of it changes too, and the reason is stated. If testing produces a result that contradicts something already published here, the older page gets fixed rather than quietly left up.