Behmor Connected Temperature Control Coffee Maker

  • A “connected” coffee maker you control with the best user interface in the world – your phone
  • And by control we mean it: water temperature, pre-soak, timing, pulsed water flow (all that coffee nerd stuff)
  • You can even select from the “library” of brewing profiles if you’re not into the whole micromanagement thing
  • It takes about 10 minutes to brew a pot, which is longer than a Mr. Coffee, but you can start it right after you hit the “snooze” button
  • It basically gives you all the benefits of pour-over without the humongous hassle of pouring water in concentric circles for 10 minutes
  • The 40 oz double-walled thermal carafe lets you drink coffee well past the point in the day when you should have stopped
  • Model: GRT20C01CMC (A string with with 7 alphabetic characters and 4 numeric characters allows for 80,318,101,760,000 unique model numbers, which is, to put it lightly, overkill.)
see more product specs

A Brazen Omission

In a comprehensive comparison of fancy coffee makers, The Sweethome (a Wirecutter sister site) gave this Behmor coffee maker a middling review. They were reviewing the “dumb” version – not the connected one you control with your phone – but none of their complaints stemmed from the interface.

You might think that, as the hawkers of the product, we would be loathe to cite a negative review of it. But we love such reviews for 3 reasons:

  1. We expect that you (the customer) will trust us more in the long term if we dissuade you from making a purchase in the short term. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.

  2. If you do end up buying it, your expectations will be appropriately set. Which is to say, your expectations will be appropriately low.

  3. We hate returns. They suck for you, they suck for us – they suck. Setting expectations reduces returns, which makes everyone happy (well, everyone involved in the transaction).

OK, so what did The Wirecutter have to say about this coffee maker?

If you like to play around with settings to get the ideal extraction from each bean, well, I would probably recommend looking into a pour-over setup that lets you control every aspect of the brewing process. But if you want a machine that’s also capable of that, the Behmor Brazen Plus … is a good choice because it makes really great-tasting coffee.

We agree. The “best” coffee is made with a pour-over setup, and the Behmor can mimic the pour-over process, so it’s the coffee maker that makes the best coffee. But wait a second, that’s not a bad review …

But it’s not for everyone. It takes almost 10 minutes to brew a full pot from start to finish …

Again, we agree. If you’d rather save 5 minutes than drink better coffee, this system isn’t for you. Set aside the fact that you can start brewing from bed using your phone, it’s still a good exclusion criterion for people who aren’t that into the flavor of their coffee.

Also set aside the fact that making delicious pour-over coffee also takes 10 minutes and a lot more care and attention. Many of the positive user reviews for it on Amazon are from former Chemex aficionados who are thrilled to have a machine take over the dirty work. But if you don’t know what “pour-over,” “Chemex,” or “delicious coffee” means, these benefits are moot.

The Wirecutter goes on:

It’s also a bit of an eyesore; a participant at our tasting compared it to a “Jetsons design.”

Yup, if a retro-futuristic design aesthetic turns you off and you don’t care much about the taste of your coffee, you should look elsewhere. And even though they don’t mention the price, we assume the $160 price tag factored into their conclusions. We agree, that’s too much to pay.

We’re grateful that The Wirecutter highlighted the pitfalls of this Behmor system because we wouldn’t want anyone who would prioritize them over delicious coffee to buy it.

Those who don’t buy it will trust us to shoot straight in the future. Those who do buy it will be aware of the drawbacks. And those who want to return it despite our transparency will be appropriately mocked by our customer service agents.

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