So today we're going to be looking at about four brands that are Bonavita, Technivorm, Ratio, and Breville. There are a lot of other brewers out there on the market, but based on our own research and a set of criteria for auto home brewers, that includes things like evenness of extraction, reliability, feature set, the quality of the coffee, of course. These are the brewers that we think perform the best. Now keep in mind these are just our opinions here at Prima and you should take that for what it's worth. But we hope this comparison will be helpful to you in some way as you make a buying decision.

First up is Bonavita. Now Bonavita is a brand that Prima has carried for a long time. Back in 2015, brewers like the BV1900TS were super popular. Bonavita kind of disappeared from the market for a number of years, but now they are back and they have reintroduced some really good designs for Auto-home brewers that I am personally very impressed with. So I'm going to talk about two of those today. The first is the Metropolitan and the second is the Enthusiast.

We'll talk about the Metro here first. So keep in mind this brewer is actually discontinued. Prima has the last of the inventory. So if you want to snag one up for about 150 bucks, this is probably one of the best value brewers that we're going to be talking about today. Okay. So Bonavita brewers in general are known for evenness of extraction. I love these for this reason because they purposely design this showerhead to almost exactly match the diameter of this flat brew bed. Okay. You would think that that would just be something that every manufacturer did when creating a dripper. But they don't and it is beyond me why they don't. But if you're looking for evenness of extraction, really, honestly, the opportunity for the best tasting cup of coffee, you don't have to spend $300. You can find that here in the Bonavitas. They do an excellent job and they are what I recommend.

Most of the time. These have a hanging filter basket that doesn't rest on top of the carafe. These take a Melitta 8 to 12 cup filter, which is something you can commonly find at a grocery store. That's nice. They're not proprietary and they are super cheap. This model has a glass carafe and a warming plate that'll keep your coffee hot for whatever it is, 45 minutes or so, and this uses a thermosiphon system, which is what most auto brewers out there use. It heats up water, kind of super heats it, and then forces it up through the tube and out the shower-head. This design just inherently kind of creates a different sort of temperature ramp throughout the brew process. So it starts out really low. The first bits of water are kind of cold, and by the end of it, it's shooting out steam and it's super heating. The last bits of water that touch the coffee, which is kind of the opposite way that we would approach like a pour over brew, right? Or usually we have kind of a declining profile. So that's an interesting thing about traditional auto brewers.

I'm not going to say it's necessarily bad, but it is what it is. Okay. The Metropolitan has just one button. That's a cool thing about it, too. Nice and simple. Press that button. It's going to automatically launch into a short one minute pre infusion phase before transitioning into full infusion. It's just going to brew as long as it needs to until the water runs out. So Metropolitan, 150 bucks. Great choice.