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amillioninprizes · 4 years

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Some thoughts on Veronica Mars, fan service, and noir

I’ve been on winter break and at home with a nasty combo cold-ear infection-stomach virus the past couple of weeks, and as so often happens when I don’t have much going on, my thoughts have turned to ruminating over the steaming pile of excrement that was season 4 of Veronica Mars. Why yes, almost six months and one cancellation notice later and I’m still complaining about it--as I told someone on Twitter, it was so stupid that it’s going to take years to unpack.

This particular rant is brought to you by a common refrain seen in both professional critics’ and S4 supporters’ reviews of S4: the movie was schlocky fan service, while S4 is TRUE NOIR. I’m here to argue that neither of those things are true, and that in the grand scheme of things trying to definitively call Veronica Mars noir or not isn’t the best qualitative judgement of the series.

A note on “fanservice”

Something that’s been very strange to me in the critical discussion around S4 is that the fan-funded movie has been retconned as a fanservicey failure. This is weird because it did get a positive Rotten Tomatoes score, actually turned a profit despite the unorthodox distribution model, and was overall well-received by fans except for maybe the 5 Piz lovers out there (he absolutely did not deserve better you guys; he works at This American Life and lives in Brooklyn, he’ll be fine).

A lot of the things pointed to in the movie as fan service actually weren’t. In every interview about the movie and S4, RT and KB always talk about how they started with the image of Veronica punching Madison at the high school reunion and worked from there. The problem is that almost no one had been asking for that. If they had bothered to read any online discourse about the show (and we know RT definitely does), they would know that fans are actually somewhat sympathetic to Madison--after all, she was the intended recipient of the drugged drink Veronica received at Shelly Pomeroy’s party, plus growing up in a family that she wasn’t meant to be a member of must have negatively impacted her. When the preview scene of Veronica encountering Madison at the reunion welcome table was released, Veronica didn’t come off sympathetically. In a similar vein, as much as I liked Corny as a side character in the original series, I didn’t need him to come back for that random scene at the reunion. Nor was anyone asking for an out-of-nowhere James Franco cameo (which given what we know about him now is super gross in hindsight).

So why was the movie well-received by fans? Veronica was in character after an unevenly written and performed S3, and she was back in Neptune, doing what (and who; Ay-yo!) she was meant to do. So while the mystery was subpar (and what Rob Thomas mystery isn’t?), the character side of the story made sense and was satisfying. I wouldn’t call that fan service so much as good writing. Plus, what is even the point of wasting time, money, and effort on making a tv show or movie if it’s going to actively alienate the audience?

S4: more trauma porn than true noir

Admittedly, I’m not exactly the world’s foremost scholar on film noir (in my opinion, the height of cinema is teen romcoms c. 1995-2005), but I do feel I have enough pop cultural knowledge to have a working understanding of what film noir is, and as internet folk would say, S4 ain’t it chief. Sure, S4 was bleak subject matter wise, but that does not automatically equal noir. HappilyShanghaied, who does have a film studies background, wrote a pretty excellent post about why that is shortly after S4 dropped that I could not improve upon, so I will just leave it here.

In addition to this analysis, I would also point out that S4 was lacking in a unique visual style common to noir films, especially compared to the original television series and the movie. The original series made use of green, blue, and yellow filters to fulfill a high school version of the noir aesthetic (quick shoutout to Cheshirecatstrut’s color theory posts for more on what we thought this meant before it turned out that Rob Thomas did not actually intend to imbue meaning into any of this), while the movie adopted a more mature muted blue-grey palette. S4, however, was more or less shot like a conventional drama and was brightly lit, perhaps signifying Rob Thomas’s apparent plans to turn the show into a conventional procedural.

The movie: more than fan service

If anything, the movie was more noir than S4. Take Gia’s storyline for instance. While Veronica was off obtaining elite degrees, Gia spent 9 years in a virtual cage being forced into a sexual relationship without her total consent (because that’s the only storyline women can have on this show), and then set herself up to be murdered at the very moment she could potentially break free. That’s pretty fucking grim.

Then there is the whole police corruption storyline, which is a hallmark of noir fiction. The glimpses we get of the Neptune sheriff’s department point to a larger conspiracy at play than just crooked cops; Sachs lost his life trying to expose it and Keith was gravely injured. This was the story I was excited for future installments of Veronica Mars to address, especially given its relevance to today’s politics. Unfortunately, this thread was entirely dropped in S4, where the police department (because, as Rob Thomas revealed in interviews but not onscreen, Neptune has incorporated) is merely overwhelmed by the scope of the bombing case rather than outright corrupt. (Side note but Marcia Langdon was also a more complex and morally grey character when introduced in the second book than she was on screen in S4. Another wasted opportunity).

Noir is also marked by a sense of inevitability or doom as a result of greater forces at play. An example of this in the movie is Weevil’s storyline. After building a life and family for himself, he ultimately ends up rejoining the PCHer gang he left as a teenager due to a misunderstanding based on his race and appearance and the assumptions authority figures make about him because of those things. No matter what he does, he is still limited by an unjust and racist society. Contrast this with the final explosion in S4; it’s not inevitable, just based on Veronica’s incompetence. Rob Thomas claims that he tried to create a sense of doom to LoVe’s relationship between the OOC Leo storyline and the last minute barriers before the wedding, but those aspects just served to make the story unnecessarily convoluted.

What is noir anyway? Was Veronica Mars ever noir? Does it matter?

But this is all assuming there is a set template for noir anyway. This New Yorker essay points out that trying to definitively establish a set of rules for noir is difficult and that the classic noir films were more a product of midcentury artistic and political movements than a defined genre. The noir filmmakers working at the time would not have described their work as such. The kicker of this essay is the final sentence: “But the film noir is historically determined by particular circumstances; that’s why latter-day attempts at film noir, or so-called neo-noirs, almost all feel like exercises in nostalgia.” I found this particularly amusing because as Rob Thomas infamously proclaimed in his S4 era interviews, he wanted to completely dispense with nostalgia going forward. Rob Thomas and S4 supporters have said that Logan needed to die because noir protagonists can’t have stable relationships; but, if there isn’t a defined set of rules other than “an element of crime”, then was it strictly necessary? Hell, writing a hardboiled detective who does have a stable relationship and maybe even a family could have been an interesting subversion of genre expectations. Unfortunately, Rob Thomas isn’t that imaginative.

There’s also the issue that noir and hardboiled detective fiction aren’t interchangeable genres. This article lays out that idea that they aren’t the same because noir is ultimately about doomed losers; in contrast, detective fiction, while dark, contains a moral center and has an ending where a sense of justice is achieved. An interview with author Megan Abbott makes a similar argument; she states that in hardboiled detective fiction, “At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored.” Based on the descriptions laid out here, I would argue that in its original format Veronica Mars far better fit the detective fiction model; while she wasn’t always right, she was never a loser, and she solved the mystery. S1-3 all had relatively hopeful, if not totally happy, endings, but you never see anyone complaining that they weren’t noir enough; if anything, they were more emotionally complex than the ending of S4, where Logan’s death is essentially meaningless. One could make the argument that S4 did push Veronica towards a more noir characterization by the definition of these articles by making her more incompetent and meaner than she was in previous installments, but that is a fundamental change in character, which is not coherent writing.

And that is ultimately why S4 was so poorly received by longtime fans and why there will be no more installments of Veronica Mars anytime soon (at least on Hulu). Even if S4 had been noir (or at least shot like one), the serious issues with plotting, characterization, and lack of adherence to prior canon that this season exhibited would still exist. Defending the poor writing choices made in S4 with “it’s noir!” does not mask them or automatically heighten the quality of the product. Perhaps ironically, in ineptly trying to be noir in S4, Rob Thomas likely prematurely ended Veronica Mars by failing his creation and fans with lazy storytelling.

#Veronica Mars #Burnt Marshmallow #Yeah I'm still angry what of it #If only RT had put as much effort into writing the show as I did into this post

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urlology · 4 years

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How Netflix Reinvented HR

https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr

Patty McCord

From the January–February 2014 Issue

Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the culture and motivated performance at Netflix, where Hastings is CEO and I was chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, we had no idea it would go viral. We realized that some of the talent management ideas we’d pioneered, such as the concept that workers should be allowed to take whatever vacation time they feel is appropriate, had been seen as a little crazy (at least until other companies started adopting them). But we were surprised that an unadorned set of 127 slides—no music, no animation—would become so influential.

Netflix culture slide deck

People find the Netflix approach to talent and culture compelling for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that Netflix has been really successful: During 2013 alone its stock more than tripled, it won three Emmy awards, and its U.S. subscriber base grew to nearly 29 million. All that aside, the approach is compelling because it derives from common sense. In this article I’ll go beyond the bullet points to describe five ideas that have defined the way Netflix attracts, retains, and manages talent. But first I’ll share two conversations I had with early employees, both of which helped shape our overall philosophy.

Crafting a Culture of Excellence

The first took place in late 2001. Netflix had been growing quickly: We’d reached about 120 employees and had been planning an IPO. But after the dot-com bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks occurred, things changed. It became clear that we needed to put the IPO on hold and lay off a third of our employees. It was brutal. Then, a bit unexpectedly, DVD players became the hot gift that Christmas. By early 2002 our DVD-by-mail subscription business was growing like crazy. Suddenly we had far more work to do, with 30% fewer employees.

One day I was talking with one of our best engineers, an employee I’ll call John. Before the layoffs, he’d managed three engineers, but now he was a one-man department working very long hours. I told John I hoped to hire some help for him soon. His response surprised me. “There’s no rush—I’m happier now,” he said. It turned out that the engineers we’d laid off weren’t spectacular—they were merely adequate. John realized that he’d spent too much time riding herd on them and fixing their mistakes. “I’ve learned that I’d rather work by myself than with subpar performers,” he said. His words echo in my mind whenever I describe the most basic element of Netflix’s talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees—a perk better than foosball or free sushi—is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.

The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She’d been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals—and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn’t be right.

So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation—and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package. I’d braced myself for tears or histrionics, but Laura reacted well: She was sad to be leaving but recognized that the generous severance would let her regroup, retrain, and find a new career path. This incident helped us create the other vital element of our talent management philosophy: If we wanted only “A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages.

With these two overarching principles in mind, we shaped our approach to talent using the five tenets below.

Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.

Adultlike behavior means talking openly about issues with your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates. It means recognizing that even in companies with reams of HR policies, those policies are frequently skirted as managers and their reports work out what makes sense on a case-by-case basis.

Let me offer two examples.

When Netflix launched, we had a standard paid-time-off policy: People got 10 vacation days, 10 holidays, and a few sick days. We used an honor system—employees kept track of the days they took off and let their managers know when they’d be out. After we went public, our auditors freaked. They said Sarbanes-Oxley mandated that we account for time off. We considered instituting a formal tracking system. But then Reed asked, “Are companies required to give time off? If not, can’t we just handle it informally and skip the accounting rigmarole?” I did some research and found that, indeed, no California law governed vacation time.

So instead of shifting to a formal system, we went in the opposite direction: Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate. Bosses and employees were asked to work it out with one another. (Hourly workers in call centers and warehouses were given a more structured policy.) We did provide some guidance. If you worked in accounting or finance, you shouldn’t plan to be out during the beginning or the end of a quarter, because those were busy times. If you wanted 30 days off in a row, you needed to meet with HR. Senior leaders were urged to take vacations and to let people know about them—they were role models for the policy. (Most were happy to comply.) Some people worried about whether the system would be inconsistent—whether some bosses would allow tons of time off while others would be stingy. In general, I worried more about fairness than consistency, because the reality is that in any organization, the highest-performing and most valuable employees get more leeway.

The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”

We also departed from a formal travel and expense policy and decided to simply require adultlike behavior there, too. The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” In talking that through with employees, we said we expected them to spend company money frugally, as if it were their own. Eliminating a formal policy and forgoing expense account police shifted responsibility to frontline managers, where it belongs. It also reduced costs: Many large companies still use travel agents (and pay their fees) to book trips, as a way to enforce travel policies. They could save money by letting employees book their own trips online. Like most Netflix managers, I had to have conversations periodically with employees who ate at lavish restaurants (meals that would have been fine for sales or recruiting, but not for eating alone or with a Netflix colleague). We kept an eye on our IT guys, who were prone to buying a lot of gadgets. But overall we found that expense accounts are another area where if you create a clear expectation of responsible behavior, most employees will comply.

Tell the Truth About Performance

Many years ago we eliminated formal reviews. We had held them for a while but came to realize they didn’t make sense—they were too ritualistic and too infrequent. So we asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work. In many functions—sales, engineering, product development—it’s fairly obvious how well people are doing. (As companies develop better analytics to measure performance, this becomes even truer.) Building a bureaucracy and elaborate rituals around measuring performance usually doesn’t improve it.

Traditional corporate performance reviews are driven largely by fear of litigation. The theory is that if you want to get rid of someone, you need a paper trail documenting a history of poor achievement. At many companies, low performers are placed on “Performance Improvement Plans.” I detest PIPs. I think they’re fundamentally dishonest: They never accomplish what their name implies.

One Netflix manager requested a PIP for a quality assurance engineer named Maria, who had been hired to help develop our streaming service. The technology was new, and it was evolving very quickly. Maria’s job was to find bugs. She was fast, intuitive, and hardworking. But in time we figured out how to automate the QA tests. Maria didn’t like automation and wasn’t particularly good at it. Her new boss (brought in to create a world-class automation tools team) told me he wanted to start a PIP with her.

I replied, “Why bother? We know how this will play out. You’ll write up objectives and deliverables for her to achieve, which she can’t, because she lacks the skills. Every Wednesday you’ll take time away from your real work to discuss (and document) her shortcomings. You won’t sleep on Tuesday nights, because you’ll know it will be an awful meeting, and the same will be true for her. After a few weeks there will be tears. This will go on for three months. The entire team will know. And at the end you’ll fire her. None of this will make any sense to her, because for five years she’s been consistently rewarded for being great at her job—a job that basically doesn’t exist anymore. Tell me again how Netflix benefits?

“Instead, let’s just tell the truth: Technology has changed, the company has changed, and Maria’s skills no longer apply. This won’t be a surprise to her: She’s been in the trenches, watching the work around her shift. Give her a great severance package—which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit.” In my experience, people can handle anything as long as they’re told the truth—and this proved to be the case with Maria.

When we stopped doing formal performance reviews, we instituted informal 360-degree reviews. We kept them fairly simple: People were asked to identify things that colleagues should stop, start, or continue. In the beginning we used an anonymous software system, but over time we shifted to signed feedback, and many teams held their 360s face-to-face.

HR people can’t believe that a company the size of Netflix doesn’t hold annual reviews. “Are you making this up just to upset us?” they ask. I’m not. If you talk simply and honestly about performance on a regular basis, you can get good results—probably better ones than a company that grades everyone on a five-point scale.

Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

Discussing the military’s performance during the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, once famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” When I talk to managers about creating great teams, I tell them to approach the process in exactly the opposite way.

In my consulting work, I ask managers to imagine a documentary about what their team is accomplishing six months from now. What specific results do they see? How is the work different from what the team is doing today? Next I ask them to think about the skills needed to make the images in the movie become reality. Nowhere in the early stages of the process do I advise them to think about the team they actually have. Only after they’ve done the work of envisioning the ideal outcome and the skill set necessary to achieve it should they analyze how well their existing team matches what they need.

If you’re in a fast-changing business environment, you’re probably looking at a lot of mismatches. In that case, you need to have honest conversations about letting some team members find a place where their skills are a better fit. You also need to recruit people with the right skills.

We faced the latter challenge at Netflix in a fairly dramatic way as we began to shift from DVDs by mail to a streaming service. We had to store massive volumes of files in the cloud and figure out how huge numbers of people could reliably access them. (By some estimates, up to a third of peak residential internet traffic in the U.S. comes from customers streaming Netflix movies.) So we needed to find people deeply experienced with cloud services who worked for companies that operate on a giant scale—companies like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook, which aren’t the easiest places to hire someone away from.

Our compensation philosophy helped a lot. Most of its principles stem from ideals described earlier: Be honest, and treat people like adults. For instance, during my tenure Netflix didn’t pay performance bonuses, because we believed that they’re unnecessary if you hire the right people. If your employees are fully formed adults who put the company first, an annual bonus won’t make them work harder or smarter. We also believed in market-based pay and would tell employees that it was smart to interview with competitors when they had the chance, in order to get a good sense of the market rate for their talent. Many HR people dislike it when employees talk to recruiters, but I always told employees to take the call, ask how much, and send me the number—it’s valuable information.

In addition, we used equity compensation much differently from the way most companies do. Instead of larding stock options on top of a competitive salary, we let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity. If employees wanted stock options, we reduced their salaries accordingly. We believed that they were sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs, judge their personal tolerance for risk, and decide what was best for them and their families. We distributed options every month, at a slight discount from the market price. We had no vesting period—the options could be cashed in immediately. Most tech companies have a four-year vesting schedule and try to use options as “golden handcuffs” to aid retention, but we never thought that made sense. If you see a better opportunity elsewhere, you should be allowed to take what you’ve earned and leave. If you no longer want to work with us, we don’t want to hold you hostage.

We continually told managers that building a great team was their most important task. We didn’t measure them on whether they were excellent coaches or mentors or got their paperwork done on time. Great teams accomplish great work, and recruiting the right team was the top priority.

Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture

After I left Netflix and began consulting, I visited a hot start-up in San Francisco. It had 60 employees in an open loft-style office with a foosball table, two pool tables, and a kitchen, where a chef cooked lunch for the entire staff. As the CEO showed me around, he talked about creating a fun atmosphere. At one point I asked him what the most important value for his company was. He replied, “Efficiency.”

“OK,” I said. “Imagine that I work here, and it’s 2:58 PM. I’m playing an intense game of pool, and I’m winning. I estimate that I can finish the game in five minutes. We have a meeting at 3:00. Should I stay and win the game or cut it short for the meeting?”

“You should finish the game,” he insisted. I wasn’t surprised; like many tech start-ups, this was a casual place, where employees wore hoodies and brought pets to work, and that kind of casualness often extends to punctuality. “Wait a second,” I said. “You told me that efficiency is your most important cultural value. It’s not efficient to delay a meeting and keep coworkers waiting because of a pool game. Isn’t there a mismatch between the values you’re talking up and the behaviors you’re modeling and encouraging?”

When I advise leaders about molding a corporate culture, I tend to see three issues that need attention. This type of mismatch is one. It’s a particular problem at start-ups, where there’s a premium on casualness that can run counter to the high-performance ethos leaders want to create. I often sit in on company meetings to get a sense of how people operate. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

The second issue has to do with making sure employees understand the levers that drive the business. I recently visited a Texas start-up whose employees were mostly engineers in their twenties. “I bet half the people in this room have never read a P&L,” I said to the CFO. He replied, “It’s true—they’re not financially savvy or business savvy, and our biggest challenge is teaching them how the business works.” Even if you’ve hired people who want to perform well, you need to clearly communicate how the company makes money and what behaviors will drive its success. At Netflix, for instance, employees used to focus too heavily on subscriber growth, without much awareness that our expenses often ran ahead of it: We were spending huge amounts buying DVDs, setting up distribution centers, and ordering original programming, all before we’d collected a cent from our new subscribers. Our employees needed to learn that even though revenue was growing, managing expenses really mattered.

The third issue is something I call the split personality start-up. At tech companies this usually manifests itself as a schism between the engineers and the sales team, but it can take other forms. At Netflix, for instance, I sometimes had to remind people that there were big differences between the salaried professional staff at headquarters and the hourly workers in the call centers. At one point our finance team wanted to shift the whole company to direct-deposit paychecks, and I had to point out that some of our hourly workers didn’t have bank accounts. That’s a small example, but it speaks to a larger point: As leaders build a company culture, they need to be aware of subcultures that might require different management.

Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Throughout most of my career I’ve belonged to professional associations of human resources executives. Although I like the people in these groups personally, I often find myself disagreeing with them. Too many devote time to morale improvement initiatives. At some places entire teams focus on getting their firm onto lists of “Best Places to Work” (which, when you dig into the methodologies, are really based just on perks and benefits). At a recent conference I met someone from a company that had appointed a “chief happiness officer”—a concept that makes me slightly sick.

During 30 years in business I’ve never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. HR departments might throw parties and hand out T-shirts, but if the stock price is falling or the company’s products aren’t perceived as successful, the people at those parties will quietly complain—and they’ll use the T-shirts to wash their cars.

Instead of cheerleading, people in my profession should think of themselves as businesspeople. What’s good for the company? How do we communicate that to employees? How can we help every worker understand what we mean by high performance?

Here’s a simple test: If your company has a performance bonus plan, go up to a random employee and ask, “Do you know specifically what you should be doing right now to increase your bonus?” If he or she can’t answer, the HR team isn’t making things as clear as they need to be.

At Netflix I worked with colleagues who were changing the way people consume filmed entertainment, which is an incredibly innovative pursuit—yet when I started there, the expectation was that I would default to mimicking other companies’ best practices (many of them antiquated), which is how almost everyone seems to approach HR. I rejected those constraints. There’s no reason the HR team can’t be innovative too.

A version of this article appeared in the

January–February 2014

issue of Harvard Business Review.

#Business #work

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generalrunawayblizzard · 4 years

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TGAB Fan Chapter

“Bored! Bored, Bored, Bored, Bored.”

Charlotte rested her forehead down on the bar, and thunked her tankard down several times for emphasis. The loud sounds of the bar washed over her and her companion, somewhat muted by the animal skins and the long wooden beams of the bar’s rustic interior. Large hunting trophies adorned the walls, and roughly dressed miners and lumberjacks packed the bar and tables, drinking, shouting and joking. It smelled of sweat, dirt and beer.

Lifting her head from the bar, Charlotte complained, “Timms, why are we this ridiculous bar? I know we aren’t exactly spoiled for choices here, but there must be some better options than this. There are barely even any women here, so there isn’t even an off chance of getting laid.”

Her companion smirked back at her. “Well Char, you forget that I’m bored too.” She took a sip of her beer and continued, “Let’s face it, Veilgrad is Shaathist enough that you’re probably not getting laid at any of the bars, and at least here I get to watch a bunch of miners hit on you all night. I need to get my entertainment somehow.”

Charlotte glared back at Timms in what she hoped was an arch manner, spoiled slightly by her bangs falling down in front of her eyes. She gave an explosive breath to move them, failed, and then brushed them behind her ears before attempting to continue her glare. “I hope Avei smites you.”

“Avei? Did you change faiths while I wasn’t looking?”

“See, it’s like this. I believe that all systems are corrupt, and I have a sacred duty to bring justice to those that would abuse their power. But Eserion wants us to help ourselves and tonight I’m also feeling very, very lazy. And I figure I’m a woman, and you’re doing anti-womany things, so maybe Avei does me a favor.”

“Anti-womany?”

“Anything I say is automatically a word, because I am perfect,” Charlotte proclaimed triumphantly, hoisted her beer into the air.

“Hear, hear!”

Their tankards clacked together, and they both took long pulls, sitting a moment in silence, observing the other patrons of the bar. Despite Timms’ comments, none of the men at the bar had yet approached them, possibly because Timms was still in her imperial uniform, although she noticed many of the men darted glances in their direction. Charlotte carefully avoided eye contact, hoping to dissuade any from approaching; despite her boredom she still didn’t want to deal with drunken miners tonight.

She turned back to Timms and continued her earlier thought, “Anyways, bored! Hard to get laid, no decent restaurants or theater, no operas with juicy nobles to steal from. And speaking of nobles, the ones we have here in Veilgrad are clearly subpar.”

“Really? Now that most of the Leducs are arrested or dead, I feel like the remainder are scary, but actually mostly decent and reclusive, not really abusive at all.”

“Exactly! If we had some wicked aristocrats then we could plan some epic cons, maybe a legendary heist. But with these, we maybe take from a warehouse occasionally, and they don’t even care. The vampire even left us cupcakes last time!”

Timms gave a quiet laugh. “Malivette is definitely an odd duck. And I know Veilgrad isn’t exactly Tiraas, but you’ll adjust eventually. You did a good thing coming out here to take care of your grandmother, and we’re glad to have you. After all, five eserites is better than four.”

“I suppose,” Charlotte agreed unenthusiastically. “Maybe we could do something a little more interesting. Why not hit the Dufresne mansion itself, instead of some half-empty warehouses? The Dufresne used to be a major house, and it doesn’t look like Malivette is spending the money.”

Timms quirked an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound exactly like a noble theft.”

“Fine, fine, maybe we don’t take anything too valuable. It doesn’t hurt to let the powerful know that we can reach them if they step over the line. And the bragging rights! We could say we stole from a vampire in her own den!”

“Bad idea, Char,” Timms said, shaking her head. “Yes, Malivette is quirky and generally a good citizen, but she’s still a vampire. She could literally eat you for breakfast, and if she caught you in her home, she could pretty easily get away with it. ‘Governor devours trespasser’ would be a funny headline to read, but it’s not worth losing out on my new favorite drinking buddy.”

“I could go in the daytime,” Charlotte offered. “Maybe take some garlic with me, some smoke bombs and all that, in case I need it for a quick getaway.”

“Yes, I’m sure that a vampire will have taken no precautions to protect their home during the daytime.”

“Well if you’re going to be so logical about it. I guess I’ll think of something else”

Timms eyed her, unconvinced she’d gotten through, but let the matter drop, and instead started to point out particularly ugly lumberjacks, threatening to invite each one to come dance, until Charlotte convinced her to relent by ordering another round from the bartender.

__________________________________________________

Leaves and branches crunched under her feet as she trudged through the forest. Charlotte brushed a branch out of her way, then winced as it broke with a particularly loud snap. Already exhausted from the long hike up the mountains, she was rueing the fact that she had spent so much time slipping quietly through city streets, and so little time moving silently through the woods. With the racket she was making, Charlotte desperately hoped that vampires didn’t hear like elves, and wishing she had done more research before setting out.

Despite setting out early in the morning, It was near noon when Charlotte came upon the Dufresne estate, having kept off the road as much as possible in her hike through the pine forests and mountains leading up to the mansion. The mansion itself was huge, wrought with engraved stonework, but the grounds around the mansion were not a particularly impressive sight, with overgrown grasses and weeds everywhere, although she didn’t miss that the gate itself looked well maintained. There was no motion inside the estate, although she could hear birds and other animal noises from the surrounding forest.

As she began to circle the estate to find a likely spot to clear the wall, Charlotte began to ponder the wisdom of her enterprise. On one hand, it was noon, so Malivette was probably asleep, and Timms was probably just being an over-cautious worrywart based on her army experience; not to mention, she really was bored out of her mind. On the other hand, well, vampire.

“You can do this,” she muttered quietly to herself, as she spotted a segment of the wall with what looked like good handhold and footing, out of view from the main windows. “Here goes nothing.”

Charlotte took a deep breath, and then nimbly clambered up to top of the wall. She threw a thick blanket over the spikes atop the wall, and then deftly flipped over, dropping down onto the other side.

“Ow!”

She carefully extracted her hands from the thorny patch of weeds that she had fallen in - they hadn’t been visible from the other side of the wall. Luckily her thick leather pants and boots stopped the rest of her from getting too scratched up. She picked her way as silently as possible through the brush to a small side door nearby.

Removing a small jar of oil from her jacket pocket, she reached softly up to the door hinges, only to find that they were already oiled. The house really was in better shape than it appeared. Charlotte grabbed her lock picks and went to work on the door, quickly popping the lock, and pushing the door inwards.

The door opened into a small foyer, completely empty of furniture, with tiled wooden floors and stone walls. Pictures of the mountains surrounding the manor adorned the walls, and a large, deep, red carpet stood just inside the doorway. The house was absolutely silent. The room was somewhat bright, despite no lanterns or lights being present as sunlight filtered in through the windows.

Determined to find something distinctive to take, Charlotte crept deeper into the mansion passing through empty room after empty room, marked occasionally by carpets and large statues. Nothing worth stealing, or even truly interesting yet presented itself.

She finally came into a much larger room. The ceilings were double high, with a grand staircase leading up to the second floor. The bannisters were polished wood, and a large picture of the manor on a moonlit night framed the near wall; on the far wall was a large crest of Dufresne done in gold and silver.

“There we go,” Charlotte whispered to herself. She padded over to the crest and examined it closely. Hard to tell without better light, but it seemed to be real gold. A perfect talisman to take to make her mark. She carefully reached up to take the crest down from the wall.

As fingers brushed the edges of the crest a deep gong sounded, and the drapes on the windows sharply pulled themselves shut, leaving the room dark, illuminated only a small amount of light filtering through the edges of the curtains. Charlotte froze in the sudden darkness and silence that followed the gong, until it was interrupted by the clack of shoes on wood. Slowly, red eyes emerged from the darkness and approached her.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”

Malivette smiled widely, her fangs glinting disturbingly in the faint light. She was beautiful, in a haunting way, her face gaunt, and eyes sunken. A long black dress draped over her slim form and her long silky black hair was slicked back away from her face. A soft wind with no apparent source rippled the hem of her dress, making it look almost like she was floating. Her crimson eyes were fixed hungrily and unerringly on Charlotte.

“How kind of you to visit my humble home. I didn’t even order lunch, and yet, here you are.”

Malivette’s words broke Charlotte out of her shocked immobility, and she leapt into motion, sliding away along the wall, and fishing out and tossing a handful of the garlic straight at the vampire. She stopped and blinked in surprise a moment later, as the garlic struck Malivette and the vampire let out an ear-piercing shriek and dissolved into a cloud of bats. She hadn’t thought garlic would do more than slow a vampire down. Moments later, however, mist began to pool down the stairs and through the doorway she had used to enter. Spinning around, she spied an empty doorway across the hall. She sprinted through, the mist continuing to rise behind her.

__________________________________

Charlotte crouched quietly underneath what appeared to be a dining table as mist slowly flowed past her. It had been what felt like an hour since Malivette had first confronted her, and the terror of the initial encounter was slowly giving way to a combination of annoyance and surprisingly, enjoyment.

With close call after close call, bats and mists gliding past her hiding places, wind knocking statues down almost on top of her, it was starting to strain Charlotte’s credulity that she was truly evading Malivette. The vampire’s powers were apparently ludicrously diverse and extremely powerful; she was almost certain she was being toyed with, and her inner Eserite was starting to take offense. And yet, she had to admit that she missed this, the feeling of life or death stakes, the adrenaline, a dangerous mark.

She considered breaking a window to slip out of the mansion, but the noise might draw the vampire, and she was no longer convinced that Malivette would be dissuaded by the sunlight. She needed to find an actual door, ideally without the Duchess noticing, so she could get enough of a headstart to get over the walls. The mist finally had passed through the room, and Charlotte carefully rose from under the table and crept through several empty rooms with no sign of the vampire, before opening the door to a particularly darkened room and slipping inside. Her sense of direction was a bit fuddled, but she thought that this might be leading her towards the front gate, and a way out.

The door slammed shut behind her with a bang, plunging the room into total darkness. Charlotte jumped, backly blindly away from the door, reflexes screaming at her to run. Slowly, two by two, candles on either side of the room lit themselves, converging in the center on the wall furthest from the door. Charlotte goggled; the room was very, very, pink.

A huge pink canopy bed dominated the center of the room, with frilly pink sheets and pillows. Pink and red carpets covered most of the floor, with floral paintings and lace adorning the walls. A cedarwood dresser stood next to the bed, topped with pink vases filled with fresh flowers, roses and pink tulips. A very pleasant floral scent pervaded the room.

“What the hell,” Charlotte murmured to herself, before hearing a soft hissing sound as mist filled in from underneath the door.

She backed further away from the door, towards the bed, as the mist rose and began to spin, faster and faster. With a final flourish and burst of wind, the mist dissipated, revealing the thin form of the vampire.

Charlotte flushed, and her heart began to pound even harder in her chest. Malivette was wearing considerably less clothing than in their initial encounter, and was staring at her silently and intently with unblinking crimson eyes.

“That’s a predatory look. I can’t tell if you want to eat me or screw me.” A voice said.

Charlotte’s hand rose to her face as she realized she had spoken aloud, her flush deepening into a bright red, contrasting with her pale complexion. Malivette’s smile widened, and Charlotte couldn’t take her eyes off of the vampire’s large fangs. The Duchess started to slowly glide forwards, and Charlotte squeaked and reflexively threw more garlic. The bulbs bounced off of Malivette’s smooth stomach, landing quietly on the carpeted ground. Looking down, then back up at Charlotte, Malivette quirked an eyebrow, and then dissolved into a fit of giggles.

“Alright, you got me. Garlic doesn’t actually do anything to vampires, besides smell a bit strongly. I may have been playing things up just a bit earlier. I just get so bored up here at the mansion, with no visitors, nothing to do.” Malivette began to slowly move forward again, candlelight reflecting off of her pale skin, and Charlotte tried to back up before realizing she was up against the edge of the bed. “And here I had a guest, and such a pretty one. I couldn’t resist having a little bit of fun.”

Malivette was now within arms reach of Charlotte, and she stumbled backwards, tripping and sitting heavily down on the bed. The duchess advanced another few inches, reaching down and lifting Charlotte’s chin gently with one hand. “Charlotte, right? I thought I recognized you from the warehouse job. I may or may not have a bit of a thing for pretty blondes.”

It took a moment for Charlotte to find her voice, and when she did it came out a bit huskily, “Umm, you were there?”

“Of course silly, I had to wait and see if you guys would like my cupcakes! We went through all that trouble baking them, I needed to know if the recipe needed adjustment.”

Charlotte stared up at Malivette incredulously, the incongruity of her previous terror, Malivette’s unearthly beauty and their casual banter leaving her brain just a little bit broken. “This is not how I expected my day to go.”

“Well me either, but I’m not complaining,” Malivette responded, gliding slightly closer and reaching down with her other arm, wrapping her hand lightly around to the back of Charlotte’s neck.

The vampire’s smile dropped for a moment, and she spoke in a more level tone, “In all seriousness you are free to go, just say the word. I can even have a carriage take you back to town. But,” Malivetter continued, her smile and fangs returning, “if would really enjoy it if you would stay a while.”

Charlotte considered for a moment, struggling to master her whirl of emotions and adrenaline. “What the hell, I guess I could stay a bit”

Malivette effortlessly lifted her by the neck into a half standing position for a long, deep kiss, before pulling back, leaving Charlotte breathless. “I’ll try to make sure you’re properly entertained.”

_______________________

It was some time later and Charlotte was lying lazily on her stomach, elbows on a pink pillow, propping her up slightly off the bed. Malivette was beside her, humming quietly and leaning against one of the bedposts, one hand gently running through Charlotte’s long blonde hair, then softly tracing patterns and circles on her back. Charlotte turned slightly towards Malivette onto one elbow, rubbing at her neck with her other hand.

“I can’t believe you bit me.”

Malivette giggled. “Hey, I asked you first. Twice. And,” Malivette continued pointing at her fangs, “you know, I’m a vampire and all.”

Charlotte flushed a little and muttered, “It sounded like a good idea at the time. You’re not like a praying mantis right? I don’t have to worry about you eating the rest of me?”

This time, Malivette gave a full throated laugh. “Oh, honey, I’m not a dryad. Not that I’d mind another nibble, but I used to be a person and hope someday to be one again, so I would rather not go around killing people willy nilly. Not to mention the empire is actually stricter on undead governors than living ones; it would go rather poorly for me if I started killing people.” Malivette smiled, her fangs still a little red with Charlotte’s blood, “Plus, you know, I like you! You ran away so well, and you’re pretty and you taste good!”

“I don’t think that’s as comforting as you think it is.” It was a little disconcerting to see her own blood on the Duchess’s fangs. “Maybe let’s hold off on more nibbles for now. So you’re technically undead. And there is a cure for it? I didn’t think you could bring back the dead.”

“You didn’t notice my lack of a heartbeat then?”

“I was distracted by a few other things.”

“Anyways, yes, I’m technically undead. There is no cure for it right now, but I’m working on one, and the empire is giving me tons of money to find it!”

Charlotte frowned. “I’m not sure I love the idea of the empire having a cure for vampirism. Wouldn’t that mean they could make and unmake an army of nigh invincible vampires?”

“That’s right! I knew my little Eserite would notice that! And in fact, that brings me to my offer for you. How would you like to be my thrall!”

“What! I’m not sure you know what an Eserite is. I’m fairly certain being a thrall to a rich noble would go against, I don’t know, all of my core beliefs. Freedom, bringing justice and comeuppance to corrupt power and systems, you know, all that?”

Waggling her finger at Charlotte, Malivetter countered, “Now, now, thralldom gets a bad rap. Mind control this, virtual slavery that. As a point of fact, there is no mind control involved at all! I can invest a portion of my power in you when I feed, and you get all sorts of benefits - you won’t age, increased speed, increased strength, incredible reflexes. You’d basically be like a Butler! In return you’d serve me and let me feed on you every so often. In the spirit of full disclosure I have three thralls already, and I rotate my feeding, so I don’t take too much from any one of you.”

“Not that not aging doesn’t sound wonderful,” Charlotte responded, “and I’m glad there’s no mind slavery, but serving and being food isn’t why I joined the Thieves Guild. I believe in Eserion, and I live by our principles.”

“Ah, but I haven’t gotten to the best part! You’d get to keep an eye on me, and through me, on all sorts of corrupt aristocrats! You can make sure I don’t give the empire a cure for vampirism, and keep an eye on Veilgrad and Stalweiss nobility in general. And let’s be honest, you had to know that coming here wasn’t a good idea, and I know Timms didn’t send you, so the only reason I can think you did, was that you must be bored out of your mind. I can promise entering my service would not be boring.”

Charlotte looked at Malivette, considering for a few long moments. “Well, I suppose it would be something to do.”

Malivette clapped enthusiastically, “Wonderful! This is perfect!” She paused a moment, looking Charlotte up and down. “How do you feel about the color green?”

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gadget-reviews · 6 years

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Best Coffee Maker: Brew Home Coffee Like A Barista

Typical automatic coffee machines often brew subpar quality cups of Joe, so we set out to find the best coffee maker for your kitchen counter—one that is capable of producing well-extracted cups with the proper balance of sweetness, acidity, and body. So after a combined 50 hours of testing, we think the best drip coffee maker money can buy is the Technivorm Moccamaster. It extracts coffee perfectly, eliciting a pleasant acidity that was lacking in cups from other machines. Moreover, its taste profile exceed if not matches the always tedious process of manual brewing. So wonder no more what is the best coffee maker. Because we've done all the home work for you.

Top Coffee Makers Compared 2017

How We Tested The Coffee Machines

While we only tested automatic machines, the human element is still a big factor. The quality of coffee you choose, as well as the amount you use and the size you grind it to can have a big impact on the taste of the resulting cup. Because of this, we controlled what factors we could and made choices to give each machine the best chance of performing well. We tested all the machines on the same day with coffee from the same batch of roasted beans—a high-quality house blend from a local roaster—to eliminate variables in quality from the beans themselves. In order to assure the most accuracy possible, we weighed both water and coffee in grams with an Acaia kitchen scale and waited until each cup cooled to an ideal temperature—140°F—before tasting and evaluating the cup. (We used a standard digital probe thermometer.) Though many of the machines we tested came with metal filters, we used whitened paper filters across the board to eliminate the differences between filters on the brew. During the first round of testing, we used the same base specifications: a medium-fine grind setting (achieved with a high-quality burr grinder) and a brew ratio of 1:15 (that’s about 33 grams of coffee to 500 grams of water, which results in about a 16-ounce cup). In a real-life situation, you would tweak these specs in order to perfect the results of the machine. After the first round, if we felt contenders, like our #1 pick the Technivorm Moccamaster, could perform better with tweaks to the brew ratio, grind setting, or other variables, we made them and used the best cup overall to judge the machine’s performance. Although taste was our primary consideration, we did note other factors that consumers often value in a home coffee maker: ease of use, speed, and aesthetics.

Best Home Coffee Maker: Technivorm Moccamaster KBG 741

Price: Check Price | Features: glass carafe, 10-cup capacity, includes permanent metal filter WHY IT'S A TOP PICK: It brews, hands down, the best cup of coffee. As someone who wrote a book on manually brewing coffee—a method that gives the user complete control over the time and temperature of the brewing process—I was a bit skeptical that a non-commercial machine could achieve café-quality results at home. That being said, I was completely blown away by the perfectly extracted cups the Moccamaster produced. The coffee was extremely well balanced, and the machine was able to tease out a pleasant acidity that was lacking in cups from other machines. It was also the fastest of the brewers we tested, brewing 500 grams of coffee in an average of three minutes and twenty-five seconds. This is impressive considering that the manufacturer claims the water stays within the ideal brewing temperature for the length of the brew cycle. The machine contains a copper heating element that seems to boil water almost instantly. On first impression, the Moccamaster seems a bit rickety, especially compared to some of the sleeker models we tested, but after spending some time with the machine, it’s clear that it was engineered for utility and simplicity—it doesn’t need all the extra polish to brew a great cup (plus the entire machine is recyclable). The Moccamaster requires a bit of (easy) assembly, but after that, you simply add your water and coffee and push a button. The machine is also remarkably quiet, and while it’s footprint appears larger than more square models, it’s narrow and can be easily tucked into a corner on your countertop. From aesthetics to utility, the Moccamaster was engineered to make a great cup of coffee. Because it does this simply and quickly, it’s our choice for #1 Best Home Coffee Maker.

Best Budget Coffee Maker: Bodum Bistro Automatic Pourover Coffee Machine

Price: Check Price | Features: stainless steel thermal carafe, 10-cup capacity, includes permanent metal filter WHY IT'S A TOP PICK: It brews a great cup of coffee at a more affordable price point. According to our testing, the Bodum Bistro produced the third ranked cup (after the OXO Barista Brain) in terms of taste, but we’re making it our #2 Best Home Coffee Maker because it can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of some of the other high-end models, including the Moccamaster, which is more than double the cost of the Bodum Bistro. It also looks great on the countertop, and its sleek peek-a-boo design lets you watch as the water heats and makes its way to the grounds. Cups made with this machine lacked some of the complexity that we found in cups from the Moccamaster and OXO Barista Brain, but the coffee was still well extracted and of very high-quality. In terms of speed, it was the second fasted machine to brew 500 grams (in about three minutes and forty-five seconds). The design is notably functional. Both the water tank and the filter holder are removable—which isn’t always the case—making them easy to fill and clean. This model also comes with a stainless steel thermal carafe, a feature that usually costs extra on other machines, that keeps your coffee hot.

Best for All Day Coffee Drinkers: OXO Barista Brain

Price: Check Price | Features: Stainless steel thermal carafe, 9-cup capacity WHY IT'S A TOP PICK: Excellent coffee in an attractive, accessible package that stays hot throughout the day without the flavor loss. Our #3 pick for best home coffee maker is the OXO Barista Brain, which retails for $199.99. It produced our second favorite cup of coffee, but we aren’t convinced the small bump in quality is worth the extra $70 when compared to the Bodum Bistro. However, if you care about what your machine looks like, this one is very sleek and modern, while still being extremely user friendly (the user guide is actually very informative and easy to read). It also has a specific setting for making it ostensibly the best single serve coffee maker, which cannot be said for all machines. If you’re like me and sometimes only want one mugful in the morning, you’ll find this feature particularly practical. If you do want multiple cups of coffee, the thermal carafe comes in handy. This model has a heat plate that, if you don’t turn the machine off, will stay on until the “freshness timer” times out after 60 minutes. But because the coffee is in a thermal carafe, the coffee won’t lose temperature as quickly as coffee in glass carafes. For making and storing extra coffee, I preferred the OXO to the Moccamaster, which also has an auto-off heat plate but no thermal carafes (although models with thermal carafes are available). The Moccamaster’s thermal plate keeps the coffee extremely hot, and it tastes noticeably degraded the longer is stays on the plate. The OXO’s coffee seems to stay fresher, longer.

The Remaining Picks

There are three other drip coffee makers we tested that produced OK results. The first is Cuisinart DCC-3200 Perfect Temp, which as of this writing, is the number one best seller on Amazon. We found it difficult to achieve a balanced cup on this machine, and they often were strangely oily and bitter, a sign of bad extraction. We tested this machine over and over, and couldn’t seem to get the results into that top tier of quality. This machine has a “brew strength” control where users can select from “regular” or “bold,” but we never quite figured out what the setting actually controlled, although coffee brewed on the “bold” setting tended to be better extracted. In the coffee world, the term brew strength refers to the number of total dissolved coffee solids in a cup. It expresses itself, in part, by how the coffee feels in your mouth: thick or thin. The more coffee to water you use, the higher the strength and vice versa. Therefore, a machine can’t actually control brew strength, unless it’s holding back water (which it isn’t). One bonus is the fact that it is capable of brewing a single cup, which not all multi-cup models can do. Next, we have the Behmor Brazen Connected, which can be controlled wirelessly through your phone. The manufacturer boasts about the number of settings you can control to create your perfect brew profile, but it only allows you to select the temperature and the presoak time, which admittedly can influence your brew but, in this case, does not seem worth the hassle—especially because you can only choose to brew six or eight cups—nothing more, nothing less, and nothing in between. We feel that if you are the kind of person who is interested in controlling your brew temperature and presoak times, you would also be the kind of person who would like to choose your own volume of coffee. We would also expect that using the machine’s default settings and its recommended coffee dose would result in a well extracted cup. While the cup was arguably better than one a standard machine would have produced, it simply did not stand up to the high-performers in our testing, coffee makers that simply required a push of a button. On top of all that, the technology was disappointingly finnicky. It took us a good 45 minutes to get the machine to even connect to the phone. When it finally did, we spent several more minutes waiting on a firmware update. Then, once we finally figured out how to control the machine, each brew took an average of eleven entire minutes—something that, in our view, defeats the purpose of an automatic machine (manual devices can usually make coffee in 5 minutes or less). Whereas machine such as the Moccamaster and Bodum Bistro brought their water to temperature seemingly in a matter of seconds, the Behmor Brazen let its water boil for several minutes in the water chamber (which we found unsettling in and of itself) before any extraction took place. Our least expensive model, the Black & Decker DCM600B retailing for a mere $19.99, made claims, though nonspecific, about achieving an ideal brewing temperature. We doubt this model can sustain an ideal brewing temperature the way other models can, since the resulting cups tended to be rather unnuanced. This model is small and the closest to a “typical” coffee maker of any on our list, but even so, it produced a cup that, at least, rivaled the Cuisineart. Although these cups were the least complex of all the cups we tasted, it didn’t tend toward bitter, as cups from other machines did. It’s certainly not flashy, but it got the job done for around twenty bucks.

Coffee Maker Brew Times

Interestingly enough, our top 3 picks, in order of rank, also had the fastest brew cycles. In short, we're countering the saying "all good things come to those that wait". Not in this case.

How We Choose the Home Coffee Makers

We selected six machines to test, all of which made claims about achieving an ideal contact time, water temperature, or both. A typical home coffee maker generally underperforms because either the water cannot reach an ideal brew temperature (generally considered to be between 195°F and 205°F) or the water does not stay in contact with the coffee long enough—or a combination of both. Professionals often consider this a go-to list for home coffee makers, so we started there, selecting three best rated coffee makers that met this standard: the Technivorm Moccamaster, the OXO Barista Brain, and the Behmor Brazen Connected. But since these machines tend to be expensive, we didn’t want to exclude options at lower price points. We also tested three additional machines that did not meet the SCA standard— the Cuisinart Perfect Temp, the Bodum Bistro, and the Black & Decker DCM600B—, each of which made claims about achieve the proper contact time, temperature, or both. And unfortunately, none of our picks would qualify for the best single serve or single cup coffee maker.

Why You Should Buy a New Drip Coffee Maker

Most US households own an electric coffee maker. Most of those machines do not have the ability to make well-extracted, well-balanced cups of coffee. But if you like to drink high-quality coffee, there is no reason to settle for the status quo: you can make café-quality coffee at home with minimal effort. Although the models with the technology—namely heating elements that can sustain an ideal brewing temperature through the ideal length of a brew cycle—to produce superior cups tend to be expensive, they will eventually pay for themselves. Without a new coffee maker, the only comparable alternative is purchasing coffee at a local specialty coffee shop. At a national average of $2.70 per cup, it would only take about four months for the most expensive machine on this list to pay for itself—assuming, of course, you only drink one cup per day.

Why Trust Me

My name is Jessica Easto. I received degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee and an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University. My writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Gapers Block, Fresh Cup Magazine, and more. My first book, Craft Coffee: A Manual, is publishing in November.

Mistakes to Avoid

When buying a new home coffee maker, it’s important to remember that you, the user, have the power to set it up to succeed or set it up to fail. All of the user manuals for the machines we tested recommended using freshly ground, high quality whole beans in the devices. Drip coffee makers can be designed to optimize a cup of coffee, but they can’t move the dial that much if you are using poor-quality beans to begin with. The same goes for the amount of coffee you use and how you grind the beans. User manuals generally provide recommendations for these, too, although you may need to tweak them the first few times you use the machine, since your environment (humidity, water chemistry, etc.) can affect how the machine extracts coffee. Most of the coffee makers we tested provided great basic information for how to make these decisions in their user manuals, and you can always use the internet to educate yourself. But if you aren’t willing to set your new automatic coffee maker up to succeed by taking care with the beans, your $200+ investment likely won’t impress you.

Features to Understand

Temperature and Time Claims

As previously mentioned, one of the main reasons why most home coffee makers do not produce well-extracted coffee is because they cannot reach and/or sustain the ideal brewing temperature (between 195°F and 205°F) for the length of the brewing cycle. Here’s what you need to know: When it comes to coffee, water is a solvent that removes flavor compounds from coffee grounds. Hot water achieves this more easily than cold water—but water that’s too hot (like boiling) burns the coffee. Most coffee machines cannot reach an ideal temperature before or during the brew cycle, which usually means the water doesn’t properly extract the coffee. The more specific that manufacture is about their temperature claims, the more likely it’s a high-quality machine. Time claims are related to temperature. Because most machines cannot get the water hot enough to properly extract the coffee, they are often designed to have longer brewing cycles to make up for it. It’s not always that simple, though. Coffee brewed at a less-than-ideal temperature for a relatively long period of time will usually still result in improperly extracted coffee.

Presoak / Preinfusion Functionality

Some high-end home coffee makers include a presoak (sometimes called preinfusion) phase. This is analogous to what coffee professionals call the bloom time when manually brewing coffee. This practice, which involves wetting the grounds with a small amount of water for a certain length of time before fully brewing, is generally considered to help the coffee extract better. Fresh roasted whole coffee is full of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of the roasting process. Coffee naturally off-gasses carbon dioxide over time, but in fresh ground coffee, it can inhibit extraction. The small amount of water that’s added during a presoak phase releases the carbon dioxide—if you could see it in the machine, you’d see the brew bed bloat and bubble, as if it were breathing. If the carbon dioxide was not removed during the presoak, it could create a barrier between the water and the coffee, making it harder for the water to extract flavor. Carbon dioxide is also bitter (think about the slight bitterness of soda water), so it’s thought that releasing that carbon dioxide prevents those bitter notes from dissolving into the brew. When looking for a home coffee maker, I wouldn’t consider it a deal breaker if the machine does not make a claim related to a presoak phase. To the best of my knowledge, the Technivorm Moccamaster, for example, does not make this claim, and it still makes superior coffee. It’s possible that it simply doesn’t matter that much or that well-engineered machines do include a presoak phase but manufacturers don’t advertise it, as they figure it’s not meaningful to most consumers.

Metal Filters

Most of the devices we tested came with permanent (usually removable) filters. Manufacturers often cite convenience (you don’t need to remember to buy paper filters) and environmental reasons (conservation of paper resources) for this choice. If these points are important to you, look out for models that include a metal filter. Keep in mind, though, that coffee made with metal filters tastes different that than made with paper filters, mostly because no matter how fine the mesh, metal filters cannot trap as many oils and small particles as paper filters can. This tends to result in a richer, fuller-bodied cup. You may prefer this. If you don’t, you can always use a paper filter, whether the machine comes with a permanent one or not.

Carafes

Every coffee machine comes with a carafe. Most models offer options for either a glass carafe or a thermal carafe. The glass carafe options usually have a heating-plate feature, so that large batches of coffee can stay warm. Models with thermal carafes tend to be more expensive than those without, but generally speaking, if your goal is to keep coffee hot for the longest amount of time possible, it’s best to never let it cool down in the first place. This makes thermal carafes a desirable option. Coffee is rather delicate, and extended exposure to the environment quickly degrades the pleasant flavor compounds in coffee into less pleasant ones. Extended exposure to heat, such as on a hot plate, can speed up this process, which usually resulted in a more bitter cup.

Capacity

Some multi-cup coffee makers have a minimum water threshold which often prevents them from brewing single cups of coffee. If this feature is important to you, make sure the machine you are purchasing is capable of brewing small quantities.

Average Brew Time

A brew time that's too long can cause poor tasting coffee. Leaving your grounds swimming in water for too long can lead to overextraction, and your coffee can end up tasting bitter. Plus, there’s the convenience aspect of it; you don’t want to wait around forever scratching your arm waiting for your morning fix, right?

Dishwasher Safe

It all depends on how much time you have to maintain your device. Most of our reviewed coffee makers have dishwasher-safe parts, and shouldn’t be a problem to clean for the busy commuter. Don’t forget to descale your machine to keep it running smoothly.

Warranty

With the help of our list you’re hopefully not buying junk coffee makers anymore, but life happens sometimes. And with coffee makers like the Moccamaster you’re investing a hefty sum, so make sure you can recoup a loss with a solid warranty that lasts at least a year, if not a heck of a lot longer.

What Else To Think About

Coffee from the best drip coffee machine can most certainly fuel the day, or at the least the beginning of it. But keep in mind caffeine is a stimulant and does wear off with time. Moreover, your body can build up a tolerance, requiring you to drink more and more to achieve a comparable "high". We highly recommend adding coconut oil and blending it. It can not only reduce the jitters often associated with coffee, but can help with overall brain function among other benefits. We highly recommend Nature's Way Coconut Oil, as it's the best tasting overall and is certified Organic. Alternatively, many people report that their energy levels increase after juicing or blending greens plus fruit. It's surely a more sustainable energy source, offering countless nutrients to the body and providing energy throughout the day. Of course everyone is different so we highly recommend trying out different methods before complete buying in and leaving your sweet cup O' Joe in the dirt.

The post Best Coffee Maker: Brew Home Coffee Like A Barista is republished from GadgetReviews

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