- Today, we're gonna be reviewing this.
It's the Makita coffee maker,
a coffee machine made by the same people
that make these [motor whirls] power tools.
It's absurd, it's a bit silly and as such,
well it deserves more than a regular review,
we should do something a little bit special.
Well, let's go to work.
(Barbershop quartet harmony begins)
(Mournful a capella singing...)
(of the horn introduction
to the Village People's YMCA)
Let me set the scene for you.
You, a craftsman, an artisan, have come to work.
You've spent the morning being very busy.
You've been renovating a once industrious building
into some expensive warehouse living,
but it's break time.
You're gonna grab your lunchbox,
'cause you deserve a delicious little treat.
Now, obviously you're gonna want a drink with that.
One of your colleagues, well, he offers you a tea,
but you don't wanna drink an infusion
of dry, dusty, broken tea leaves sewn into a paper coffin.
No, you want a coffee.
Now, you've got a Thermos,
but obviously, this is not coffee,
this is the beef consommé that you're gonna have
as the soup course at lunchtime.
You want fresh coffee, delicious, fresh coffee,
and for that reason, being where you are and who you are,
you reach for this,
the Makita coffee maker.
Now, we've gotta have just a little reality check here,
just for a second, because I have friends
who work at offices and maybe make some nice coffee
at lunchtime or break time.
They brew a little V60 and they are mocked, teased,
ribbed mercilessly by their colleagues
for being a little bit weird about coffee
as if that's a bad thing.
Now, I just can't imagine being the one guy
on a building site that rolls in
with my own personal coffee maker.
Now hey, maybe I'm falling into stereotypes about builders,
but it does seem like a little bit of an opportunity
for some mockery from your colleagues.
You're gonna brew some coffee,
'cause fresh brewed coffee's the best thing in the world,
and we'll talk through how this little thing works.
First thing to see on the side of this thing here,
most important thing, is this little sled here.
Now, Makita make two different types of batteries,
two different voltages, there's an 18 volt battery,
those are a bit bigger, and then there's a lower volt
battery, I think around 12 volts maybe.
You can use either one here, you've got choices,
you just sort of slide backwards and forwards
depending on your battery preference.
Your water tank,
here at the back,
very simple and actually removable.
And on here you can see you've got your little fill lines.
Now, it says the capacity's 240 mls.
That's sort of technically true, but it's not the brewer
that decides the capacity of your brew,
it's actually your battery, but we'll explain.
You do also get your dual wall, stainless steel mug.
Branded, very nice, not very big,
but we're not brewing that much coffee with this.
And then your brew basket.
They do make a pod sort of basket,
but we're not gonna use that today.
This, this is the fresh coffee basket,
and actually the design's kind of nice.
You've got your sort of shower screen here,
and then if you open it up inside,
you've got your reusable mesh brew basket.
It's not very big, but again,
we're not making that much coffee.
And that's, that's how it works.
You put water in, you're gonna put coffee in here
brew in just a second and you get coffee.
But before we brew coffee, I did say
I'd explain the battery thing, right?
We're gonna do a little tiny bit of battery mathematics.
So this is one of the lower voltage batteries,
one of the smaller ones you could get.
On a battery it'll tell you what its sort of amp hours are
and if you've got the voltage too
you can work out with the sort of watt-hours are.
And in the case of this thing, it actually tells you
it's 22 watt-hours.
So this can deliver 22 watts of power for an entire hour.
And then it's empty. The brewer here,
when it's brewing is gonna pull 190 watts,
which is a lot more than the 22 sort of Watts
that this would discharge and theoretically as standard.
And so you have a higher amperage draw
which means the battery discharges much faster.
So at that watt draw, you can do some basic math
and discover that this will last for about seven minutes.
And with seven minutes of brewing
they say you can brew 160 mls of coffee,
which is not very much coffee, especially when you think
about the weight of this battery is about 210 grams.
So to make coffee, you'd need to have 200 grams of battery
160 grams of water, some coffee, a grinder potentially
and the brewer itself, which all of which weigh quite a lot
more than like the Thermos of coffee would,
but maybe,
maybe
this thing brews such spectacular coffee
that it would be way better than whatever you could make
in a Thermos at home with whatever setup you have
and would bring in with you that might degrade a little bit
over a couple of hours in the morning.
So maybe it's amazing. We should find out.
Now this battery, I'm gonna load in on the little sled.
Done. We're ready to go. Let's get some water.
Set the water in.
Now coffee, they recommend a pretty weak recipe actually.
They recommend like 50 grams a liter.
I'm gonna brew 60 grams a litter
because that's just how I like to brew my coffee.
So let's grind some coffee.
Grinder.
(drill motor whirls)
Obviously we're not gonna hand crank the hand grinder
when we've got drills and batteries lying around.
(grinder whirls)
In we go.
And now we're ready to brew.
Now, like I said, it takes seven minutes to brew
a cup of coffee with this thing, with this little battery
and that battery will take an hour to recharge.
And if you've got chargers on site, that's great.
But you'd think, oh, if we've got power on site
why don't I just plug it in.
But you can't plug it in, it's battery only.
So every time you want a cup of coffee
you'd need to carry a dedicated battery
and 160 mls for this battery,
well, if you want two or three cups in a day,
yeah you might have half a dozen
sort of batteries for your drill
but are you gonna give half of them over to brewing coffee?
Like I said, if it's amazing, if it's delicious,
then maybe that's, you know, totally worth it for you.
Now, if you stick a temperature probe inside the brew basket
and sort of look at the temperature of the water coming in.
Yeah, it hits perfectly normal temperatures
that would match those of a cheap little domestic
Mr. Coffee style filter coffee maker,
you know some of you might spend £20, 30 pounds
on Amazon that's a comparable kind of performer
to this thing here.
It's not bad. It starts a bit cold.
It gets a bit hot at the end.
The technology inside a brewer is kind of identical.
What's sort of interesting here is
that it runs on batteries.
That's its point of difference really.
So the brew light's gone out, we're ready to drink
but it's going to be a little bit too hot
to drink straight away.
So I'm gonna have to think of something to do
to pass the time.
I have an idea.
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In one!
(High five slap)
It's time to taste.
Now 160 mls in this cup produces
a fairly disappointing serving.
My 10 grams of coffee would have stolen about
20 grams of brew water.
So I've got 140 mls for my battery.
10 grams of coffee.
That's you know maybe less caffeine
that you might want to drink, but is it good?
Is it delicious?
(James smells coffee)
Hmm.
(Sips coffee)
It's fine.
It's fine! It's, it's fine.
It's okay.
It's
exactly what you think it'll taste like
if you brewed a small batch of coffee
on a cheap domestic Mr. Coffee type machine.
It's good coffee.
It's good water.
It's freshly ground.
You know, all of the sort of key components
for success are there.
The brew temperature's not perfect
and certainly not for a lighter roast,
but it's not that bad, but it's not that good.
You know, it's, it's sort of fine.
I'm not, if I'm honest, I'm not sure it's good enough
to drink alongside the delicious treat
that I have bought myself for today's snack time.
So I'm gonna brew something else because honestly
if you're gonna brew coffee at work
just bring an Aeropress with you,
you know, boiler kettle, and brew an Aeropress.
Now you're gonna say
how am I boiling a kettle, I'm on a building site,
there's no power supplies available to me.
What sort of kettle could I possibly use?
Makita have you covered.
Look at this! Look at this!
It's a kettle!
It's a kettle that runs on Makita drill batteries.
Now you've gotta have the big juicy batteries
the big chunky chunky batteries.
And this needs two of them at the same time
to pull the wattage it needs.
Now it looks, looks like a big kettle.
800 mls is your maximum.
We're not gonna put 800 mls in there
because that's wasteful.
We don't need that much water.
We're gonna replicate this brew, but with an Aeropress.
So we'll brew, we'll do 160-200 mls,
kind of a thing in here, should boil pretty quickly.
And let's see if I can make a better building site coffee
than this thing can.
While still, you know, not betraying Makita.
You know what I mean?
We've gotta be loyal to our power tool brands apparently.
So like I said, I need two,
but one of them is still on my drill
and I've got to grind some coffee.
You know, I'm sure there's a good reason
I dunno what it would be,
I'm sure there is probably a good reason
not to use a drill to grind coffee.
It's definitely, you know, fun.
I will say that, I'm having a great time doing this.
(Drill grinding)
Oh, I do also hate hand grinding.
So that's probably a factor in this.
Now I'm not actually too worried about having drained
this battery out with a bit of drilling.
Two of these batteries full will do 1.4 liters of water
in total, assuming that your water is 23 degrees Celsius
to start with, but we're not gonna get anywhere
close to that with 200 mls, so we'll be completely fine.
(water sloshes)
(kettle beeps)
Got myself a clean mug, but as I've just discovered
this Aeropress: bit of a snug fit.
Not sure if I'm necessarily gonna recommend that
but we'll
we'll make it work.
It's about 10 grams of coffee to 160 grams
(beep)
of water.
Thank you for that, extremely thorough beep.
160.
So a little press.
Now I'm hesitant to press this too hard 'cause I really
I don't wanna jam this into the mug.
That's gone very wrong.
Do not brew this Aeropress on a Makita mug.
Bring a different mug from home.
You can have a stainless steel one if you want to,
just this is not a good, this is not a good time for anyone.
(James sips coffee)
Now that's good coffee.
So this is the Makita coffee brewer.
Let's ignore the kettle for now.
I'm having great coffee, but not honestly from the Makita.
And I just, I just don't understand why this exists.
I kind of get that they thought here's an opportunity
we could just make a little coffee maker
but the battery to liquid ratio
which is a weird thing to say out loud, it's pretty poor.
Like it's just a lot of battery weight to carry around
to just make a cup of coffee.
And actually even the kettle, like these two batteries
they weigh over a kilo.
This thing weighs a kilo.
Like you're just dragging a lot of stuff around the place.
And honestly most building sites find some way
to have a power supply.
Just buy a cheap coffee maker and plug it in.
And it won't annoy you as much.
The use cases for this where this and only this is the right
answer to the problem are so incredibly tiny
that they pretty much overlap exactly with the sort
of use cases where this would do a better job, you know?
So I don't get it.
But now I wanna hear from you.
Do you have one of these? Do you use it?
Why? Tell me why.
Not in a like, mean way, I just, why?
Like in what situation is this better
than just bringing something else from home
and plugging it in or do you just hate thermoses?
Do you have like a Thermo beef that I don't understand?
What, why are you using this? Do you like it?
Did I do something wrong? Was I unfair to it?
Like it is kind of hilarious.
And do you get abuse for using it amongst colleagues?
Just let me know, let me know the deal,
down in the comments below but for now
I will say thank you so much for watching.
(James slurps coffee)
(Bites into the tasty treat)
I hope you have a great day
(laughs)
I've got curd in my mustache.
I've never had curd in my mustache.