iCoffee spins up a Keurig competitor

[MUSIC] Hey, I'm CNet's Ryan Christ. And today, we're talking single serve coffee. Specially, the iCoffee Opus Brewer from Remington. This is a $140 follow up to the iCoffee Steam Brewed Drip Coffeemaker that Remington put out last year. That coffeemaker claimed to use steam to make a less bitter pot of coffee. This coffeemaker makes similar claims. It say's it makes lest bitter single serve coffee and it does that by using spin brew technology. Which means the needle that pierces the lid of your k-cup it is actually going to spin around and spray water in all directions, agitate the grounds, and it claims it makes a less bitter cup of coffee. Now another of iCoffee's claims is that it'll work with an K-style cups. So K-cups or knock-off, off brand cups. That's a distinctive difference from Keurig 2.0 brewers, which use a scanner to only brew approved K-cups. Still there are plenty of single serve coffee makers out there that will brew both K cup and store brand stuff so it's not a distinct advantage for this machine in particular. That puts the [INAUDIBLE] on the performance, on that claim of less bitter coffee. So let's take a look at how it works. Using this coffee maker is really simple. You just plug it in, hit the power button, and then you'll turn this dial to select how much water you want in your cup of coffee. That's a really nice feature. A dial is sort of the right tool for the job when you're selecting water amount. However, the dial wasn't accurate. It gave us more water than we dialed, so we'd have to adjust down. If we had an eight ounce cup we'd have to set it down around six point five ounces. You'll push a button in the front of the machine to open it up, you'll pop your cup in, push it down, and then you'll just tap the dial a brew button to get the coffeemaker going. The brew process will take less than a minute depending on exactly how much water you're using. And once you're done, you've got you single serve cup of coffee and at first sip it tastes a little watery to me, it tastes a little underdeveloped. We tested this out with a refractometer, a very nice tool that helps us see exactly what's going on in a cup of coffee. And it is indeed a little bit on the weak side, even for a single serve coffee which is gonna be weak to begin with. Also it's not any less bitter than other coffee makers that we like [MUSIC] Including the editor's choice winning Bunn MyCafe MCU. So it doesn't really produce a cup of coffee that's better than other brewers. It's not a whole lot worse, it's right in the ball park, but it's not a distinctly better cup. Because of that I think this is a tough brewer to recommend outright. It's not the best in its class. It's not the worst either though. And the price, $140 isn't terrible. So basically if you just need a simple single serve brewer and you like the look of this thing, go ahead and get it. 140 is not terrible. But you can probably do better if you shop around. I like the Bunn mycafe MCU along the the quisenart SS700. Those are both crafty machines that do a good job for about the same price. Thanks for watching. Be sure and check out the full review at cnet.com along with the rest of my tech reviews. For cnet appliances, I'm Ryan Crist.