The 2022 Winners of Our Kitchen Gear and Coffee Awards Are Here!
For our second annual Kitchen Gear Awards, we’ve added a new breakout category: coffee! From espresso makers and kettles to beans and no-brew, these winners will have you buzzing. And our picks for the best kitchen innovations and multiuse machines will have you eager for an upgrade.
Meet the Judges
How We Tested Kitchen Gear
Our Kitchen Appliance Lab analysts and Test Kitchen editors spent months testing more than 200 product submissions. Each product was tested in our Kitchen Appliances Lab in addition to being sent to a handful of consumers so real-life users could try the items in their own kitchens. Products were evaluated on the following criteria:
Innovation: How innovative is the product? How different is it from others like it on the market?
Performance: How well does the product work? How does it work compared to competitors?
Ease of Use: How easy is the product to use? Is it worth the effort?
Problem-Solving Attributes: Does this product make a home cook’s experience in the kitchen easier? Is investing in it worth the counter space?
Timelessness: Is this an item someone can — and, most important, would want to — use for a long time?
How We Tested Coffee
To test coffee, we teamed up with Kaleena Teoh, cofounder and director of education at Coffee Project New York, to help us taste and evaluate coffee the ways the pros do. This way, we could assess the quality of the coffee, including its consistency and any potential imperfections that could be a sign of defect, as well as better identify tasting notes with the assistance of someone who has been tasting coffee professionally for years. Here are the steps pros take to test coffee:
Assess the dry grounds: Experts grind a single type of coffee and place the grounds in five cups to smell. They work under red light that disguises the grounds so they can focus on the aroma.
Reassess with wet grounds: Hot water is added to each cup, and the grounds are smelled again over a four-minute period. Pros look for notes like fruity, chocolatey and earthy as well as others that can be signs of defects.
Slurp: Judges taste each cup and take notes on flavor, body, acidity and bitterness. Inconsistency between the same coffee in two or more cups can be a sign of a poor roast.
Once we acquired all our Lab data, we compared it with the more than 750 surveys we received. As hard as it was to choose the winners, the following products stand out for being innovative, top-performing, easy to use and worth trying.
AWARD CATEGORIES
Kitchen Gear Awards: Innovative Standouts | Multifunctional Whizzes | Outdoor Entertainment
Coffee Awards: Brewing Buddies | Coffee Companions
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