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It can be mighty expensive to get your favorite cocktails at the local bar, and it's probably an inconsistent experience too. How much easier to make your favorite cocktails at home with the "BEV" cocktail maker machine from Black + Decker, powered by Bartesian capsules and your favorite liquors. Tech expert Dave Taylor tries out the BEV Cocktail Maker Machine and finds that it does a darn good job with a variety of cocktails, including his Whiskey Sour. But is it worth the money? He talks about that too, and his answer might surprise you...
Check out the BEV at https://amzn.to/3BbCwAU
and the Bartesian capsule sets at https://amzn.to/3KNzqX5
Then why not visit Dave's Q&A Web site at: https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/
#cocktails #bevcocktails #bevmachine #blackdecker #liquor #askdavetaylor
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Premium cocktails at home? Let's check this out
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Dave Taylor here and I'm checking this out. This is ridiculously cool. This is the Bev by
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Black & Decker. It's a cocktail maker machine. It acts like a coffee Keurig machine, but for
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mixed drinks. They all work with these capsules. These pods or capsules are Bartesian capsules and
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there's a couple of companies that make devices that work with them. And you can see this one
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is for a whiskey sour. Now what's in here is everything but the alcohol. So the capsules
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work with the machine which uses the alcohols you plugged in, knows how to make it. That's
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what the barcode does. It tells it what drink you're making and it makes a perfect drink for you
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And there's 40 plus different kinds of cocktails that you can get capsules for. Really fun. Now let
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me show you what this looks like. This is the Classic Collection cocktail mix and I'll open
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it up and you can see those are what the capsules look like. So these are from Bartesian. These are
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not Black & Decker. This is from a different company and they're really incredibly easy to
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work with. You basically look at it and so here's the whiskey sour one and it says load whiskey
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Okay so this one's going to need whiskey and I just happen to have a whiskey over here which is
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handy. And then in the back I have a water bottle because it adds a little bit of water as it goes
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along too. And that's basically it. So they're barcoded. They're freshness dated. You can see on
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the bottom of the box best by November 2022. So these don't have a huge amount of shelf life. You
1:49
want to buy it, keep it in the fridge and then pull out the capsules as you want to make a drink
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Now on the front there's four different strengths you can specify. You can see along here and you
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dial the strength that you want. You can see that light going back and forth. So on this leftmost
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setting that's a mocktail. So it will make the drink but not use any alcohol. Good if you want
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one of the kids or if you're like trying to cut back on your alcohol consumption but you still
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are really dying for a Tom Collins or something. You can use this to make one of those. Or you can
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dial up the alcohol level from low to regular to strong. And strong again it's just like a heavier
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pour. If you had a bartender in front of you and you're like give me a little bit more. That's like
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dialing this thing but actually dialing it's a whole lot easier. So I tend to like it. Let's see
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on regular. I think that's regular. Yep and then here a little light comes on. If it says that the
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drink that you're making once we've made it then you're probably going to want to put it in a
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cocktail shaker and give it a couple of shakes against ice. Not all drinks require that so that's
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easy. There are LED lights. The controls are on the back so you can turn it on and it illuminates
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all the bottles. Obviously more effective when it's darker. And then there's also this sort of
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disco light. It's good for partying and it lights up individual and sort of moves things around
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Very eye-catching. This is perfect for parties actually. And then on the back there's also a
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control to turn it off. In fact here's a close-up. You can see the big button is for the light
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effects and then the smaller button is actually for having you do the self-clean. And then there's
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an on-off switch. Now on the front like you saw there are these lights that show you and you can
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also use the dial when you're ready to make the drink. You just push the button. Easy as that. You
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want to make sure you have your alcohols in place and they're really easy to load. And then I'm going
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to go ahead and make this whiskey sour. So since I'm using a short glass I'm going to pull out the
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little platform and put our glass on it. And I've already put some ice in there because why not
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right? And then I'm going to open this up and then this goes in. Nice and easy. You put this down
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and it's ready to go. So now let me double check my strength. That is on regular
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and I'm going to push the button and watch the level of the alcohol
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So now it's adding a little bit of water. And there's my beverage ready to drink. Super easy to work with. Having the ice cubes already
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in there makes it look very fancy. And you can see that's a nice looking beverage. And of course
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the real question is how does it taste? That's pretty darn good. In fact this absolutely relies
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on the Bartesian company and their mixes. And they get professional bartenders to help them design
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all their formulas. And in those little cups are actual juices and extracts and bitters. And this
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tastes like fresh lime juice. It has that nice sharp edge to it. So it's not just I put whiskey
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on over a couple of ice cubes and good luck. I mean it's clearly a mixed cocktail and it's very
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tasty actually. So the LED lights, it self-cleans after every drink. The machine self-cleans. They
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tell you every 30 days or so you should probably do that cleaning cycle from the button on the back
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And each of the little spots is labeled for the alcohol that you need to put in it. So there's
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five alcohols you can put in or you can put in a subset. As you can see I don't have any gin on
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mine right now which would be this bottle. Because I don't have any drinks that need gin. So easy
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enough right. Most of the components are dishwasher safe which is really nice. And you probably
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noticed there was a drop that came here onto the little shelf. So like a Keurig coffee machine
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every so often you're going to want to give it a quick wipe down to get rid of that last drop or
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two. But you might be wondering does it use everything in the capsule? And the answer is
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let's have a look. The answer is absolutely. That capsule is completely empty. All of the ingredients
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that were in this capsule, I'm going to put this back here, all of the ingredients that were in the
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capsule are in my drink. How cool is that? It's really a smart design. Now this, the capsules are
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not inexpensive. This whole setup is fairly expensive. This is not for a college dorm room
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You will like find that it costs more than your tuition after one weekend of partying
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But if you're looking for something that is just like perfect for you to get that one drink after
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work without stopping by your favorite bar or something. And I'll be honest, your modern bars
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nowadays they charge what like 12, 15, 17 bucks for a cocktail. So this is absolutely comparable
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And this collection is $14.99 for six. And that's a pretty typical price for the Bartesians
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So they're about $2.50 a capsule. So you figured that plus the alcohol costs, it's probably about
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five, four or five bucks a drink, which is mighty inexpensive compared to, like I said
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going to your favorite bar. And let's see what else can I tell you is you should go to
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bartesian.com and check out the collection. There are a lot of drinks. There's a lot of
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really fun, exotic ones way beyond this classic collection. And this one contains whiskey sour
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margarita, old-fashioned Long Island iced tea, a cosmopolitan and an uptown rocks. But I mean
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the company makes tons of different cocktails. It's very fun. And you might be thinking I can
7:58
just buy a book and I can just make cocktails. But then you get the challenge of all your
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ingredients going out of date, right? So you get fresh limes. That's great. But that lime juice has
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a very short shelf life. And if you're only making one of these drinks every so often
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it's much easier to have capsules that have all those exotic additional ingredients
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than doing it yourself. If you just like whiskey on the rocks, then obviously this is not for you
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because you're not drinking an actual cocktail. So dimensions wise, it's 15 and a half inches tall
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by 12.3 inches in each of the other dimensions. And it's fairly heavy at 17.6 pounds. Now
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one thing I will say surprised me about it is for an appliance like this, I really expected a fairly
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heavy duty power cord, but it's just this little charger cable that looks honestly like something
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that would have come with an Android smartphone or something. So I was a little taken aback
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by the power. But on the other hand, honestly, that's in the back of the unit. So does it really
9:02
matter? All it really does is it runs a bunch of pumps and that's the whole job. So let's get this
9:08
to be in a better light mode. There we go. And that's really everything. You've seen me make a
9:14
drink. I've talked about the price of all of this stuff. I've talked about all the different fun
9:18
options you have. And of course, like a really nice bar, you can upgrade your drinks at any time by
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buying better alcohols. I have okay alcohols. I could definitely upgrade all of them. And then my
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drinks are going to taste better because my alcohols are going to be better. But in terms of
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all the other ingredients, there is nothing wrong with this delicious drink. But before I finish it
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let's talk about the price. But before we get there, I'm going to ask you if you could subscribe
9:49
to my channel, click or tap on that subscribe button, turn on notifications. I get tons of fun
9:55
stuff to review from ear pods and earbuds to headphones, tablets, smartphones, computers
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honestly, cocktail makers, you name it. I'll probably review it. If I haven't reviewed it
10:09
I'll be reviewing one soon. So please go ahead and subscribe. I'm always straight and candid and
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straightforward with you. What else can you ask for? Right? Cool. Well, cheers. This is the Bev by
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Black and Decker cocktail maker machine. And it's $249 at amazon.com. And then these Bartesian
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cocktail capsules are going to run you about $2.50 a capsule. So this classic collection is $14.99
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I have links for all of this in the description on my YouTube. And it's all great fun. And I
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got to say, I had a party last night and we cracked this thing open and we were making all
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these different drinks, we went through an entire classic collection of different alcohols and
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different cocktails. And everyone liked them. It was a absolutely the hit of the party. And people
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were like, Oh, I've never tried one of these. This is really good. So it's really fun. This is
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definitely one you want to check out if you're someone who enjoys having cocktails, or being able
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to make really good cocktails for your friends. Pretty darn cool. So I got I hope to catch you
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in my next video
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