
A Very Good rating tells you the ice is more like a snow cone. A blender that garners an Excellent rating in our ice-crushing test serves up ice that looks uniformly like snow. "When a blender earns an Excellent in our icy-drinks tests, the drinks have a smooth, consistent texture," says Larry Ciufo, a CR test engineer who runs our blender lab.įor our ice-crushing tests, we use another set of sieves to separate the big chips from the finer bits. In our lab, we make batches of nonalcoholic piña coladas and use a series of sieves (with increasingly smaller mesh sizes) to evaluate smoothness and thickness. CR tests blenders on how well they make icy drinks, crush ice, and purée, as well as on convenience, durability, and noise.
