Vitamix A2500 Ascent Series Review

This blender is 17 inches tall, and the pitcher is 11 inches deep by 8 inches wide, which is a pretty average size and fits nicely in most kitchens. The pitcher can hold up to 64 ounces of liquid, ensuring you have enough margaritas or smoothies to go around. It is dishwasher safe and provides a user-friendly experience with three presets. To ensure a controlled trial experience, we spread our tests across five weighted rating metrics — smoothies, ice, convenience, pureeing, and grinding — with the sections below providing details about the performance of the Vitamix A2500 and how it compares to the rest of the blenders in the bunch.

Performance Comparison

Smoothies

The smoothies metric is weighted the heaviest, accounting for 30% of each blender's final score. The A2500 delivers an exceptionally great performance here. We use four different beverage recipes to evaluate, grading the A2500 on how well it makes a green smoothie, berry smoothie, fruit and oat, and an Oreo shake. This product stacks up well against the competition when blending smoothies.

Our Smoothie scoring stems from four different smoothie tests, each of which challenged all the competing products in an apples-to-apples manner.

The A2500 does a fantastic job at mixing a green smoothie, creating a silky-smooth drink that pours right through a sieve.

This matches the performance of the other high-end models, with no flakes or chunks of greens in the beverage and a very consistent flavor profile throughout the entire glass.

The A2500 continues its stellar performance in our berry smoothie challenge, perfectly blending the mixture and completely destroying any of the seeds to create a velvety-smooth texture.

The performance of the A2500 takes a substantial hit with our fruit and oat smoothie, leaving behind plenty of larger chunks. However, the parts of the smoothie that are completely blended are smooth. The Oreo shake is blended perfectly, with no hint of graininess. We also don't have to intervene by scraping the sides of the pitcher or shaking it in the slightest to get the mixture to blend.

Ice

Our next metric, ice, consisted of two tests — crushing ice and blending a margarita — and is responsible for 20% of the overall score.

The A2500 perfectly crushes and blends ice. It does not over crush the crushed ice or under blend your margaritas.

This blender completely crushes the ice without any signs of difficulty, completing the task in less than 15 seconds.

It also makes an excellent margarita. This perfect drink is evenly mixed throughout without any large ice chunks.

Convenience

Meriting the same weight as our ice metric, our convenience metric also takes credit for 20% of the total score. We rank and score each blender on how easy it is to operate, the difficulty of cleaning it, and whether or not there are any other ease of use features that streamline operations. We conduct a series of seven individual tests to score convenience, and the A2500 does an impressive job across the board.

The A2500 is quite easy to clean manually, with a large pitcher and plenty of space around the blades. There aren't any lips or crevices prone to collecting food on the blades or in the pitcher, although some texture on the lid can render it difficult to wash by hand. That being said, the entire blender, sans base, is dishwasher-safe, so the lid is a non-issue if you have a dishwasher.

You can also place the pitcher back on its motorized base in a way that it will dry, freeing up valuable space in your dish rack.

The A2500 has a handful of different preset functions, as well as a built-in digital timer. The three presets are soup, frozen drink, and smoothie, and they work swimmingly. However, they aren't the most intuitively labeled, so you have to consult the manual on their use for the first few times. Unfortunately, this appliance is a little on the loud side, measuring in at 88 dBa on our SPL meter, but that is a small price to pay for such a high functioning device.

Pureeing

Responsible for 15% of the overall score, our pureeing metric is comprised of three different tests: making almond butter, mixing tomato soup, and heating up that soup. The A2500 again delivers a stellar performance.

This model delivers a next-to-perfect performance when it comes to making nut butter, producing a smooth and creamy spread after about eight minutes of blending.

It also provides an excellent performance in our soup test, perfectly liquefying the mixture to the extent that it passed entirely through the sieve without any getting caught. This stellar kitchen appliance also heats up the soup enough to serve right out of the pitcher reaching a temperature of 153.2°F after 5:45 of blending.

Grinding

Grinding accounts for the last 15% of our testing, and the A2500 doesn't disappoint. Our grinding metric evaluates each blender on how well it did at making powdered sugar, grating hard parmesan cheese, and milling popcorn into corn flour.

The A2500 does an excellent job at milling the cornflour, with 99% of the finished product passing our sieve test. It does decently well with our parmesan cheese, though it does leave a few larger rogue chunks interspersed throughout the mix. The A2500 also finishes out the test with a good showing at making powdered sugar, creating a very finely ground mixture without melting.

Should You Buy the Vitamix A2500?

The Vitamix A2500 Ascent Series is a fantastic blender that won't disappoint. It excelled in all of our tests and showed no signs of wear and tear, even after pureeing almonds, crushing ice, or grinding popcorn. For those that want the very best, this hefty blender is definitely one to consider — if you can stomach the cost. The Vitamix is also a product that makes a good long-term investment since it is a quality and durable product built to last for years.

What Other Blenders Should You Consider?

The A2500 is a fantastic blender, but it is quite expensive, making it a poor option if you are shopping on a budget. If the price is giving you heartburn, think about getting one of the lower-priced models in our test that performs nearly as well at a lower price.

The next step down in price, with nearly identical performance, is the Cuisinart Hurricane Pro. The one thing we will say is that at the end of our extensive testing period, the Vitamix was in like-new condition, with no signs of wear and tear. But, the Cuisinart showed some signs of wear on the blade and deterioration.