How many citrus juicers do you need to buy before you figure out which is the best citrus juicer? According to my most recent kitchen purge a few months ago, that number would be five.

I discovered a long-forgotten electric juicer that I’d used twice; a heavy press-type contraption that weighed around fifty-pounds; a glass juicer attached to a cup that looked like a bad idea; an ancient wood hand-reamer clearly from the Victorian era; and a metal hinged juicer that I bought at a garage sale.

The metal hinged juicer from Zulay is the best juicer.

(Sorry, I know I just built up all that suspense and then just gave it away, but this isn’t American Idol. Did you think I was just going to eliminate all the other juicers one by one and send them crying off stage until only one was left?)

CME is an rstyle affiliate

Best Citrus Juicer: The Zulay Metal Hinged Manual Squeezer (and we tried 5!)

Related: Everything you need to know about citrus: Picking, storing, and cooking, oh my!

Having a the best juicer is important to me. How else am I going to make those lemon bars for the school bake sale or lemonade for the class party?

And then, there are the margaritas when we’re done with the school bake sale and the class party.

If you have one of those other juicers, I’m sure they do just fine, but they all have their problems: The hand-reamer leaves my hands wet and sticky and the glass juicer always feels like it’s about to break. Both the electric juicer and press-type take up too much space for me, and although they’re great if you need a lot of juice at one time, I prefer to offer that valuable counter real estate to something I use more often, like my electric pistachio sheller or my Doritos bag re-sealer.

Zulay’s metal hinged juicer, on the other hand, can juice the hell out of a lemon or lime even with a weakling like me using it.

And here’s the best part: you can fold the rind in half after the first juicing and squeeze again and get the last precious drops out of your citrus.

I know this makes me sound like someone who is a little too fanatical about citrus extrusion, but if being a crazy, juice enthusiast is wrong I don’t want to be right.

You can find my favorite metal hinged juicer on our affiliates Amazon.com for $15.99, at Crate & Barrel for $16.95, or probably, at a garage sale near you.