Compare the Top 6 Drip Coffee Makers
Frequently Asked Questions
How We Tested and Chose the Best Drip Coffee Machines AccordionItemContainerButton LargeChevron I've been a drip coffee fan—some might say fanatic—for quite some time. Much of my machine selection comes from personal experience and decade-long history as a coffee writer and reporter. To broaden my selection, I listened to some of the best minds in coffee, including internet bean personalities like James Hoffmann and Lance Hedrick, trusted baristas and roasters, my friend Joel, and countless published lists by credible sources. If it looked good, I tried it. And sometimes, I just took a flyer on an interesting-looking machine. But if you don't see your favorite budget Hamilton Beach or Cuisinart 14-Cup on this list, it's because I focused on a new generation of devices that are moving drip coffee forward in terms of flavor and technical sophistication—adding bloom cycles, dual heating elements, customization, or precise water temperature control. That said, there are still a couple budget devices that make actual good coffee. My favorite of these is the Zojirushi Zutto. I test each coffee machine first by reading carefully and following manufacturer instructions to the letter, whether scoops of ground coffee or weights to the tenth of a gram, and then brew both light- and medium-dark-roast coffee according to spec. I then do the same while adhering to a 1:17 “golden ratio” of water-to-coffee while brewing multiple batch sizes. Then I generally tinker a bit with different roasts and machine settings while putting the machine through its paces, seeing how easy (or hard) it is to get a genuinely good cup of coffee according to different preferences. But in addition to the evidence of my taste buds, I use probe thermometers when possible to track brew temperature, time brew cycles for various sized batches, and use infrared thermometers to measure coffee temperature at the end of brewing. I examine the soaking of the brew bed, for signs of uneven extraction. And, of course, I assess ease of use, the little fun features that make you fall in love with a machine, and the quirks or flaws that can make you hate it. Does the carafe hold temperature? Can you time the machine to have coffee ready when you wake up? How easy to clean or descale is the water reservoir? How's the lid fit? When you've really invested in a device, even the littlest things will matter. But taste is always king, and it's what mattered to me most. Amid testing, I also held side-by-side taste tests against other machines I liked, with the same ratios and coffee, to see how each stood up to the other. A good cup of coffee never quite seems good enough, when it sits on the counter next to truly great coffee. Do More Expensive Drip Coffee Makers Make Better Coffee? AccordionItemContainerButton LargeChevron The short answer is “often, very much yes.” You've probably noticed that drip coffee makers have gotten a lot more expensive lately, after decades spent racing to the bottom of the market. The original Mr. Coffee machine was actually a time-saving luxury and a marvel of newfound convenience when it arrived in the 1970s, quickly taking over half the home coffee market share despite costing $250 or more in current dollars. But these days, a basic 12-cup drip coffee machine with a warmer is quite easily had at Walmart for $30. So why not just buy that? You can. But it won't be as good. Why are cheap coffee makers cheap? Cheap drip coffee makers tend to work a similar way: Coffee is heated till it boils underneath the burner plate. The resulting steam pushes water up through plastic tubes with steam to pour out of a small showerhead over the brewing chamber, until all the water is gone. A couple things happen, alas. First, the water that initially pours into the brewing chamber is too cold. By the end of the pour, it's too hot. Also, since the pour spout is generally a bit small, the grounds will not wet evenly, or extract evenly: Water will tunnel through the middle or the side of the brew basket. (You can see this quite clearly, usually: There's basically a big crater in your coffee grounds after you brew.) Bad extraction means bad coffee.
The result of this uneven extraction from cheap coffee makers is that coffee extracts weirdly, and unevenly. Different flavors come out of coffee at different times, and at different temperatures. Especially with liger roasts and higher quality coffee—coffee with unique and intersting and aromatic qualities—a cheap coffee maker will be a form of violence. Coffee that's been brewed outside optimal temperatures, and steeped sort of unevenly—more in some places than others—will have a whole mess of unintended flavors. What's more, after you drop the coffee onto the thermal plate, it'll just kinda keep burning. It will taste, perhaps nostalgically, like diner coffee. It'll taste thin, and burnt, and possibly sour. If you're used to this, and that's what you like, these qualities should only cost you $30. Good extraction makes good coffee.
Drip or immersion coffee does not have to taste like burnt rubber. Well-extracted drip coffee can taste round and chocolatey and deep, without any off burnt notes. It can offer aromatics as subtle and fruity as those you'd find in wine: plum and nectarine and cherry. Since the early 2000s, baristas with twirly mustaches have gotten quite good at coaxing out these flavors wtih cafe pour-over—using good grinders, tight temperature control and painstakingly evenly immersed coffee grounds. This usually involves a Chemex or a Kalita Wave conical filter, and a tightly controlled gooseneck kettle. Modern drip machines emulate cafe pourover.
So why are the newer, more expensive drip coffee makers better? They exercise the same control as a good barista in a cafe. They keep temerpature in a tight temperature range. They immerse the coffee evenly. They “bloom” coffee to further aid even extraction. They control time appropriately. They mimic what a skilled barista would do to predicatbly and beautifully coax the nice flavors out of the coffee, but stop short before they pull the nasty flavors out of coffee. But seriously. Is expensive always better?
Nah. Plenty of expensive coffee makers also make bad or ok coffee, despite their best efforts. That's why I take the time to test each machine. WIRED's top-pick devices make drip coffee better than any other machines I've encountered. Some, like the Technivorm Moccamaster, achieve these results with precise analog engineering. Some, like the Four from Portland coffee maker Ratio, construct ideal temperature curves and ideal extraction using electronic controllers and long-term testing, unlocking good coffee with a single button-press. And some, like the top-pick Fellow Aiden, allow you to customize your brewing parameters for each individual bag of coffee. Wild. What Is SCA Certification? AccordionItemContainerButton LargeChevron A number of the brewers among the favorites are certified by the international Specialty Coffee Association as “Golden Cup” brewers. So what's this mean? Quite a bit, actually. The Specialty Coffee Association is an international trade group for coffee. And its Golden Cup home brewer certification is a rigorous testing process designed according to criteria laid out by some coffee scientists in the 1950s. A vanishingly small number of devices receive and maintain SCA Golden Cup laurels, and these include some of the best brewers in the game. Large brands like Bonavita and Breville may have more resources to devote to certification, but relative newcomers like Ratio and Fellow may also use SCA certification as a way of proving their bona fides. An SCA brewer must be able to consistently deliver on the following criteria: Coffee-to-water ratio: The golden ratio for coffee brewing generally is thought to fall between 1:16 and 1:18. This is one gram of coffee for every 16 to 18 grams or milliliters of water. That's around 8 grams of coffee for every 5-ounce cup. This is the strength most prefer, after years of taste testing. Brew temp: Water temperature must remain between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit (90 to 96 degrees Celsius) throughout the brewing process. If it's too hot, the coffee burns or bad flavors come out. Too cold, extraction is too weak and the coffee might end up tasting sour. Recommended temperature might be lower in higher-elevation area such as Denver. Brew time: In general, a batch of drip coffee should brew in a time span of four to eight minutes, to get full extraction without overdoing it and getting bitter or acrid flavors. Pour-over coffee tends to brew at the lower end of this scale, around three to five minutes. Extraction: Especially, the SCA tests the extraction achieved by a coffee maker. The ideal strength—the percentage of the brewed liquid that's made up of coffee particles—tends to be 1.15 to 1.35 percent. The extraction is a more complicated calculation, but the SCA wants coffee to be 18 to 22 percent extracted. The maximum theoretical extraction is 30 percent, but you don't want this. The bitter flavors come last, and you'd rather leave them in the bean. The objectivity of these criteria have been questioned a bit recently, especially given changing tastes over time and different regional preferences. It is true that any coffee machine that can consistently meet these criteria tends to be a pretty well-made machine. But an SCA stamp does not guarantee excellent coffee. (In fact, I've tasted multiple “Golden Cup” brewers I would not recommend.) And the lack of an SCA stamp doesn't mean bad coffee. Indeed, makers of some of our top picks have privately told me they've moved away from the SCA's one-size-fits-all criteria, in favor of in-house optimization. What Is This “Bloom” You Speak Of? AccordionItemContainerButton LargeChevron The “bloom” is a technique from the pour-over brewing method that's recently been adopted in a lot of the best automatic drip coffee makers. The idea is this: If your coffee is fresh and fresh-ground, it's probably gassy. Specifically, there's a bit of carbon dioxide still trapped in the bean that will actually hinder good coffee extraction. Once you add hot water, the carbon dioxide will be in a rush to escape and shoulder out those good coffee flavors from doing the same. So a bloom is just a poetic name for degassing, Basically, you pour over a small portion of hot water to begin with, then wait 30 seconds or so. The visible bubbling of the carbon dioxide that results is the “bloom.” Blooming fresh coffee tends to lead to a better and more full-flavored extraction. Weakly extracted coffee is thinner and more sour. The best modern drip coffee machines now often also offer a bloom cycle, in part because consumers are now more likely to use better, freshly ground beans in their drip coffee. You don't need to bloom stale ground coffee. But that said, it will always taste like stale coffee. Another technique coffee makers have borrowed from pour-over is agitation, which is to say: stirring up the coffee with water. Many newer machines use a broad showerhead to drip out water unevenly in large droplets. This increases and optimizes coffee extraction by both wetting the coffee grounds evenly and creating more agitation. How Big Is a Coffee Cup? AccordionItemContainerButton LargeChevron This is a hairy, sticky, no-good question with only uncertainty at its bottom. There's very little standardization in coffee makers, but the answer tends to be that most but not all American drip coffee makers use 5 ounces as a standard serving size. This means a 12-cup coffee maker tends to hold 60 ounces of water in its reservoir. But some European makers, like Technivorm Moccamaster, roll with 125 milliliters, about 4 ounces. Other coffee makers might have 150-milliliter cups, or 6-ounce cups. To find out the size of each machine's “cup,” you may have to use your own measuring cup, read the manual very carefully, or have fun with Google.
More Coffee Makers We Like and Love
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ratio Eight Series Two for $799: Like its predecessor—the hourglass-shaped, pour-over-inspired, original Ratio Eight—the Eight Series Two is beautiful. It stands stately atop the counter like a modern-minimalist sculpture, a sinuous graduate from a design museum. Like its counterparts from Portland-based Ratio, the Four and Six (both top picks), the Eight's carefully modulated temperature settings and Fibonacci-inspired showerhead offer some of the most full extraction of any drip coffee makers I've tested—enough so that often I grind a little coarser to calibrate. Indeed, it's arguable the Eight is the culmination of Ratio's efforts to fully and evenly evince flavor from finicky light-roast coffees. What's more, the device is designed so that hot water does not come into contact with plastic, dodging worries about microplastics. This achievement comes at a cost, of course. The locally hewn wood, the pleasant heft of the stainless steel brewing chamber, the glass tubing and silicone pipe connectors, the borosilicate glass or sturdily stainless steel thermal carafe all add up to an $800 price tag (or $900 with a thermal carafe) that's double the price of our top picks. For many, avoiding microplastics while enjoying that full-tasting drip coffee will always be worth it—though we kept Ratio's Six as our thermal carafe recommendation largely because of cost. Note one design quirk, also: The water reservoir is located above the heating element, and maintains condensation on its walls unless you take the lid off the reservoir.
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