GoKawiilCompare the Top 7 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 as a coffee writer and reporter for more than a decade. 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. Curious why 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 of budget devices that make actual good coffee. My favorite of these is the Zojirushi Zutto. I test each coffee machine first by carefully reading and following the manufacturer's instructions, and then brew both light- and medium-dark-roast coffee according to specifications. 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 and infrared thermometers when possible to track brew and final temperatures, plus time brew cycles for various-sized batches. I examine the soaking of the brew bed for signs of uneven extraction. I also 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 is it to clean or descale the water reservoir? How's the lid fit? When you've really invested in a device, even the littlest things matter. But taste is always king, and it's what matters 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 they compared. 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 less than $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 is uneven coffee. Different flavors come out of coffee at different times and different temperatures. Especially with lighter roasts and higher-quality coffee—coffee with unique, interesting, aromatic qualities—a cheap coffee maker will be a form of violence. 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, chocolatey, and deep, without any burnt notes. It can offer aromatics as subtle and fruity as those you'd find in wine: plum, nectarine, and cherry. Since the early 2000s, baristas with twirly mustaches have gotten quite good at coaxing out these flavors with 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 pour-over.
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 the temperature in a tight 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 predictably and beautifully coax the nice flavors out of the coffee, but they stop short before pulling out the nasty flavors. 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 my time testing 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 Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as “Golden Cup” brewers. What does this mean? Quite a bit, actually. The Specialty Coffee Association is an international trade group for coffee. Its Golden Cup home-brewer certification is a rigorous testing process designed according to criteria laid out by coffee scientists in the 1950s. An increasingly 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, and the extraction is too weak and the coffee might end up tasting sour. The recommended temperature might be lower in higher-elevation areas, such as Denver. Brew time: In general, a batch of drip coffee should brew in four to eight minutes in order to get full extraction without overdoing it and risking bitter or acrid flavors. Pour-over coffee tends to brew at the lower end of this scale, around three to five minutes. Extraction: 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. Extraction is a 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 has been questioned a bit recently, 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.) Likewise, 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 beyond 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 freshly 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 or kitchen scale, read the manual very carefully, or have fun with Google.
More Coffee Makers We Like and Love
Photograph: Cavanaugh/Oxo
Oxo Brew 9-Cup Coffee Maker for $250: The 9-cup Oxo (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a lovely, SCA Golden Cup coffee maker capable of making tasty drip coffee that would please any connoisseur. Five years ago when WIRED reviewed it, it was arguably our favorite batch coffee maker. Alas, the world of drip coffee relentlessly keeps moving forward. It still might be your favorite, given that it costs 40 percent less than my top-pick Aiden and offers a feature that's indispensable for some: a timer that allows you to schedule your brew overnight, so it’s ready when you wake up.
... continue reading