How We Tested and Chose the Best Drip Coffee Machines
I’ve been a drip coffee fan—some might say fanatic—for quite some time, and so 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 good coffee, including our top low-cost 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.
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.
What Is SCA Certification?
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 are the criteria each maker must be able to meet:
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 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.
While the absolute objectivity of these criteria have been questioned a bit recently, especially given changing tastes over time or different regional preferences, rest assured that any coffee machine that can consistently meet these criteria tends to be a pretty well-made machine.
What Is This “Bloom” You Speak Of?
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.
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 Maker Favorites
Photograph: OXO
Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker for $295: The Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is our previous pick for best large-batch brewer before being knocked out by the new Breville Luxe. This Oxo is not overtly pretty, but like the Luxe it’s SCA-certified, it can be set on a delay timer, and can adjust heat and flow rate of its showerhead to account for batches from large to small. Which is to say it wakes up each morning and brews excellence. WIRED contributing reviewer Joe Ray prized in particular the machine’s water tank, which operates as a kettle, heating the water precisely before brewing rather than heating up during the brew, a quality quite rare among home brewers. The new Breville Luxe beat it out with its excellent cold brew setup, and most of the same virtues but fewer quirks.
Oxo Brew 8-Cup Coffee Maker for $190 or Oxo Brew 9-Cup Coffee Maker for $190: Both of these previous-generation Oxo models are quite lovely, SCA Golden Cup coffeemakers. Both can make tasty drip coffee that would please any connoisseur. Which you choose will depend on your priorities. The 8-cup Oxo (9/10, WIRED Recommends) contains an insert that allows for good single-serving drip. The 9-cup Oxo (9/10, WIRED Recommends) has a timer that allows you to schedule your brew overnight, so it’s ready when you wake up.
Ninja 12-Cup Programmable Brewer for $90: At less than $100, this 12-cup Ninja is a perfectly serviceable brewer with a bloom function, a timer so you can wake up to hot coffee on a hot plate, and a half-batch setting to help optimize your brews. At the same price range, I far prefer a coffee pot from the 5-cup Zojirushi Zutto. But if you want to caffeinate an office or community rec room on a budget, this larger budget brewer might still be your choice.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gevi 10-Cup Touchscreen Brewer for $160: Gevi is a relatively new brand out of China—part of a wave of new appliance makers who’ve moved from manufacturing expertise to product design. And lately Gevi has been shaking up a lot of assumptions about what goes in a drip coffee maker and what doesn’t. This 10-cup batch brewer, usually on sale around $160, comes with a host of customizable brew settings, a timed brew delay, and a conical-burr grinder to brew fresh coffee beans—a style of grinder you’d rarely find much below $100 all by itself. The resulting coffee is not at the level of WIRED’s top picks: The grinder tends to grind too much coffee, and brew times are quite long, a combination that has led to some bitterness unless you adjust your grind to fairly coarse settings. But this Gevi does make it easy and affordable for non-coffee-geeks to brew drip coffee from fresh coffee beans, an encouraging development. If you want a budget coffee maker for pre-ground coffee, though? You should probably get our budget pick 5-cup Zojirushi or the 12-cup Ninja instead.
Aarke Coffee System With Thermal Carafe for $860: This shiny, SCA-certified Swedish-made system (6/10, WIRED Reviews) is beautiful, in the Swedish modernist sense: It looks like a Turkish tea service has been redesigned into a brand new gasworks. It makes quite lovely coffee. And in a novel twist, the coffee brewer can be paired with the matching flat-burr grinder so the grinder theoretically churns the exact right amount of ground coffee. Alas, this grinder pairing wasn’t quite perfectly calibrated, requiring much tweaking. And though I didn’t have this problem, users online have reported that the grinder jams up very easily—a troubling worry on such an expensive device. I remain nonetheless affectionate.
Other Brewers Tested
Mr. Coffee Perfect Brew for $205: This SCA-certified Mr. Coffee brewer amounts to a giant leap forward for the drip coffee pioneer and does indeed make an aromatic and flavorful if somewhat thin-bodied brew. That said, the controls interface is maddening, and the device tries to do too many things without succeeding at all of them: The cold-brew function, in particular, is just a recipe for lukewarm, watered-down coffee. The tea basket is a pleasant addition, however.
Melitta Vision Luxe 12-Cup for $230: This quite large and fetching machine was designed under the Melitta brand by Hong Kong design firm Wabilogic. It’s full of interesting touches like a water reservoir that lights up red when it heats, and a control panel that can swivel for convenience. Alas, I never found a way to get the even extraction I was looking for, and much coffee came out somehow thin but bitter. Worse, the immovable water reservoir stayed constantly humid after brewing, a recipe for either constant cleaning or something worse.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gevi 10-Cup Grind-and-Brew for $140: This is a slightly lower-cost version of Gevi’s other, more digital 10-cup grind-and-brew device. Both include a built-in conical-burr grinder at relatively low cost, making fresh-ground coffee was easy and affordable for many drip coffee lovers. Both also brew similarly, a bit slow and strong, requiring coarser grinds. But at $20 or so more, I recommend Gevi’s touchscreen device instead for two reasons: a removable water tank, and a removable top granting access to the grinder to clear beans or jams or change out the burr. The touchscreen device has both. This one has neither.
De’Longhi TrueBrew for $700: Like a lot of De’Longhi espresso machines, this TrueBrew (4/10 WIRED Review) is a superautomated machine with a bean reservoir up top. This one makes something akin to drip, grinding and brewing coffee ranging from a dense 3-ounce-cup “espresso” to a classic mug. But the “espresso” was weak, and the drip coffee was sad, wrote contributor Joe Ray. Plus, the machine was just kinda messy and expensive.
GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker for $299: GE is a big name but a less common one in the world of high-quality coffee. This SCA-certified Cafe Specialty Drip Coffee Maker (4/10, WIRED Review) seemed initially promising, wrote contributor Joe Ray, but turned out to extract coffee unevenly and led to flat, coppery flavors, a fatal flaw in a premium-priced machine.
Balmuda The Brew for $700: Balmuda is a brand known for lovable design, and this coffee maker is no exception: petite and handsome, with a habit of steam-blasting the coffee carafe in advance of brewing and ticking like a clock as the coffee dribbles down. But it brewed weird, wrote contributor Joe Ray (5/10, WIRED Review), making concentrate at low temperatures then diluting it with extra water. Maybe it’s cute, but the coffee doesn’t taste good unless you do some serious gymnastics. It also costs $700.
