The Best Coffee Makers

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 this round 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.

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.

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. Water that's too hot can burn the coffee, while water that’s too cool will under-extract it, leading to weak or sour flavors. Recommended temperature might be lower in higher elevation area such as Denver.

Brew time: In general, a batch of drip coffee should brew within four to eight minutes, to avoid getting bitter or acrid flavors from overlong extraction. 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.

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.