This is not a comprehensive list of all the machines we’ve considered. It includes models we’ve tested that are still available.
The Fellow Aiden Precision Coffeemaker is a darling among coffeeheads; it offers advanced settings for temperature, coffee-to-water ratio, and bloom and pulse variations so you can really dial in your brew. Those advanced settings and its single-serve feature did produce a superior cup, but the automatic brew setting produced flat or inconsistent results. It also took an agonizing 10 minutes 15 seconds to brew a full pot, and the carafe was prone to spilling and lost heat more quickly than the carafes on our picks. The Aiden’s brew-ahead function was also a bit glitchy, and its removable water reservoir was difficult to clean.
The sleekly designed Balmuda The Brew made a very good cup of coffee. However, it brews only 12 ounces in total, just barely two cups, which is too little to justify this model’s hefty $700 price. The machine did not keep the coffee warm, either.
The coffee from the original Simply Good Coffee brewer, which is being phased out, was just that: simply good, a little flat, and not very nuanced. The model replacing it is plastic-free and, at $480, more than twice the price. The newer model produced a more nuanced cup of coffee than its sibling, but it wasn’t balanced enough to justify the cost.
The beautiful design of the stainless steel Aarke Coffee System makes it a showpiece. It’s speedy, brewing a full carafe in six minutes, and the machine is extremely easy to use, with just one button (one push for brewing, two pushes for blooming and brewing, three pushes for cleaning). We found the flavor of the coffee too one-note and a tad watery. It comes with a glass carafe, and you can order a thermal carafe separately for about $100 — an extra cost on an already-pricey machine.
With a multitude of brew settings, the Breville Precision Brewer Thermal has a lot to offer craft-coffee lovers. You can adjust almost everything, from bloom duration to water temperature to flow rate. But we found it tough to get going — it took us more than two hours to dial in a decent brew. For those who love to tinker or are particular about coffee, the time investment may be rewarding. But if you’re just looking to make a good pot of coffee, the learning curve is needlessly steep.
We liked that the Breville the Luxe Brewer Thermal had a removable water tank, which is handy for filling and cleaning. But we found the machine to be needlessly complicated. While an exacting coffee drinker might appreciate features like a water filter (which must be changed every 90 days) and test strips to determine water hardness, the machine is noisy and doesn’t extract the flavor as well as our picks, turning out flat and papery-tasting coffee.
Lotus’s The Top Drip also features a removable water tank and was instinctive and easy to use. Tasters found the resulting coffee to be a bit flat, watery and bitter, however.
There is a lot to like about the GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker: It has settings for varying strengths and temperatures, an auto-brew function, and a handsome design, and it’s the only machine we tested that can pair with Wi-Fi so that you can control it with an app. It also brewed quickly and quietly. However, despite fiddling with different settings, we failed to brew a good pot of coffee, turning out an acrid, one-dimensional brew each time.
The Bunn Speed Brew was extremely complicated to understand, from set-up to brewing. It requires 15 minutes to initially heat up and brews a pot in four minutes thereafter only if the coffeemaker is left on with the water tank full at all times. Worse, it did not produce a good cup of coffee.
Despite its pleasant design and functions such as a brew-ahead timer, the Zwilling Enfinigy Drip Coffee Maker took nearly 11 minutes to brew and produced coffee with an unpleasantly metallic aftertaste.
The Ratio Six Series 2 Coffee Maker was awkward to use, primarily because of its stacked carafe and basket. The basket comes with a drip tray to “catch” drips after removing the basket from the brewer. Not only do you have to act quickly to prevent a mess, but the tray is one more piece to clean. It also lacks a brew-through lid, which causes the coffee to cool after brewing if you don’t screw the carafe lid on immediately.
There are few brewers as attractive as the pricey Ratio Eight Series 2, with its wood grain trim, and we like that it’s plastic-free. But it is just as awkward to use as the Ratio Six, as it, too, features a stacked carafe and basket. We also found the thermal carafe to be top-heavy, and the coffee tasted burnt.
For such a clunky machine, the Ninja Specialty Coffee Maker made surprisingly good coffee. But its extra features (a watery single-cup setting and a milk-frothing wand) don’t add a lot of value, and it’s now available only with a glass carafe, which we don’t recommend.
The Zojirushi Fresh Brew Plus Thermal Carafe Coffee Maker EC-YTC100 brewed coffee at a glacial pace, taking more than 15 minutes to make a full pot. We also thought the coffee tasted weak.
The Brim 8 Cup Pour Over Coffee Maker is expensive for what it offers. It’s not programmable, and it has a large gap between the showerhead and the filter basket, which allows a lot of heat to escape during brewing. The Chemex-shaped carafe can be difficult to grip with one hand. And because this model is glass and lacks a lid, the coffee cools quickly (the hot plate shuts off after 30 minutes).
The Braun 10-Cup MultiServe Coffee Machine is the worst coffee maker we’ve tested. It consistently brewed coffee that tasted awful, like burnt gas-station coffee.
This article was edited by Marguerite Preston, Marilyn Ong, and Gabriella Gershenson.
