More Coffee Maker Favorites
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. But here’s the thing. The 8-cup (9/10, WIRED Recommends) contains an insert that allows for good single-serving drip. The 9-cup (9/10, WIRED Recommends) has a timer that allows you to schedule your brew overnight, so it’s ready when you wake up. The 12-Cup model we recommend above boasts both of these faculties, in a larger-batch package to boot.
Ninja 12-Cup Programmable Brewer for $80: 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.
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 $251: 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 $140: 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.
De’Longhi TrueBrew for $600: 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 $229: 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.
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