Tech
I Tested 20 Drip Coffee Makers This Year to Find the Best
Compare the Top 7 Drip Coffee Makers
Frequently Asked Questions
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 Makers We Like and Love
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ratio Eight Series Two for $799: Like its predecessor—the hourglass-shaped, pour-over-inspired, original Ratio Eight—the Eight Series Two is beautiful. It stands stately atop the counter like a modern-minimalist sculpture, a sinuous graduate from a design museum. Like its counterparts from Portland-based Ratio, the Four and Six (both top picks), the Eight’s carefully modulated temperature settings and Fibonacci-inspired showerhead offer some of the most full extraction of any drip coffee makers I’ve tested—enough so that often I grind a little coarser to calibrate. Indeed, it’s arguable the Eight is the culmination of Ratio’s efforts to fully and evenly evince flavor from finicky light-roast coffees. What’s more, the device is designed so that hot water does not come into contact with plastic, dodging worries about microplastics. This achievement comes at cost, of course. The locally hewn wood, the pleasant heft of the stainless steel brewing chamber, the glass tubing and silicone pipe connectors, the borosilicate glass or sturdily stainless steel thermal carafe all add up to an $800 price tag (or $900 with a thermal carafe) that’s double the price of our top picks. For many, avoiding microplastics while enjoying that full-tasting drip coffee will always be worth it—though we kept Ratio’s Six as our thermal carafe recommendation largely because of cost. Note one design quirk, also: The water reservoir is located above the heating element, and maintains condensation on its walls unless you take the lid off the reservoir.
Courtesy of 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.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ninja Hot and Iced XL for $159: Arguably Ninja’s top-line coffee maker of the moment, the 12-cup Ninja Hot and Iced XL has many features to like. Timed brew for sluggish risers. The ability to choose your batch size from single-mug to 12-cup carafe without having to measure water, because the device simply sucks the desired amount out of the tank. Options on iced coffee and cold brew. It is what Ninja does: It has the features. The coffee is not as well-extracted as our top picks, whether on classic or rich settings. But at its price, and with its many little conveniences, it may still be the coffee machine you desire. It’s best for those who like medium roast or darker, though—it’s not a pick for delicate, aromatic light roast drinkers.
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 five-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
Ninja Dualbrew Hot & Iced Coffee System for $170: Lordy, this one really does it all. Hot coffee, cold coffee, iced coffee, pod coffee. This machine is designed for the family who can’t agree, or the person who wants everything but only sometimes. It’s among WIRED’s top-pick pod machines for this wild versatility, and while the drip coffee doesn’t stack up to our top picks, it’s perfectly good for those more likely to make the occasional carafe from store bags.
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 five-cup Zojirushi or the 12-cup Ninja instead.
Aarke Coffee System With Thermal Carafe for $860: This shiny, SCA-certified Swedish-made system (see our full review) 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, and 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.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Cuisinart Grind and Brew for $250: Cuisinart’s new entrant in single-serve grind-and-brew coffee machines is a bit of a neither-here-nor-there machine that shows why it’s so hard to find integrated grinder-brewers. The grinder means it’s priced close to the top picks among standalone drip brewers that offer delicate and nuanced takes on even pre-ground coffee. But the Cuisinart’s integrated grinder has only one setting—which means the only way to adjust flavor is by adjusting brew strength. This makes it not great for the light or lighter-medium roasts favored by third-wave coffee lovers, the very people who tend to be sticklers about having their coffee ground fresh before brewing. The grinder adds a bit of versatility for those who favor medium-dark roasts, and the conical burr grinder is a step up from a blade grinder. But this machine remains a bit of an odd duck.
De’Longhi TrueBrew for $700: Like a lot of De’Longhi espresso machines, this TrueBrew (see our full 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 (see our full 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 (see our full 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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The European online age verification app is ready.
The app works with passports or ID cards, is built to be “completely anonymous” for the people who use it, works on any device (smartphones, tablets, and PCs), and is open source. “Best of all, online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app, so there are no more excuses,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at a press conference on Wednesday. “Europe offers a free and easy-to-use solution that can protect our children from harmful and illegal content.”
High Expectations
“It is our duty to protect our children in the online world just as we do in the offline world. And to do that effectively, we need a harmonized European approach,” von der Leyen said at Wednesday’s press conference. “And one of the central issues is the question, how can we ensure a technical solution for age verification that is valid throughout Europe? Today, I can announce that we have the answer.”
This answer takes the form of an open source app that any private company can repurpose, as long as it complies with European privacy standards and offers the same technical solution throughout the European Union. The user downloads the app, agrees to the terms and conditions, sets up a pin or biometric access, and proves their age through an electronic identification system, or by showing a passport or ID card (in which case biometric verification is also provided). The app does not store your name, date of birth, ID number, or any other personal information, according to the European Commission—only the fact that you are over a certain age.
After that, when a person using the app wants to access a social network (minimum age: 13), pornographic site (minimum age: 18), or any other age-protected content, if they are logged in from a computer, they need only scan the QR code shown on the site they want to visit. If, on the other hand, the person logs in from a smartphone, the app sends the proof of age directly. The platform does not access the document with which the user proved it in the first place.
Adoption Event
The need to introduce a common system for the entire European Union has been discussed for some time, and according to commission technicians, the technical work is now complete. Of course, it will still be possible to circumvent the system—all it takes is for an adult to lend their phone to a younger friend—but the technological architecture exists, and it will be up to EU member states to decide whether to integrate it into national digital wallets or develop independent apps.
“No More Excuses”
For the app to really be effective, platforms must be obligated to verify the age of their users—that’s where things get tricky. The Digital Services Act, which went into effect in 2024, requires “very large online platforms”—those with more than 45 million monthly users in the European Union—to take concrete steps to mitigate systemic risks related to child protection, with heavy penalties for noncompliance.
“And that’s why Europe has the DSA: to call online platforms to their responsibilities. Because Europe will not tolerate platforms making money at the expense of our children,” European Commission executive vice president Henna Virkkunen told a press conference. She added that after an investigation into TikTok, the European institutions plan to take similar action against Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, as well as four porn sites. “Since the platforms do not have adequate age verification tools, we developed the solution ourselves,” he concluded. In short, as von der Leyen also remarked, “there are no more excuses.”
Bare Minimum
So far, this is the European framework that sets the general rules. On this basis, member states can consider more restrictive measures. Italy was among the first to discuss how to regulate the use of social media by minors but has so far not landed on anything concrete. Elsewhere in the EU, France’s Emmanuel Macron has been a trailblazer on the issue, pushing France to discuss a rule to ban social networks for minors under the age of 15 entirely. So far, this measure has received broad political support—but the outcome depends largely on compatibility with the Digital Services Act and the availability of effective age verification systems like the app the European Commission just released.
This article originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated.
Anthropic is moving into a new London office as it seeks to expand its research and commercial footprint in Europe, setting up a scrap between the leading AI labs for talent emerging from British universities.
The company, which opened its first London office in 2023, is moving to the same neighborhood as Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, Wayve, Isomorphic Labs, Synthesia, and various AI research institutions.
Anthropic’s new, 158,000-square-foot office footprint will have space enough for 800 people—four times its current head count—giving it room to potentially outscale OpenAI, which itself recently announced an expansion in London.
“Europe’s largest businesses and fastest-growing startups are choosing Claude, and we’re scaling to match,” says Pip White, head of EMEA North at Anthropic. “The UK combines ambitious enterprises and institutions that understand what’s at stake with AI safety with an exceptional pool of AI talent—we want to be where all of that comes together.
UK government officials had reportedly attempted to coax Anthropic into expanding its presence in London after the company recently fell out with the US administration. Anthropic refused to allow its models to be used in mass surveillance and autonomous weapon systems, leading to an ongoing legal battle between the AI lab and the Pentagon.
As part of the expansion, Anthropic says it will deepen its work with the UK’s AI Security Institute, a government body that this week published a risk evaluation of its latest model, Claude Mythos Preview. According to Politico, the UK government is one of few across Europe to have been granted access to the model, which Anthropic has released to only select parties, citing concerns over the potential for its abuse by cybercriminals.
The increasing concentration of AI companies in the same London district is an important step in creating a pathway for research to translate into AI products, says Geraint Rees, vice-provost at University College London, whose campus is around the corner from Anthropic’s new office.
“This cluster didn’t emerge from a planning document. It grew because serious researchers and companies understand that proximity isn’t a nice-to-have,” he said last month, speaking at an event attended by WIRED. “That’s how the innovation system actually works. It’s not a clean, linear transfer from lab to market. It’s messier, richer, more human than that.”
The increasingly long-in-the-tooth Computer Misuse Act (CMA) of 1990 remains an albatross around the neck of British cyber security professionals, and even though the UK government committed last December to reforming it, every minute of delay is holding back the nation’s security innovation, resilience, talent, and ability to defend itself against cyber attacks, campaigners have warned.
Ahead of the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC’s) upcoming CYBERUK conference in Glasgow, the CyberUp Campaign for reform of the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) has published a new report, titled Protections for Cyber Researchers: How the UK is being left behind to maintain pressure on Westminster.
The CMA defines the vague offence of unauthorised access to a computer, which the campaigners want changed because it was written 35 years ago and fails to account for the development of the cyber security profession, and the fact that in the course of their day-to-day work, cyber pros may sometimes need to hack into other systems.
“Cyber attacks are growing in scale, sophistication and severity, with a devastating impact on infrastructure, businesses and charities,” said a CyberUp campaign spokesperson.
“While other countries have moved to refresh their cyber laws in response, the UK’s Computer Misuse Act hasn’t been updated since before the modern internet – hardly the best platform for accelerating our defences into the next decade.”
The group’s report highlights how other nations, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malta, Portugal, and the USA, have already secured legal protections for cyber professionals that enable them to go about their business without fear of prosecution.
In Portugal – Britain’s oldest formal ally under a treaty dating back to the 14th Century – the government last year published Decreto-Lei 125/2025, implementing the European Union (EU) Network and Information Systems (NIS2) Directive and revising the country’s cyber crime law to ensure that ethical hackers and professional cyber security practitioners working in good faith are both recognised and protected.
Portgual’s laws now accept some elements of cyber work may have to happen without explicit permission or involve unanticipated technical overreach that has a legitimate purpose.
As such, Portugal says that security work undertaken in good faith won’t be punished as long as the researcher fulfills a set of conditions. For example, they can act only to find vulnerabilities and these must be reported immediately, they must avoid taking harmful actions, like conducting DDoS attacks or installing malware, and they must respect the integrity of any data they may find or access and delete it within 10 days once the issue is addressed.
CyberUp said Portugal’s example demonstrates how cyber crime laws can be modernised to legally protect research carried out in the public interest.
“Portugal has demonstrated how to modernise their equivalent law through cyber legislation. We urge the government to follow this example and act swiftly through the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to achieve meaningful reform, or risk lagging even further behind our peers,” the spokesperson said.
Defence Framework
Working with cyber security experts and legal advisors, the CyberUp campaign has developed its own Defence Framework that would allow cyber professionals to present a statutory defence in court as long as they adhere to the Framework’s four core principles.
- Harm Vs. Benefit: The benefits of the activity must outweigh the potential harms;
- Proportionality: Cyber pros must take all reasonable steps to minimise the risks of their activity;
- Intent: They must act honestly, sincerely, and clearly direct themselves towards improving security;
- Competence: Their qualifications and professional memberships should demonstrate they are suitably equipped to perform cyber security work.
The campaigners say this framework will bring clarity and confidence to the security sector, enabling cyber pros to run essential research tasks without fear of criminal prosecution, helping organisations operate to recognised legal standards, and enabling a more open and collaborative relationship between the cyber sector and the UK government.
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