Compare the Top 7 Drip Coffee Makers
Frequently Asked Questions
More Coffee Makers We Like and Love
Photograph: Cavanaugh/Oxo
Oxo Brew 9-Cup Coffee Maker for $250: The 9-cup Oxo (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a lovely, SCA Golden Cup coffee maker capable of making tasty drip coffee that would please any connoisseur. Five years ago when WIRED reviewed it, it was arguably our favorite batch coffee maker. Alas, the world of drip coffee relentlessly keeps moving forward. It still might be your favorite, given that it costs 40 percent less than my top-pick Aiden and offers a feature that’s indispensable for some: a timer that allows you to schedule your brew overnight, so it’s ready when you wake up.
Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker for $350: The Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is another previous top pick for as a large-batch brewer, and it’s still a worthwhile choice. This Oxo is not overtly pretty, but, like the Luxe above, it’s SCA-certified, 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.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
12-Cup Breville Luxe Brewer for $350: Sometimes nothing less than 12 cups will do. WIRED has previously recommended this big-batch 12-Cup brewer as a top pick for those who want good-tasting coffee in large batches. Among the big boys, this Breville Luxe (7/10, WIRED Recommends), the update on the prior Breville Precision Brewer, has the best feature set and the best capabilities. It can reliably make balanced, aromatic 60-ounce batch of coffee thanks to a lot of technical sophistication under its hood: PID temperature control, water sensors, brew algorithms, customizable settings, the same thermocoils and pumps you’d use to make espresso. It also has an excellent cold brew function, which can make real, actual, cold brew overnight or over the course of the day, timed out with a drip stop. Even so, the device has a number of quirks and particularities in terms of water volume, water left in the reservoir, and an entirely different brew mode for small batches that’s not well explained in the product documentation. After noticing a lot of frustrated user feedback online, I’ve moved this down to my honorable mentions despite the machine’s many admirable qualities.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ninja Hot and Iced XL for $160: 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 my 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 my 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 brewing drip coffee from fresh coffee beans encouragingly easy and affordable for non-coffee-geeks. 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 Maker With Thermal Carafe for $480: This shiny, SCA-certified Swedish-made system (6/10, WIRED Recommends) 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
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Oxo Brew 8-Cup Coffee Maker With Glass Carafe for $180: I leapt at the chance to try an updated version of Oxo’s modern-classic 8-cup coffee maker, now available with a glass carafe and a warmer. When first reviewed in 2020, the Oxo Brew 8-Cup received a rare 9/10 score from WIRED reviewer Joe Ray for its elegant simplicity, its “rainmaker” showerhead meant to mimic the agitation of a pour-over, and a SCA Golden Cup certification attesting that the machine was able to stay within tight temperature and time parameters. Six years later, the coffee flavor and extraction is still amid the upper echelon of drip coffee brewers, at a sub-$200 price that’s a bargain in its class. It no longer being a top pick is simply a sign of how far other drip coffee makers have come—including the newer 9-cup and 12-cup machines from Oxo. In particular, I wish Oxo had since updated the 8-Cup’s showerhead design to be more in line with its newer machines. The six-hole showerhead erodes pits into the brew bed and causes channeling. This adds up to less even extraction than the newer Oxo machines. It’s not that I don’t like the 8-cup, it’s just that I think you should probably get the 9-cup or 12-cup instead.
Mr. Coffee Perfect Brew for $169: This SCA-certified Mr. Coffee brewer amounts to a giant leap forward for the drip-coffee pioneer. It 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 $227: 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.
Gevi 10-Cup Grind-and-Brew for $150: 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 a 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.
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 stand-alone 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 (4/10, WIRED Recommends) 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, according to contributor Joe Ray. Plus, the machine was just kind of 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 Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker (4/10, WIRED Recommends) seemed initially promising, according to 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 $699: Balmuda is a brand known for lovable design, and this coffee maker (5/10, WIRED Recommends) 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, 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 a steep $700.
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