Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ratio
There are many reasons to like the Ratio Six. Its teardrop top and trapezoidal double-stack of brewer and carafe make the device look like it’s been shoplifted from a mid-century design museum. Like its cousin, the Ratio Four, the Six achieves implausibly full-flavored, full-bodied extraction without any particular effort on your part: just the press of a single button. Machine after machine, Ratio makes coffee brewers for lazy people with good taste.
But while I prefer the Four for single servings, the Six is better for batches. The eight-cup brewer’s thermal carafe, updated late last year, is now one of the best around, keeping coffee at optimal drinking temperature for literal hours. Just note that even with an updated design, pouring can get a little drippy when the carafe is almost empty—and there’s something fiddly about the way the filter basket has to be stacked atop the carafe while brewing. But it’s a beautiful machine, and the coffee’s even better.
Note that to avoid any plastic contact while brewing, Ratio suggests using the stainless steel dripper set ($55) from the plastic-free Ratio Eight Series 2. This works, but it's an aftermarket solution and not a perfect aesthetic match.
| Specs | |
|---|---|
| Reservoir | 40 ounces |
| Dimensions | 13.5 x 6.8 x 14.3 inches (L x W x H) |
| Weight | 7 pounds |
| Features | Adjustable bloom cycle for full or half batches, heat-shielded brew chamber |
| Carafe | Thermal |
| Warmer? | No |
| Warranty | 5 years |
WIRED
TIRED
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. Much of my machine selection comes from personal experience as a coffee writer and reporter for more than a decade. 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.
Curious why 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 of budget devices that make actual good coffee. My favorite of these is the Zojirushi Zutto.
I test each coffee machine first by carefully reading and following the manufacturer's instructions, and then brew both light- and medium-dark-roast coffee according to specifications. 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 according to different preferences.
But in addition to the evidence of my taste buds, I use probe and infrared thermometers when possible to track brew and final temperatures, plus time brew cycles for various-sized batches. I examine the soaking of the brew bed for signs of uneven extraction.
I also 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 is it to clean or descale the water reservoir? How's the lid fit? When you've really invested in a device, even the littlest things matter.
But taste is always king, and it's what matters 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 they compared. A good cup of coffee never quite seems good enough when it sits on the counter next to truly great coffee.
Do More Expensive Drip Coffee Makers Make Better Coffee?
The short answer is “often, very much yes.” You've probably noticed that drip coffee makers have gotten a lot more expensive lately, after decades spent racing to the bottom of the market.
The original Mr. Coffee machine was actually a time-saving luxury and a marvel of newfound convenience when it arrived in the 1970s, quickly taking over half the home coffee market share despite costing $250 or more in current dollars. But these days, a basic 12-cup drip coffee machine with a warmer is quite easily had at Walmart for less than $30. So why not just buy that?
You can. But it won't be as good.
Why are cheap coffee makers cheap? Cheap drip coffee makers tend to work a similar way: Coffee is heated till it boils underneath the burner plate. The resulting steam pushes water up through plastic tubes with steam to pour out of a small showerhead over the brewing chamber, until all the water is gone. A couple things happen, alas. First, the water that initially pours into the brewing chamber is too cold. By the end of the pour, it's too hot. Also, since the pour spout is generally a bit small, the grounds will not wet evenly, or extract evenly: Water will tunnel through the middle or the side of the brew basket. (You can see this quite clearly, usually: There's basically a big crater in your coffee grounds after you brew.)
Bad extraction means bad coffee.
The result of this uneven extraction is uneven coffee. Different flavors come out of coffee at different times and different temperatures. Especially with lighter roasts and higher-quality coffee—coffee with unique, interesting, aromatic qualities—a cheap coffee maker will be a form of violence. What's more, after you drop the coffee onto the thermal plate, it'll just kinda keep burning. It will taste, perhaps nostalgically, like diner coffee. It'll taste thin, and burnt, and possibly sour. If you're used to this, and that's what you like, these qualities should only cost you $30.
Good extraction makes good coffee.
Drip or immersion coffee does not have to taste like burnt rubber. Well-extracted drip coffee can taste round, chocolatey, and deep, without any burnt notes. It can offer aromatics as subtle and fruity as those you'd find in wine: plum, nectarine, and cherry. Since the early 2000s, baristas with twirly mustaches have gotten quite good at coaxing out these flavors with cafe pour-over—using good grinders, tight temperature control, and painstakingly evenly immersed coffee grounds. This usually involves a Chemex or a Kalita Wave conical filter and a tightly controlled gooseneck kettle.
Modern drip machines emulate cafe pour-over.
So why are the newer, more expensive drip coffee makers better? They exercise the same control as a good barista in a cafe. They keep the temperature in a tight range. They immerse the coffee evenly. They “bloom” coffee to further aid even extraction. They control time appropriately. They mimic what a skilled barista would do to predictably and beautifully coax the nice flavors out of the coffee, but they stop short before pulling out the nasty flavors.
But seriously. Is expensive always better?
Nah. Plenty of expensive coffee makers also make bad or OK coffee, despite their best efforts. That's why I take my time testing each machine. WIRED's top-pick devices make drip coffee better than any other machines I've encountered. Some, like the Technivorm Moccamaster, achieve these results with precise analog engineering. Some, like the Four from Portland coffee maker Ratio, construct ideal temperature curves and ideal extraction using electronic controllers and long-term testing, unlocking good coffee with a single button-press. And some, like the top-pick Fellow Aiden, allow you to customize your brewing parameters for each individual bag of coffee. Wild.
What Is SCA Certification?
A number of the brewers among the favorites are certified by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as “Golden Cup” brewers. What does this mean? Quite a bit, actually.
The Specialty Coffee Association is an international trade group for coffee. Its Golden Cup home-brewer certification is a rigorous testing process designed according to criteria laid out by coffee scientists in the 1950s. An increasingly 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:
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, and the extraction is too weak and the coffee might end up tasting sour. The recommended temperature might be lower in higher-elevation areas, such as Denver.
Brew time: In general, a batch of drip coffee should brew in four to eight minutes in order to get full extraction without overdoing it and risking bitter or acrid flavors. Pour-over coffee tends to brew at the lower end of this scale, around three to five minutes.
Extraction: 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. Extraction is a 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.
The objectivity of these criteria has been questioned a bit recently, given changing tastes over time and different regional preferences. It is true that any coffee machine that can consistently meet these criteria tends to be a pretty well-made machine. But an SCA stamp does not guarantee excellent coffee. (In fact, I've tasted multiple “Golden Cup” brewers I would not recommend.) Likewise, the lack of an SCA stamp doesn't mean bad coffee. Indeed, makers of some of our top picks have privately told me they've moved beyond the SCA's one-size-fits-all criteria, in favor of in-house optimization.
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 freshly 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 or kitchen scale, read the manual very carefully, or have fun with Google.
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
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageNinja 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.
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
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageMr. 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
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageMelitta 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.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
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.
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 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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