The Best Drip Coffee Maker

Liz Clayton, who wrote the 2018 update to this guide, is a seasoned coffee writer with more than a decade of experience brewing and tasting coffee alongside professionals. She is also the associate editor at the coffee news website Sprudge, and she’s written multiple guides to coffee equipment, including Wirecutter’s guide to coffee grinders.

In early 2020, Alex Arpaia, a Wirecutter staff writer at the time and a coffee enthusiast, researched the latest coffee makers, reviewed the current list of Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)–certified home brewers, and checked in with past contenders. For testing, we brought our top contenders to Coffee Project NY’s SCA-certified training center in Queens (the only SCA training facility in New York), where we dialed in each machine and taste-tested with Chi Sum Ngai, a co-founder of Coffee Project NY and a certified Q Grader (sort of like a sommelier for coffee).

Marguerite Preston, a senior editor who edits all of Wirecutter’s coffee coverage, tested the OXO 8 Cup Coffee Maker against the OXO Brew 9 Cup Coffee Maker and the Bonavita Connoisseur in mid-2020.

This guide also builds on research and testing conducted by Cale Guthrie Weissman, a coffee writer and National Barista Championship finalist.

For past years of testing, we also enlisted the expertise of:

• Counter Culture Coffee’s New York City team; they helped us fine-tune our testing criteria and evaluate each coffee maker both qualitatively and quantitatively.
• Charles Babinski, 2015 United States Barista Champion and co-founder of Los Angeles coffee bars G&B Coffee and Go Get Em Tiger—cafés known for unpretentiously addressing the real-world preferences of normal human coffee drinkers.
• Humberto Ricardo, owner of the renowned Manhattan coffee shop Third Rail Coffee.
• Carlos Morales, a barista and a past Northeast Brewers Cup Championship finalist.
• Mark Hellweg, who founded and runs the speciality coffee-accessory company Clive Coffee (which offers a high-end coffee maker of its own design).

Most people in the United States who drink coffee at home use automatic drip coffee makers. But the average $30 to $40 model brews coffee that’s only okay. If you regularly buy specialty coffee beans, it’s worth investing more in a machine that will bring out the nuances of those high-quality beans, to yield a balanced, café-quality pot. Those are the drip coffee makers we focus on in this guide. Most cost over $100, but they are more reliable, durable, and consistent than cheaper machines, and we think they’re a good investment for people who love coffee. If you want something less expensive that will just get the job done, we also have a guide to the best budget coffee makers; it covers basic models that cost less than $100.

One small caveat to these high-end drip coffee makers: Even the best ones won’t give you as much control over the brewing process as a pour-over dripper, which most coffee pros agree is a better way to brew the absolute best cup of coffee. But the trade-off with pour-over is convenience: Making a good pour-over requires some technique, and you can brew only one cup at a time with most pour-over drippers. If you want to be able to brew a large pot of very good coffee at the touch of a button, this is the guide for you.

A high-quality automatic brewer should be easy to use, and it should consistently produce a balanced, nuanced cup of coffee. To find such models to test, we first looked at coffee machines with good industry reputations, primarily focusing on those certified by the Specialty Coffee Association. The SCA, a worldwide professional organization, regularly evaluates and certifies coffee-brewing equipment that meets its standards (PDF)—though manufacturers must submit machines for this consideration, with an application fee. Focusing on SCA-certified machines allowed us to be fairly certain that every model we tested met these basic criteria (though we conducted our own tests to be sure):

• Brews with water that’s around 200 °F (the SCA specifies between 197.6 °F and 204.8 °F), which helps extract the best flavor from coffee. Brewing with cooler water under-extracts the coffee, resulting in a weak, flat-tasting brew, while boiling water can bring out unpleasant flavors.
• Brews quickly, producing a full pot in under eight minutes. The size of a full pot varies, but most brewers we looked at were capable of making between 1 and 1½ liters. (Be aware that a “cup,” as defined by coffee-machine manufacturers, is usually 4 to 5 fluid ounces, whereas a standard cup measure is 8 fluid ounces. The average small coffee cup from a café holds 12 fluid ounces.)
• Brews evenly, saturating all the grounds in the brew basket thoroughly with hot water in the first minute. This helps ensure that you get a balanced, full-bodied pot of coffee every time.

We also looked for features that made a drip coffee machine more pleasant to use. G&B Coffee’s Charles Babinski noted that there’s now a wide range of drip coffee makers for sale between $200 and $500 “that basically all do roughly the same thing.” Babinski continued: “The difference seems to be primarily design and to some extent the bells and whistles.”

Here are the features we think are important in a good coffee maker:

• Easy to use: A good drip coffee maker—even one with lots of special options—should be relatively quick and simple to use. Ideally, a groggy person or a houseguest should be able to just walk up and brew a pot of coffee without any confusion. We looked for machines with minimal settings and clear interfaces that allow you to brew with little more than the press of a button.
• Keeps coffee hot: Many of the machines we looked at in this price range come with a thermal carafe, but some come with a glass one. A few models come in two versions, one with each type of carafe. We tested machines of both types, but ultimately we preferred those with a good thermal carafe, which will keep your coffee reasonably warm for hours without much effect on its flavor. Glass carafes do not retain heat but typically sit diner-style on a hot plate to keep your coffee warm. The hot plate, however, can make your coffee taste burnt and unpleasant after an hour or so. That may not be a dealbreaker if you drink your coffee quickly (or if you can keep the hot plate off and don’t mind reheating your coffee in the microwave), but glass is also easier to break.
• Easy to clean and durable: The coffee machines we cover in this guide all cost over (sometimes quite a bit over) $100, so they should be able to serve you well for years. Cleaning your coffee maker regularly is an important part of ensuring that it continues to brew delicious coffee, so we looked for models that made the process easy. The best have dishwasher-safe parts and an alert to remind you to descale. We also looked for machines with solid warranties. Most of the models we tested offer a two-year warranty, but a few (including newer Bonavita models) are covered for only a year. For something in this price range, we wouldn’t settle for anything less than that.
• Programmable: Although not all machines we tested let you schedule your brew ahead of time, we know that many people like to wake up to a fresh pot of coffee. We preferred machines with a timer function, although we did test some notable exceptions.

The brewers we’ve tested over the years range in price from $90 to $300, with many hovering around the $200 mark. Even for a coffee snob, $200 is a lot to pay for a machine that many people expect to cost $25 to $50. So even though we weren’t looking for a budget pick in this category (we have a guide to cheap coffee makers), we tried to find brewers that offered the best value in terms of quality and features.

First we set up each coffee maker and brewed several pots of coffee according to the manual, using generic paper filters and Counter Culture Coffee’s Big Trouble, a medium-roast blend. We noted how easy each machine was to set up and get comfortable with, how good the coffee tasted, and whether the coffee maker had any especially useful (or useless) features. We also used an instant-read thermometer to measure the temperature of the brew bed during brewing. We looked for machines that maintained a stable temperature of around 200 °F, which is tremendously important to ensuring that grounds are being extracted to their full flavor and strength potential.

Next, we measured the heat retention of every machine’s carafe, whether thermal or glass. We recorded the temperature of the coffee immediately after brewing a full pot, and we then poured off half the pot (to simulate drinking a couple of cups of coffee immediately, as you would at home) and let each carafe sit with the lid on for four hours, measuring the temperature of the coffee inside every hour.

In early 2020, after that initial round of testing, we narrowed the pool to five finalists, which we brought to Coffee Project NY’s SCA training facility and café in Queens for taste-testing with co-owner Chi Sum Ngai.

In our tests with Ngai, we brewed a full pot with each drip coffee maker using the SCA-recommended ratio of 55 grams of coffee per liter of water, and then we tasted the results side by side. We used Coffee Project NY’s house blend, which it roasts on-site and whose ideal flavor profile Ngai was already very familiar with. And we ground the coffee fresh, using a Baratza Encore (the top pick in our guide to the best coffee grinders) set to a medium-fine setting. After the first round of tasting, we tried making a couple more pots with some of the machines, adjusting the grinder setting to see whether we could improve the flavor of the brew. But we found that the pots that tasted best the first time remained on top in every round.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic prevented us from testing with Ngai again when we looked at the OXO Brew 8 Cup Coffee Maker in summer 2020. Instead, senior editor Marguerite Preston (who has participated in past taste tests for this guide) tasted coffee from each brewer at home, while also conducting all of our usual usability and temperature tests.

In the past, we conducted more-technical tests measuring the total dissolved solids (TDS) in each brew using a VST refractometer. The SCA uses TDS measurements to help assess how strong the brewed coffee is (in simple terms, how much flavor the water pulled out of the grounds). But we didn’t find that the results of those measurements were more useful to us (or to our readers) than thoroughly taste-testing each brew a number of times. For the 2020 update of this guide, we did not measure for extraction or TDS.

Stylish from top to bottom, the OXO Brew 9 Cup Coffee Maker brews better coffee than most of the other machines we tested, and it has a tall carafe that pours easily and keeps coffee hot for hours. Plus, it comes with a number of convenient features that our other picks lack, including a timer function (which allows you to program the machine to make coffee before you wake up) and a count-up timer (which tells you how old the brewed coffee is). This OXO model can make a full pot in just under eight minutes.

The 9-cup OXO is designed to make good coffee consistently and without much effort on your part. Its showerhead disperses water evenly over the coffee, and the bed of grounds measured about 200 °F during brewing in our tests (well within the SCA-approved range of 197.6 °F to 204.8 °F). This model also has an automatic pre-infusion mode, which helps prepare the grounds for better extraction. Other coffee makers we tested, including the Bonavita Connoisseur, make pre-infusion optional, so you have to remember to turn that feature on. The 9-cup OXO also adjusts the pre-infusion time and overall brewing time for smaller amounts of coffee (you have to select between brewing a two- to four-cup pot or a five- to nine-cup pot); we found this helped the OXO brew a stronger-tasting cup than some other machines we tested when we set them to the smallest quantity.

Brews from the OXO 9 Cup Coffee Maker tasted good, if lacking a little of the sweetness and dimension we got from both our other picks, the OXO Brew 8 Cup Coffee Maker and the Bonavita Connoisseur. This may be because the 9-cup OXO uses a cone-shaped filter basket, which doesn’t allow grounds to be quite as evenly steeped and extracted as a flat-bottomed filter basket (like our other picks have). Still, brews from the 9-cup OXO were pleasant and much better than those we made with some competitors—like the Bunn coffee maker’s woefully under-extracted pot. The OXO’s basket fits standard #4 paper filters, which are easy to find at most grocery stores. The machine also comes with a few to start out.

A couple of features really sold us on the 9-cup OXO. First, we like its display and programmability. Whereas the Bonavita Connoisseur has just an on/off switch and the 8-cup OXO only a simple, four-button interface, the 9-cup OXO has an easy-to-read digital display with a timer that allows you to set the machine to brew at your desired time (though it does take a little while to get the hang of the minimalist single-dial-and-button system—more on that here). When the machine is finished brewing, the display also shows how long it’s been since the coffee was made, up to 60 minutes after brewing.

We also like the well-designed thermal, stainless steel carafe, which kept coffee hotter after four hours than almost any other carafe we tested (second only to the Zojirushi’s carafe; Zojirushi excels at making gear to keep drinks hot). The OXO brews directly through the lid of its carafe, unlike the Bonavita Connoisseur (or any other Bonavita with a thermal carafe), which requires you to brew with the lid off; not only is screwing on the lid an annoying extra step, but the coffee cools faster when the lid is off. You can also remove the 9-cup OXO’s carafe to pour yourself a cup before the machine has finished brewing (something you can’t do with the Bonavita). The filter basket on the OXO has a mechanism that springs shut when you do this, stopping the flow of coffee out of the machine; it also pauses brewing for up to 60 seconds, and if you forget to replace the carafe in that time, the machine will cancel the brewing cycle.

The OXO’s carafe is easier to pour from than many others we tested, even with the lid off. This is convenient when you’re filling the water tank, since doing so with the lid on can take a while. In comparison, the carafes of both the 8-cup OXO and the Bonavita Connoisseur dribble all over the place when you try to pour without the lid on.

Cleaning the 9-cup OXO is relatively simple. Aside from the carafe, all of the removable plastic parts are dishwasher-safe (top rack only). This includes the filter basket, the showerhead, the carafe lid, and the plastic mixing tube you use inside the carafe. Occasional cleaning of these parts will make the machine last longer and ensure that buildup and residue don’t accumulate on any of the water-transporting objects. You should hand-wash the carafe with normal dish soap (running it through the dishwasher may damage its vacuum insulation), and every so often you might want to use a powder cleanser to de-gunk the hard-to-remove coffee residue (Full Circle makes a good one). We recommend occasionally descaling your coffee machine to remove minerals from the water reservoir, and the 9-cup OXO will conveniently remind you to do so with a little red light that comes on after every 90 brews (you can still use the machine when the light is on).

For this drip coffee maker, OXO offers a two-year warranty, which is the standard for high-end appliances. All the Wirecutter staffers who have taken advantage of the coverage have found OXO’s customer service to be helpful and responsive, sometimes even after the warranty expires.

The 9-cup OXO coffee maker’s streamlined, one-button interface isn’t always intuitive for first-time users because it’s label-free. You have to press the button or start scrolling with the dial to switch the display from the digital clock to the brewing options, which display as either “2–4” or “5–9,” in reference to the number of cups you’re planning to brew. Then you have to press the button again to brew. It’s also not clear how to program the timer without reading the manual, although all you have to do is hold down the brew button for a few seconds. As a result, the machine may be intimidating for houseguests to use (something we’ve seen a couple of times when visitors have tried ours at the Wirecutter test kitchen). But it’s easy to get the hang of and very straightforward once you do.

This machine is also big, at just over 17 inches tall, and some people have problems fitting it under their kitchen cabinets. We don’t consider that to be a dealbreaker since many coffee makers we tried were a similar size. But if you’re unsure, you should take care to measure the clearance under your cabinets, and if you’re short on space, go for one of our other picks (which are both a little over a foot tall).

The 9-cup OXO’s carafe is a pain to clean. The opening is too narrow to reach a hand into, so you’ll need to use a bottle brush. And the lid has a hollow interior that tends to retain a little coffee, which dribbles out when you set the lid down on the counter. Some of that coffee also builds up as gunk, which is tough to clean out without the help of a pipe cleaner.

Our biggest complaint is that this machine can be drippy. The water-delivery mechanism leading from the water reservoir to the spray head retains a fair amount of water once it’s done brewing. When you flip up the lid to remove the filter basket, drops of water pour backward out of the spray head and into the basket. If you plan to use the programmable start-time function, make sure to fully air out the filter basket first. If it doesn’t adequately dry out, and you place tomorrow’s dry coffee filter and coffee grounds in it, they begin to get wet (and therefore partially extract) right away.

In the photo below, we show one technique we’ve come up with to allow the filter basket, the filter basket holder, and the easily fogged-up water reservoir to air-dry all at once:

We’ve heard some complaints that the brew basket also drips when you remove the carafe from under it. That shouldn’t happen (though OXO did have a run of machines with faulty valves on the brew basket several years back; the company has since fixed the problem and offered to replace any of the faulty machines). If you have issues with yours, first check that the valve is clear of loose coffee grounds, which can prevent it from sealing tightly. Otherwise, contact OXO for a replacement.

As long as you don’t need an auto-brew function (which allows you to program the machine to start brewing a pot at a set time), we think the OXO Brew 8 Cup Coffee Maker is a great choice. It’s also your best option if you’d like a machine that takes up less space than the OXO Brew 9 Cup Coffee Maker, without sacrificing much in capacity. The 8-cup OXO makes delicious coffee, and it brews a full pot in just over 6 minutes—about 2 minutes faster than either of our other picks. It’s also the only one of our picks that can brew a good single cup of coffee directly into a mug.

In our at-home taste tests, coffee from the 8-cup OXO tasted noticeably rounder than coffee from the 9-cup OXO, with more roasted, nutty flavor balancing out the bright, fruity notes. We suspect this is because the 8-cup OXO uses a flat-bottomed filter basket (which fits standard 8- to 12-cup basket filters) rather than a conical one like the 9-cup OXO’s. Flat-bottomed filters generally make it easier for water to disperse evenly through the coffee grounds before draining out, leading to a more-balanced-tasting pot of coffee. The 8-cup OXO’s brew tasted most similar to coffee from the Bonavita Connoisseur (another machine with a flat-bottomed filter basket), which the coffee professionals who participated in past rounds of testing always declared their favorite. (We weren’t able to have any coffee professionals help out when we tested the 8-cup OXO, due to the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic.)

Like the larger OXO, the 8-cup OXO has an automatic pre-infusion mode and a large showerhead that helps with even coffee extraction. In our tests, the temperature of the brew bed stayed well within the SCA standard range of 197.6 °F to 204.8 °F, averaging about 200 °F (just like our top pick, the 9-cup OXO). This machine is also fast, brewing an 8-cup pot in 6 minutes 7 seconds. In comparison, the Bonavita Connoisseur brewed the same quantity in 7 minutes 44 seconds, and the 9-cup OXO brewed a pot in just under 8 minutes.

The 8-cup OXO is quite a bit smaller than our top pick, with a shape that’s more like a traditional drip coffee maker. It’s just over a foot tall, so it fits under upper cabinets, with enough room that you can open the lid on the water tank or brew basket—something you can’t usually do with the 17-inch-tall 9-cup OXO. And the footprint is a compact 10 by 7 inches (approximately), whereas the 9-cup OXO takes up about 15 by 8 inches of countertop. Of course, our top pick does hold an extra cup of coffee, but it’s important to remember that a “cup” of coffee as defined by OXO (and most manufacturers of coffee brewing equipment) is just 5 ounces. So the amount of coffee you’re sacrificing with the 8-cup OXO would fill only about half of a standard mug.

The 8-cup OXO’s carafe retained heat almost as well as the 9-cup OXO’s in our tests; over the course of four hours, a half-pot cooled from 176 °F to about 138 °F, which is still pleasantly hot. And the squatter shape of the 8-cup carafe means it’s easier to clean: You can fit a hand through the opening to scrub it with a sponge, something you can’t do with the narrower carafe of the 9-cup OXO. Like the 9-cup OXO, the 8-cup machine also has a drip-stop mechanism on the filter basket, so you can remove the carafe and pour yourself a cup while the machine is still brewing. The downside of the 8-cup carafe is that it dribbles all over the place when you try to pour with the lid off—something you might want to do to fill the water tank, since pouring is so much slower with the lid on.

Maybe the coolest thing about the 8-cup OXO is that it can brew a good cup of coffee directly into a mug, something our other picks can’t do. A few things make this possible. There’s a switch that allows you to turn off the drip stop (the 9-cup OXO lacks this, which is why you can’t brew directly into a mug with the larger machine). There’s also a plastic pedestal hidden in the base of the machine that you can either flip up, to hold a mug closer to the filter basket (to avoid splashing), or remove, to make space for a tall travel mug. Most notably, the 8-cup OXO comes with a second, smaller filter basket (which works with Kalita Wave 185 filters, the same ones used by our top-pick pour-over dripper); this basket can brew small quantities of coffee more evenly than the larger filter basket. When we tasted coffee brewed with the 8-cup OXO’s single-cup feature alongside the same portion of coffee brewed in the 9-cup OXO, the difference was noticeable, though not enormous. The coffee made by the 8-cup OXO tasted just a bit mellower and more balanced.

The downside to the single-cup feature is that the process is a little fussy. You have to find a place to keep the extra filter basket when you’re not using it. And you have to shell out for the extra Kalita filters, which are a little pricey and aren’t easy to find in stores (you’ll have to clear a little more storage space for these, too). Technically, you can brew the same amount of coffee with the 2-cup setting on our top pick (again, a “cup” equals 5 ounces, so two cups is just enough to fill a standard coffee mug)—and if you tinker with your grinder settings, you can get it to taste good (we found grinding our coffee a little finer when brewing small portions of coffee to be the best approach). But if you really like the idea of just sticking your mug under the coffee maker, the bit of fussiness might not bother you—it’s still less work than making a pour-over.

In contrast to the sleek digital display on the 9-cup OXO, the 8-cup OXO has a simple, four-button interface. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: The buttons are so self-explanatory that a houseguest could immediately figure out how to use this brewer, whereas we’ve seen some guests be intimidated by the minimalist dial on the 9-cup OXO. But the 8-cup OXO does lack a digital clock, which means you can’t program it to automatically brew at a set time (say, in the morning, right before you wake up). The 8-cup model also won’t display how long it’s been since you brewed a pot (which is another nice feature on the 9-cup OXO).

Cleaning instructions for the 8-cup OXO are the same as for the 9-cup: Except for the carafe, all of the removable parts are dishwasher-safe. A light will come on after every 90 brews to remind you to descale the brewer (using a descaling solution and the machine’s programmed cleaning cycle), but the machine will continue to work when that light is on. This brewer comes with a two-year warranty.

Following a split with Bonavita’s US distributor, the manufacturer (Smartco) is relaunching the brand, and Bonavita products are currently unavailable. A representative for Bonavita told us that stock issues are due to shipping delays, but the Connoisseur is now available for pre-order through the company’s new website and is expected to ship March 21.

You can also now reach Bonavita’s customer service through the new website, however, according to the site, "Bonavita products sold prior to October 15th, 2021 are covered by warranties and customer service offered by the prior distributor. We understand that the prior distributor is no longer supporting the products it sold.” Bonavita will still offer troubleshooting support for those products, but unfortunately will not offer refunds or replacement parts.

If you prioritize flavor and just want the smallest, simplest machine possible, get the Bonavita Connoisseur 8-Cup One-Touch Coffee Brewer. This coffee maker, which goes back to the basics, has always won out with coffee professionals in our taste tests. (We think the 8-cup OXO makes very similar coffee, but we haven’t yet had a chance to taste that model with the pros.) And though the Connoisseur’s price has gone up in recent months (more on that below), this brewer is usually at least a little cheaper than our other picks—and sometimes quite a bit so. The Connoisseur is easy to use, but it’s missing additional features (like programmability or the ability to brew a single cup of coffee) that make the OXO brewers stand out. It also suffers from a terribly clunky carafe that lacks a brew-through lid—you have to screw on the lid after your coffee has finished brewing.

Our tasters liked the coffee brewed in the Bonavita Connoisseur as much as—or even more than—the OXO Brew 9 Cup Coffee Maker’s coffee, finding the Connoisseur’s brew to be sweeter and more balanced. Over years of testing with various experts, the Connoisseur has consistently produced coffee that professionals like the best.

We brewed several pots with the Connoisseur and found that it retained heat very well in the brew bed, measuring around 200 °F during brewing. The brewer’s spray head distributed water efficiently over the bed of coffee grounds, making for a better extraction. The Connoisseur’s flat-bottomed filter basket (which fits standard 8- to 12-cup paper basket filters) also likely brews a bit more evenly than the 9-cup OXO’s cone-shaped filter basket, since the shape makes it easier for water to disperse through the coffee grounds before draining. The Connoisseur has a pre-infusion mode that briefly wets the grounds to prime them for brewing. However, unlike the OXO brewers, the Bonavita machine doesn’t automatically activate this mode, and manually doing so is not intuitive: You have to hold down the on button for five seconds, until the machine beeps and the power light flashes. Then you have to press the button again to actually start brewing. We didn’t test the Connoisseur without pre-infusion in our expert taste tests, but we have tried it out on other occasions, and we think this machine still makes a good-tasting pot of coffee.

Otherwise, the Connoisseur is exceptionally easy to use, with an on/off rocker switch that activates the machine and flips back into the off position once it’s done brewing. One really nice feature is that the measurements marked on the water tank tell you about how many grams of ground coffee to use for a given pot size. This is convenient if you like to weigh your coffee before brewing (which will give you the best, most consistent results), because it saves you from having to remember or look it up.

In our tests, it took about 7 minutes 45 seconds to brew a full pot in the Connoisseur—not as fast as in the 8-cup OXO (which made a full pot in about 6 minutes), but about on a par with the 9-cup OXO (which is a little slower but also makes a bit more coffee). Cleaning the Connoisseur’s carafe is relatively easy, too, due to its gaping maw of a mouth (whereas we found it difficult to reach into the narrow openings of other brewers’ carafes). This Bonavita model won’t alert you when it’s time to descale the machine, like the OXOs do, but you should follow standard descaling practices once every six months to a year, to keep the machine working well. As with the OXOs, all of the Connoisseur’s removable parts—except for the carafe—are dishwasher-safe.

At only 12 inches tall, the Bonavita Connoisseur is about an inch shorter than the 8-cup OXO and much more compact than the 9-cup OXO. That means you won’t have to pull the Connoisseur out from under your cabinets to refill it or worry about its venting while it brews.

But the Bonavita has some design flaws that we can’t overlook. Of all the thermal-carafe brewers we tested, the Bonavita’s carafe was the only one that didn’t offer a brew-through lid. Instead, the Bonavita’s brew basket and carafe are mutually exclusive. To brew into the carafe, you must remove the lid. But to serve coffee you have to screw on the lid—otherwise, coffee will spill everywhere. And once the lid is on, the carafe no longer fits under the brew basket. Also, if you don’t put the lid on right away, your coffee will begin to lose heat through the open top.

And the Connoisseur isn’t programmable: You can’t set it to automatically brew a pot before you wake up. Also, it doesn’t give you the option of brewing the smaller quantities the OXO machines do. Though those can brew as little as 10 ounces at a time (which OXO calls two cups but is actually just enough to fill a standard mug), the smallest pot the Bonavita Connoisseur can make is 20 ounces. And we found the flavor of that smaller pot to be a little weak and under-extracted in flavor, possibly because Bonavita doesn’t adjust the brewing parameters for smaller pots, as OXO does.

Increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic bumped up the price on this machine (as of this writing in spring of 2021, it’s still hovering between $130 and $150). But in the past, we’ve seen it regularly priced closer to $110 or $120. We think it’s a better buy for that price, given some of its flaws, compared with the 8-cup OXO, which costs around $170. But even at its higher price, you might prefer the Connoisseur if you just want something as small and simple as possible. Just keep in mind that the Connoisseur comes with only a one-year warranty, whereas the OXO machines are covered for two.

We’re interested in testing the sleek, minimalist Cafe Smart SCA Drip Coffee Maker. It’s about three inches shorter than our pick, coming in at 14 inches versus the OXO’s 17 inches. Like our picks, the machine is SCA certified and programmable, but unlike our picks it also features wifi connectivity that allows you to pair with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant—though we don’t think this would add much to your experience, given that you’d still have to prep your coffee grounds and fill the water tank before brewing. At $350, it’s pricey, but we think it may appeal to those who want a more attractive (and slightly more compact) coffee maker to leave on their countertop. We hope to test this sometime this year, and we’ll update the guide accordingly once we do.

The Technivorm Moccamaster KBT is another good option, if you want something relatively compact (it’s about 15 inches tall, but has a footprint of about 11 by 6 inches), with a good thermal carafe and a barebones interface. It comes with a five-year warranty, which is better than that of any of our picks, and Technivorm brewers (there are a few variants) have legions of devoted fans. The KBT also has a unique switch on the filter basket that allows you to adjust how long your coffee steeps. When we tested the KBT, all of our tasters enjoyed its coffee, but not more so than that made by the Bonavita Connoisseur or the 9-cup OXO. And at around $100 more than our top pick, the KBT is quite pricey for a brewer that lacks user-friendly features like the OXO’s programmable timer and descaling reminders.

We were optimistic that the Breville Precision Brewer, a sturdily built machine typically priced around $300, would be great. With a multitude of brew settings, this drip coffee maker has a lot to offer to craft-coffee lovers. But we found it tough to get going—the first thing a new Breville asks for is the hardness of your water on a scale of 1 to 5, which you have to measure with an included test strip. After that, dialing in a decent brew still took us more than two hours. For those who love to tinker or are particular about coffee, the time investment in playing with this machine may be rewarding. You can adjust almost everything, from pre-infusion/bloom duration to water temperature to flow rate. But if you’re just looking to make a good pot of coffee, the learning curve is steep. It’s also a loud machine. Although we’re fascinated by its capabilities, a coffee maker this complex and expensive isn’t the right choice for most people.

For such a clunky machine, the Ninja Specialty Coffee Maker made surprisingly good coffee—it was expert Chi Sum Ngai’s top pick for flavor among those we tested in 2020. The Ninja has a ton of options for brewing, but we don’t think they add a lot of value. The single-cup setting made a notably watery beverage, while the attached milk-frothing wand is simply an electric whisk, like the kind you can find at any kitchen store for around $10. We aren’t comfortable recommending the Ninja because ours had some issues with fully emptying the water tank after each brew; it left around half an inch of water behind every time, and this could lead to mold or mildew. We’ve also seen an unusually high number of reviews on Ninja’s website and Amazon reporting that the coffee maker broke after less than a year. Considering that it has only a one-year warranty, we don’t think it’s worth the $200 investment.

The Braun 10-Cup MultiServe Coffee Machine is the worst coffee maker we’ve tested. The coffee it brewed tasted consistently awful—like burnt gas-station coffee. Like the Ninja and other models we tested, this machine has a lot of settings and features to tinker with, such as single-cup and over-ice settings. But the bad coffee it made overshadowed anything else.

The Zojirushi EC-YTC100XB 10-cup coffee maker brewed coffee at a glacial pace, taking more than 15 minutes to make a full pot. We also found, using the SCA-approved coffee recipe, that no matter how many times we brewed using this machine, the coffee came out tasting weak. However, this model does have an excellent carafe, which performed the best in our heat-retention tests.

Similar to the Bonavita Connoisseur, the Cuisinart CPO-850 has a compact footprint, but it improves on the design with a carafe that the machine brews directly into. Although the Cuisinart is easy to use, we found the flavor of the coffee to be relatively one-dimensional and at times even papery.

A previous runner-up pick, the Bonavita BV1900TS is an earlier version of the Bonavita Connoisseur. Our tasters praised its brew’s overall flavor and balance. And it’s fast, brewing a liter of coffee in just 5 minutes 20 seconds (including a pre-infusion period). However, the filter basket sits directly on the carafe, leaving a drafty gap underneath the machine’s showerhead. It also has a drippy and clunky carafe.

The Brim 8 Cup Pour Over Coffee Maker seems expensive for what it offers. It’s not programmable, and there’s a large gap between the showerhead and the filter basket that allows a lot of heat to escape during the brew cycle. The Chemex-shaped carafe can be difficult to grip with one hand. And because it’s glass and lacks a lid, your coffee will cool quickly (the hot plate shuts off after 30 minutes).

We tested a couple of other Bonavita brewers similar to our also-great pick, the Connoisseur, including the Bonavita Metropolitan BV1901PW. This machine features a lightweight black plastic construction and a glass carafe. But the quality of the coffee didn’t measure up to the OXO’s results, and we think most people will prefer a thermal carafe.

We tested two “pour-over-style” brewers from Motif: The Motif Elements and Motif Essential (which is a smaller version of the Elements). Both now seem largely unavailable. The Elements had a convenient removable water reservoir, but in general the construction of this machine was subpar. The brewer was also too large, and the coffee tasted flat and lacked dimension. The Essential takes up less counter space, but in our tests it made brews that were similarly average. And it had an interface that was just as flimsy as that of the Elements model—minus the removable water reservoir.

The Cuisinart Brew Central Coffee Maker DCC-1200, which was part of our initial testing, is one of the best-selling coffee makers on Amazon at this writing—and it has been for more than a decade. But it made coffee that tasted dull in comparison with the brews made by the $150-plus machines we tested.

You can find a number of expensive, stylish coffee makers made in small quantities for enthusiast audiences. Clive Coffee’s Ratio Eight and the Chemex Ottomatic are two prominent examples. They’re all made for connoisseurs who are willing to spend a lot on a high-end machine. The main draw of these coffee makers is that they brew similarly to manually making a batch of pour-over—pre-infusing the grounds and evenly pouring the hot water. For the price, however, it’s hard to see any concrete benefits to these machines, and they’re also less widely available than our top picks.