The Best Drip Coffee Makers Are Proof You Don’t Need to Make Pour-Over to Make a Good Cup
To some people, the idea of making coffee with a drip coffee maker, even the best drip coffee maker, is laughable. That’s because there are plenty of coffee drinkers out there, including more than one Epicurious editor, who think a cup of coffee is not simply a beverage like a can of soda or a glass of water but an artwork that needs to be carefully formed and obsessed over. But this view of drip coffee makers is outdated. Lumping everything in the category in with the $17 coffee machines available at the Walgreens checkout that can turn to dust in your hands does a disservice to how far the technology of drip coffee has come.
The best drip coffee makers
Actually, the best drip coffee makers have tech that rivals lots of espresso machines in terms of temperature and brewing control—they’re much closer to a fastidiously made carafe of pour-over coffee than they are to the brute force method that comes with, say, an average K-cup single-serve coffee maker. And they are oh so convenient. Even a basic budget model offers the ability to set it the night before and wake up to pleasant coffee aromas wafting into your bedroom and a full pot waiting for you as soon as you come downstairs. You can and should expect great coffee from a drip a coffee maker.
If that kind of carefree, no-hassle coffee lifestyle sounds appealing, read on for our top picks for drip coffee makers. For more about how we tested, which coffee makers you shouldn’t consider, and tips on how to make the best cup of coffee, scroll down toward the bottom.
The best drip coffee maker overall: Fellow Aiden
When we first tried the Fellow Aiden in our test kitchen, we were impressed. It offered the ability to tweak every single brewing parameter to adjust the flavor of your pot of coffee just like you would a carafe of pour-over coffee. We could turn the dial and adjust the water temperature anywhere from 122℉ (for cold brew, more on that later) to 210℉. We could change the bloom time, which helps release carbon dioxide and eliminate off flavors. We could shorten or extend the bursts of water that shower down on the coffee grounds. But it wasn’t until we took it home and spent a few weeks with it that we really got a sense of what it could do. We tasted coffee from the Aiden side by side with Chemexes full of pour-over coffee, and the automated brew from the Aiden offered the same sorts of fruity and caramel notes we got from our pour-over. The scheduling feature one-ups those on most other machines because you can set it to when you’d like the brew to begin and when you’d like it to end.
Fellow founder Jake Miller told us that he wanted it to be a good machine for coffee obsessives, but also a good one for coffee novices. To that end, once you select one of the brew profiles (light roast, medium roast, or dark roast) and the amount of coffee you want to brew, the Aiden’s LCD screen displays the amount of ground coffee you should add in both grams and tablespoons. You can also use the Instant Brew setting that brews however much water is in the water tank with a single button push (basically what you’d get from a $50 drip coffee maker, except the Aiden brews to the Specialty Coffee Association’s Golden Cup standard—a combination of water temperature and coffee-to-water ratio)
The interface is intuitive and simple—just a single dial and a button to the scroll and click through the menu options. And the thermal carafe is one of the best we’ve tried, keeping coffee above 110℉ for around two hours. The removable side water tank is as easy to fill with a measuring cup at the machine as it as in the sink or at the fridge.
Finally, there’s that cold-brew setting. Lots of machines have a “cold brew” or “iced” coffee setting. Most of them make claims that they can complete a cup in just a few minutes. That’s not really possible as the extraction process of cold brew is entirely different from brewing hot coffee and needs to take much longer. The Aiden actually performs one of these slow brews, dripping out much cooler water over the course of hours. The result is the best cold brew from an automatic coffee machine we’ve tried.