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

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

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.

Mr Coffee Perfect Brew

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

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

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

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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