Coffee Gear

Coffee tastes best if the beans are ground fresh before they are brewed. Our winner grinds evenly and can produce fine coffee grounds, but it doesn't create excessive amounts of coffee dust.

Three key features separate the best drip coffee makers from the rest of the less-than-average pack. A large basket to hold plenty of coffee grounds ensures full, not weak-flavored coffee. The temperature of the brewing water is kept in the preferred range of 195 to 205 degrees for most of the brewing time, ensuring the best flavor and aroma compounds are released (lesser models tend to brew the water at too low a temperature.) Also, the brewing time should be kept under 8 minutes—tops. Any longer and the coffee suffers from overextraction, when many off or bitter flavors are released. Our winner is pricey, but it brews a great cup of coffee. The best buy in our testing performed almost as well.

Read more in our testing of automatic coffee makers.

When it comes to which filter is better for manual and automatic drip coffee makers—paper or metal—the experts are divided. Some say brewing through paper filters can impart papery off-flavors and trap some of the delicate aromatic oils that enrich coffee flavor. Others insist that metal filters produce a weaker brew and that their larger openings allow too many grounds to pass through.

To see for ourselves, we ground enough beans for two batches of coffee, brewing one batch in a manual-drip coffee maker using a paper filter and the other in a second manual-drip using a metal filter. Our in-house panel of experts found the two brews virtually identical in flavor, with no unwanted tastes or lack of complexity in the paper-filtered coffee. The coffee made with a metal filter clearly had more body from the presence of fine particles and tasted ever so slightly weaker than the paper brew.

Our recommendation? Use paper if you like your coffee without any particles in the mix. Metal is fine if you prefer coffee with body, but since water passes through this kind of filter faster than paper, grind the coffee a little finer to achieve the proper extraction.

Shopping for espresso machines is complicated. They range in price from well under $100 for basic machines to elaborate, glossy marvels that can set you back as much as $8,000. Our favorite fully automatic espresso machine consistently produced excellent espresso at the push of a button and readily let us adjust the flavor, temperature, and strength of a shot. We also have a recommendation for those coffee drinkers who prefer a DIY-approach.

Read more in our review of espresso machines.

A French press uses a piston-like mechanism to force ground coffee through hot water, sending the spent grounds to the bottom of the pot and leaving a full-bodied brew on top. Look for a model with a sturdy, comfortable handle and—if you’re not going to drink the coffee immediately—an insulated pot, which keeps the coffee hotter longer (heat escapes glass pots quickly).

Read more about French press coffee makers in our testing.

Electric kettles are handy for making tea or coffee and for any cooking task that requires a few cups of boiling water, from rehydrating dried mushrooms and tomatoes to softening lasagna noodles or reconstituting concentrated stocks. If you're making French press or pour-over coffee, an electric kettle is a nice thing to have.

Our winner was one of the quickest to boil water in our testing.

This is a must for entertaining a crowd of coffee lovers. Leaving coffee on the heat in an electric machine quickly burns and ruins it, while coffee brewed by press or manual methods gets cold quickly. A thermal carafe should keep coffee drinkable for about 3 hours, without any ill effects or considerable drop in temperature.

Read more about our testing process and recommended carafes.

You can make pour-over coffee using our method with a thermal carafe and a coffee funnel, but if you really love pour-over coffee, it might be worth investing in a special piece of equipment. Pour-over brewing devices work because they let you control water temperature and steeping time—both key to a good cup.

Read more about our testing and our winning model.