The Best Coffee Makers For Expresso, Drip Coffee, and More

Breville’s Barista Express is the perfect choice for beginner home baristas. It has everything you’ll need to create authentic lattes, cappuccinos, and other coffee drinks with all the important components of a commercial café style coffee maker. You’ll get an integrated, conical-burr grinder that can be adjusted to grind the way you like. The machine also has a thermocoil heating system with temperature control, which maintains the temperature of the espresso to 200 degrees, resulting in balanced espresso shots. Discerning coffee nerds can also expect high-pressure, 9-bar extraction, again a staple of traditional Italian espresso makers.

If you’re into coffee, or would like to make better drinks than what comes out of a pod machine (no judgement), the Breville Barista Express is the right choice. Downsides include price and a learning curve. You’ll also need to put in some work to actually use the machine, although some hobbyists enjoy the process, and the resulting coffee is well worth the effort.

You might not like what comes out of a traditional drip coffee maker. The ones you find in American diners, are, well, drinkable at best. Cafe Specialty’s Drip Coffee Maker stands as a modern alternative, something that brews artisanal pour-over style coffee, but without any of the fuss of buying four different gadgets.

This is an all-in-one coffee maker, where you put in ground coffee at the top, choose between four strength options (light, medium, bold, and gold), and if you’re nerdy about your coffee, select a precise temperature for your brew (a great option when you’re brewing light roast specialty coffee). You can even install the SmartHQ app to connect to the machine wirelessly, so you can give the coffee maker commands, customize brews, and schedule brewing time. There’s also an insulated carafe, so your brewed coffee will stay hot for a long time.

No matter what some TikTok tells you, making good cold brew is not as easy as coffee plus water plus time. To make the best cold brew, you need a good filtration system, which will remove the sediments from ground coffee. Those sediments are what lead to the acidic taste in badly made cold-brews. You can get around this by using the OXO Cold Brew Maker.

First, you fix in the steel-mesh filter at the bottom, then add ground coffee, and then use the Rainmaker attachment at the top to add water evenly to all your coffee grounds. After 18 hours or so, add the carafe at the bottom, pull down the stopper, and wait as the cold brew slowly filters down.

Sometimes, you just can’t beat a classic, and Bodum’s Chambord French Press is as classic as it gets (although I’ll get to another classic soon enough). If you want the simplest coffee maker ever made, just get a French press. Bodum’s Chambord is made from durable, thick glass, and features the timeless French press design that dates back to the 1950s.

To make French press coffee, add a spoonful or two of coarsely ground coffee, hot water, and just let it sit. After four minutes or so, plunge down the mesh filter and pour the coffee out. Leave the final few bits of coffee under the filter, as they might contain sediments. And that’s it! You can add milk and sugar to taste.

Fun fact: You can also use a French Press to froth milk. Just pour hot milk into it, and plunging repeatedly.

This is yet another classic, this time Italian. The Bialetti Moka Express is a stove top coffee maker that comes in a variety of sizes (making 1 to 12 cups). The design is iconic, and the brewing is as simple as it gets. This moka pot is made from aluminum, is light to use, and will literally last you decades if you take proper care of it. (As you read this, there is someone in Italy making coffee using a moka pot from the ’70s).

The Moka Express gives you a strong cup of coffee that closely resembles an espresso, just less intense and without the crema. The coffee maker works by pushing boiling water up through a bed of ground coffee, leading to a rich flavor. All you have to do is fill up the coffee chamber, add water, put it on the stove, and let the steam do the rest.

The AeroPress is a manual brew coffee maker, so it requires nothing more than hot water, a filter, and grounds to make a cup of coffee. It’s a small, portable plunger that I have personally used every day for over eight years. Not a real brag, but I’ve made coffees using the AeroPress that are better than what you’d get at commercial coffee chains.

You can buy an AeroPress for as little as $30, and you can use it for years. It also comes in different colors, including a transparent version, if you want to see the whole brewing process. The premise is simple: Screw in the cap with a paper filter, add finely ground coffee to the chamber, wait a minute or two, and then you plunge. That is the simplest way to use it, but there are many more interesting ways to brew with AeroPress, and I’ve outlined all my best AeroPress recipes in this guide. If you want to brew specialty coffee without dealing with artisanal pour overs, the AeroPress is a great way to get started.

Pod coffee doesn’t need to suck. If you pick up the cheapest option from your nearest big box store, you’re in for quality roulette. But if you go for a respected machine, like the Nespresso VertuoPlus Deluxe, you’ll have a much better time. Nespresso capsules come with high-quality coffee, with each pod’s recipe already coded into the pod itself.

The machine can even hold up to 10 pods, so you don’t need to clean up too often, and Nespresso will accept used pods for recycling. The machine itself heats up fairly quickly, in under 30 seconds, and with one touch, you can brew different types of coffee drinks, including a single espresso, a double espresso, a Lungo (long espresso shot), or just a good-old cup of black coffee.