There's been a slow renaissance in home coffee machines in the past few years. Fancy cafés and “waves” of coffee culture got most of the attention, but in the background, Mr. Coffee and his friends have been upping their game.
Experts justifiably snub home coffee makers. My favorite coffee reference, Jessica Easto's 2017 Craft Coffee, effectively ignores automatic machines because most of them can't get the water hot enough, nor can they keep it in contact with the grounds for the right amount of time during the brew cycle. Compared with other ways to make it at home—Chemex, French press, AeroPress, pour-over—the coffee from these automatic machines could be downright nasty.
But slowly, almost one at a time, the Specialty Coffee Association has certified coffee makers with its Gold Certification, meaning a host of coffee-making variables has been taken into consideration. There are scads of criteria like brewing time and temperature, the size of the grounds and amount of them you use, and the quality of the grounds and the water, and they all make a difference in the finished cup. For manufacturers and their customers, following the SCA guidelines locks many of these into place, making it harder to make bad coffee. As of this writing, there are 30 home brewers that have received the trade group’s blessing.
At my home, I have a Mr. Coffee that was well reviewed when I bought it a couple of years ago, and I have been happy with it. I'm a French-press guy for my day to day, but I'll break out the coffee maker when we have friends over and need to make more than a couple of cups at once. It also passes the important “can-guests-make-coffee-without-asking-for-help” test. (Side note: I spoke with my mom about this and she summed it up, saying, “If it’s 6 am and you’ve got a hangover and can figure it out, it’s a good product.”)
Still, there are newer, better options out there, very often with SCA certification, and I became particularly interested in those that could brew either a pot or a mug's worth. Single-cup brewers like Keurig and Nespresso, with their wasteful, disposable pods and their attendant packaging made the leap from hotels and corporate campuses to our homes and it drives me bananas. I started to see these full-size, SCA-certified brewers that could also make an end-of-day mugful as a way out.
My reigning favorite in this category is the SCA-certified MultiServe from Braun, a tinkerer's delight that allows you to brew anything from a full pot to a surprisingly decent single cup. Its single-serve brewing was imperfect, but much better than what you'd get with similar amounts from other drip machines. Most important, it was plenty good enough to ditch K-cups at home.