Filter / Drip Coffee Machines

Filter and Drip Coffee Machines

A filter machine brews a jug rather than a cup, and that single difference decides whether it is the right machine for you. If the household drinks mugs of coffee through the morning, or the machine is going into an office or a workshop where several people help themselves, filter is both the cheapest way to make coffee and the least trouble: fill the tank, add ground coffee to the basket, switch on, walk away. If you drink one espresso a day, it is the wrong format entirely. Two things separate good filter machines from poor ones. The first is water temperature: coffee extracts properly between roughly 92 and 96 degrees, and cheap machines run cooler than that, which is why their coffee tastes thin and sour no matter what beans go in. The better machines here hold the correct range and say so. The second is what happens to the jug after brewing. A glass carafe on a hotplate keeps coffee hot by continuing to cook it, and after half an hour it tastes stewed and bitter. A thermal carafe is an insulated flask instead, so coffee brewed at eight is still drinkable at ten. If you are brewing a full jug rather than drinking it straight away, the thermal version is worth the difference. Beyond that, look for a showerhead that wets the whole coffee bed evenly rather than dripping into the middle, a reusable permanent filter if you would rather not buy papers, and a timer if you want coffee ready before you come downstairs. Grind matters here too: filter wants a medium grind, and pre-ground supermarket coffee is usually sold at roughly the right coarseness for it.

Sage covers the serious end with the Luxe Brewer thermal drip machine and the Precision Brewer, both built around controlled brew temperature. Russell Hobbs supplies the Buckingham filter coffee maker at 1.25 litres, and Ninja the Prestige DualBrew, which brews a filter jug and takes pods in the same machine. For single cups from beans see bean to cup coffee machines, and for the full range see coffee machines.

Filter is the cheapest coffee per cup of any format and the machines are the cheapest to buy, so a reduction here is small in absolute terms and large as a proportion, which makes it the easy upgrade from a hotplate carafe to a thermal one. Prices are live all year, so see what is reduced now on coffee machines on sale.