Best Coffee Makers Of 2024
Transcript
I'm Ryan from Prima, and we have a lot to talk about today because this is a comparison of the best auto home brewers of 2024.
So today we're going to be looking at about four brands that are Bonavita, Technivorm, Ratio, and Breville. There are a lot of other brewers out there on the market, but based on our own research and a set of criteria for auto home brewers, that includes things like evenness of extraction, reliability, feature set, the quality of the coffee, of course. These are the brewers that we think perform the best. Now keep in mind these are just our opinions here at Prima and you should take that for what it's worth. But we hope this comparison will be helpful to you in some way as you make a buying decision.
First up is Bonavita. Now Bonavita is a brand that Prima has carried for a long time. Back in 2015, brewers like the BV1900TS were super popular. Bonavita kind of disappeared from the market for a number of years, but now they are back and they have reintroduced some really good designs for Auto-home brewers that I am personally very impressed with. So I'm going to talk about two of those today. The first is the Metropolitan and the second is the Enthusiast.
We'll talk about the Metro here first. So keep in mind this brewer is actually discontinued. Prima has the last of the inventory. So if you want to snag one up for about 150 bucks, this is probably one of the best value brewers that we're going to be talking about today. Okay. So Bonavita brewers in general are known for evenness of extraction. I love these for this reason because they purposely design this showerhead to almost exactly match the diameter of this flat brew bed. Okay. You would think that that would just be something that every manufacturer did when creating a dripper. But they don't and it is beyond me why they don't. But if you're looking for evenness of extraction, really, honestly, the opportunity for the best tasting cup of coffee, you don't have to spend $300. You can find that here in the Bonavitas. They do an excellent job and they are what I recommend. Most of the time. These have a hanging filter basket that doesn't rest on top of the carafe. These take a Melitta 8 to 12 cup filter, which is something you can commonly find at a grocery store. That's nice. They're not proprietary and they are super cheap. This model has a glass carafe and a warming plate that'll keep your coffee hot for whatever it is, 45 minutes or so, and this uses a thermosiphon system, which is what most auto brewers out there use. It heats up water, kind of super heats it, and then forces it up through the tube and out the shower-head. This design just inherently kind of creates a different sort of temperature ramp throughout the brew process. So it starts out really low. The first bits of water are kind of cold, and by the end of it, it's shooting out steam and it's super heating. The last bits of water that touch the coffee, which is kind of the opposite way that we would approach like a pour over brew, right? Or usually we have kind of a declining profile. So that's an interesting thing about traditional auto brewers. I'm not going to say it's necessarily bad, but it is what it is. Okay. The Metropolitan has just one button. That's a cool thing about it, too. Nice and simple. Press that button. It's going to automatically launch into a short one minute pre infusion phase before transitioning into full infusion. It's just going to brew as long as it needs to until the water runs out. So Metropolitan, 150 bucks. Great choice.
Let's move on to the Enthusiast. And this is where I think Bonavita just really knocked it out of the park. Internally, the first thing I'll mention is that this does not have the thermosiphon technology. It has a pump. So it's heating water and it's moving water with a very quiet pump. So it makes kind of a humming noise versus a bubbling noise. But more importantly, throughout the brewing process, it's maintaining a much more consistent temperature from beginning to end. So you're not super heating the water at the very end. It's staying just about the same as it was within the very first 30 seconds, which is cool. Another thing about this is it has a removable water tank which does fit on a scale. No more like weighing your water in a carafe from another pitcher and then dumping that in. You can just take this off, set it right on your scale, and then snap it right back into place. So, it's kind of like an espresso machine. Okay. Really thoughtful feature there. Up here, we have four buttons. One is just a power button to turn the unit on. One is a bloom button to start the bloom phase, and then one is a brew button. You can skip bloom if you want. Then there is a descaling button, which is essentially just a program that allows you to add descaler to the tank and then moves that water through much more slowly than it would with a normal brew cycle to really clean out the inside. Okay. Over here, I've got the same floating brew basket made of BPA free plastic that holds a Melita 8 to 12 cup filter. No heating plate because this is a thermal carafe. And I think Bonavita did a decent job with this. It's not perfect. You know, the lid is a little difficult to take off. It does retain like a tiny bit of water in there, which I know is a frustration for some. And we're talking like, I don't know, four or five milliliters that are left in there, which can be annoying. But for its shortcomings, I think this is a really impressive brewer for around 250 bucks. One of the best brewers that we're going to talk about today, in my opinion. Okay. So that's the Bonavita Enthusiast and Bonavita in general.
Next, we're going to talk about Technivorm. Most people are probably really familiar with Technivorm. They've been around for decades. They have a classic sort of retro style to them, and they're known for being very reliable brewers. They include a five year warranty, which is second to none. Beyond that, the company promises to replace parts for you over however many decades you decide to keep this brewer. So you can buy a heating element down the line, whatever it is, it'll be available if you want. If you want a one and done, this is the last brewer I'm ever going to buy, it maybe should be a Technivorm. So these are handmade in the Netherlands by really coffee savvy folks, and they're very, very simple in operation. And that's part of what makes them so reliable. I have four models on the table here today. We're not going to talk in great detail about each one, but if you click the link above me, you can find a link to our Technivorm comparison video where we get more in depth. So let's just go over this with a bird's eye view.
First Brewer we're going to look at is the Technivorm single cup. Now this is a ten ounce brewer meant for just a single cup. It doesn't come with a carafe. You got to use your own cup. All right, so this is a thermosiphon design, very small water reservoir, just one on off button on the side to activate the brew. Nothing else going on here. It has a small Melita number one basket which holds, you know, 20, 30 grams at most. And this very simple shower-head is just a pipe that dumps kind of a centered stream right into the middle of the coffee. I'll talk about that a little later on here.
Next up, we have the KB. So this is a 40 ounce brewer. 1.2 liters is kind of the standard for coffee brewers nowadays. This model has a glass carafe. It has a heating plate and it has a Melita number four basket. What makes this unique is that it has a selector switch for temperature for the heater plate. So if you're brewing a half batch it uses a lower temperature, if you're brewing a full batch, it knows to increase the heat to the element on the plate to keep that higher volume of coffee hotter, longer. Other than that, we have a interesting kind of flow selector here on the cone, which gives you the option to completely shut off flow for, say, a long pre infusion or if you're using, you know, coarser ground coffee, you can let it steep for longer, especially if you're using pre-ground coffee, that's useful. It has a middle setting and then it has a full flow setting. So there's lots of ways you can use that. You can always keep it fully open. So that's a really thoughtful feature that they've included in the KB that also exists here in the KBT.
T stands for Thermal. And that's really the biggest difference between these two brewers because there's no heating plate and a thermal carafe instead. There's no temperature selection switch, just an on off. And this is a ten cup carafe that is absolutely no drip. That's really nice. They've designed the lip really well so that it doesn't make a mess when you pour. Other than that, you have the same flow selection here on the cone and that is it. One other thing I think it's worth, two other the things are worth considering with this brewer. It's a little taller than the others. I think it stands around 15 and a half inches. So let's say you have a 17 inch countertop or cabinet, rather. You know, you're not going able to fill this. You're going have to pull it out. And pulling this out is a little bit annoying. Technivorm comes in a lot of pieces. Like there's this is this, there's this, this. And then when you move this, this part comes out. It can kind of feel like you're moving a Jenga tower. In some ways it frustrates me a little bit. But of all the things to be frustrated about, it's probably a small complaint.
Last, let's talk about the KBGV. Now, this is Technivorm’s most expensive model, and that's because it has a couple additional features which we'll talk about here in a second. So at heart, this is 40 ounce brewer glass carafe heating plate the cone instead of having a flow control as just a spring loaded valve. So when you remove this, it just closes the valve so this doesn't drip when you set it on the counter. And the reason it doesn't have flow control is because that's actually built in over here on a button. So not only does this button set the temperature setting for the heating plate, kind of like the KB, but it also tells the machine, okay, we're brewing a half pot, let's slow our flow rate down so it knows to use a slower flow rate for smaller brews. And when you want to brew a full pot, you can increase that flow rate and speed up the brew. And that's exactly the way that we’d approach, you know, pour over coffee, right? If we're brewing a ten cup Chemex, we increase the flow rate from our kettle to get it done faster, to increase the agitation and dig down deeper. And that's what this brewer does. It's a really nice and thoughtful feature.
One other thing I'm going to say about all of these that I think is really important to say is that these shower-heads are only saturating the very middle of the cones. And so what you get is a lot of grounds that are left high and dry if you're not in there stirring. And so if you're really looking for the most even extraction possible, I don't necessarily think the Technivorms are going to be for you. And that is not to say that the coffee from these tastes bad, it is just that they have a lower flavor potential, I would say, than some of these other brewers that we're going to talk about do. Okay. But really what you get with these is fantastic reliability. The peace of mind of having parts available for basically the rest of your life. Okay. So that's the Technivorm line-up.
Next we're talking about the Ratio Six coffee brewer and this really is one of the most striking coffee brewers of the bunch. It's a very modern design. On the counter, these look awesome next to accessories like fellow products like the Ode grinder. They also come in white and stainless steel, which is great. So a few things I'll say about this that really make it unique inside are some borosilicate hand-blown glass water lines. So they did that in an effort to kind of minimize hot water's contact with plastic and that's kind of carried throughout the shower-heads made of metal. They did decide to use a plastic basket so this isn't completely plastic free if you're looking for that. And I'm not sure it exists, just so you know, this isn't completely plastic free, but as close as you can get to no plastic at all. So we have a flat bottomed basket that holds the same Melita 8 to 12 cup basket that we have talked about earlier with the Bonavitas. Above that they have this interesting heat shield that kind of traps steam and keeps the temperature of the brew slurry a little bit hotter during brewing. That makes it a little bit tricky to get this in and out. It's not quite as smooth as maybe I would like, and it kind of does spit back a little water at you. This is the hottest brewing automatic brewer in our catalog here. I think overall, I'm going to get you to probably the highest overall extraction. The shower-head is good. It is not full coverage of the bed. So, again, there are going to be some areas of the bed that are left dry and not quite evenly saturated. But overall, I mean, it does well, it does better than some of the other brewers that we're going to talk about here today. And the cup of coffee that comes from this is great. Really no complaints about it. The carafe is nice and heavy, fully steel, steel lined, kind of like the Bonavita carafes. It does retain a little bit of coffee on the inside. You cannot get everything out by pouring this. Okay, so to put it back together, put the brew cone on top of the heat shield here and kind of load all three of them in at once. Okay. And then on the front here is a button and it will launch from a pre-brew phase into full infusion and then kind of an indicator that it's ready, all automatically. You don't need to select pre-infusion. You always just hit one button and this thing will go through its cycles automatically. A couple other things I'll mention about this. It has a removable power cord, which is cool. That's nice to have. But the last thing I want to just say is like fit and finish like the feel of this thing is great. It's stamped steel. It has a real heavy lid for the water tank. This is just about as premium as automatic coffee brewers come. And if you have a modern kitchen and you want a brewer to make a statement in there, this is really something that you should consider. So that's the ratio six.
Last, but certainly not least, we have the Breville Precision Brewer. We've got to take a deep breath because there is a lot of features to talk about in this brewer. First thing, this is a 60 ounce brewer, not a 40 ounce. So you have an increased capacity more than any other brewer in our lineup. That's interesting. This is a dual filter brewer. You get the option of the Melita number four cone or a flat bottom. So you can switch between two for different flavors. Inside of this is a pump. There is no thermosiphon inside, which means this machine offers stable temperature throughout, but also the ability to program a slow medium or a fast flow rate to accommodate your grind size or the volume of coffee that you're brewing. One thing I want to just say about this before we move on to other features is ergonomically like fit and finish. This is in my almost 11 years here at Prima, the best product I have ever felt. I mean, the way that these things just snap into place and fit. Everything has been thought out with such incredible detail. You can just tell that a lot of love, a lot of expertise was put into this very carefully by a lot of people. And for that reason, this is, you know, one of the best brewers you can possibly buy.
Okay. So let's move on and talk about some of the features that are integrated into the computer here. Okay. So here is the control screen for the Breville Precision Brewer. So we can start it up just by hitting this button. What we have access to from here is five of Breville's Presets. Those include fast, which is just literally a faster, maybe a little bit weaker brew gold, which is SCA Gold Cup standard. And they're using the variables available in this brewer like temperature and flow control and contact time, which I'll talk about in a minute to kind of hit a specific extraction that the SCA would approve of. Strong mode is also using the available variables here to really increase extraction and make a stronger cup of coffee. It doesn’t mean that it's using a lower ratio. It still uses what water you put in, but it uses some interesting features that I'll show you in a second to achieve that over ice. And we have cold brew as well. So what makes these interesting presets possible is a mechanical arm above the carafe here, which automatically closes the outlet, the drip outlet to the cone and allows the machine to or the cone rather, to kind of immerse the coffee in water for any period of time that it wants to to both increase extraction and in the case of like over ice, you can decrease the temperature of that water before introducing that coffee to the ice. Therefore it is diluting it less. Okay. Now cold Brew uses the pump to just dispense cold water into the cone here. And then when there's 5 minutes left on the clock, it'll open the valve with that little arm and release everything. But you can brew for, you know, up to 24 hours if you like. The other thing we can do here is develop our own brew. So I'm going to switch to my brew and now I have control over bloom time. I have control over brew temperature, which is currently set pretty high to 208. Flow rate, I can have a slow medium or fast flow rate. Then there's this option for pour over. There is an attachment available on Breville’s site to use this with drippers like a V60 or Kalita instead of their proprietary basket if you want to do that. Okay. So once you've set your preferred parameters, all we need to do here is kind of come back and hit the start button to start your brew. Okay. In addition to this, we also have an auto start. So if you have pre-ground your coffee, you can set it to begin at a specific time and be ready for you in the morning, which I think is an underrated feature. I don't think that pre grinding coffee one day in advance is detrimental at all. If you want that convenience of waking up and having to do no work of weighing and grinding and just having your coffee ready for you, that's there. And that's a really cool feature that will also tell you what time it is. That is really it. So when you're in the preset modes like Strong Mode or Gold Cup mode, there is an automatic feature built in here that adjusts flow rate based on how much water it recognizes in the reservoir. So unlike the Technivorm where you can set half part or full pot on the KBGV, this is recognizing when there is below, say, 20 ounces in the reservoir and adjusting the flow rate to accommodate to achieve the best results. Okay, that's pretty darn cool. Let's talk a little bit about the shower-head and the carafe and then we'll be done. Man, All right. So, Shower-head, it's not that big. It's like the size of a silver dollar, and it doesn't come nearly close enough to covering the entire bed. And this brewer. It does spray out a little bit instead of straight down overall, not the best saturation. Cups from from this brewer do taste really good though. Okay, so it's not a make or break design choice on their end.
Knowing Breville, I'm sure that they were very intentional about that part of the design, especially just considering all of the other things that they included in this brewer. You know, when you're including functionality for both the cone and a flat bottom in one brewer, I'm sure that you have to make a compromise on the shower-head to be honest. And they had to find a happy medium there. Again, the cups of coffee from this tastes great. Among the best, I would put it right with Ratio, probably in terms of extraction quality, and I would probably put my Bonavitas a little bit above that. Okay. Probably the best cup of coffee of the bunch. Breville and Ratio behind that and the Technivorms behind that. Last thing is this Carafe feels really good in the hand has a very simple unlock or pour kind of lid mechanism here. So we're on the pour setting now and I'll just show you has a very low to no drip spout. There sometimes can be a drip, but if you get it right, like then there was no drip. But you know, overall pretty well designed inside of this carafe. There is a little bit of coffee left. Let's take a look. Yeah, kind of exactly the same as everything else I've looked at. It's really unavoidable with thermal carafes these days. 3 to 5 milliliters of coffee left in there. Not too much. If you really don't want anything left in your carafe, you're going to have to go with a glass carafe. Like the Technivorms or the Bonavitas. That's just the way it is. All right. So that's the Breville precision Brewer. This guy is $329.
This has been a comparison of the best home auto brewers of 2024. If you have a question that wasn't addressed here, please drop it in the comments. I have spent hours with these brewers and I am happy to engage with you. So check these out at primacoffee.com for more info. Thanks so much for watching!
