The Oxo has settings for a full 8-cup pot, a half pot, and a single cup. Oxo touts that single-serve capability as a major feature in its own description of the coffee maker, and it’s…fine. The individual cup didn’t brew up as flavorful as the full pot nor as flavorful as the single cups brewed by some other coffee makers, like the Fellow or Oxo’s higher-end 12-cup machine. But it does make good coffee, has a relatively small footprint, 7 inches wide and 10 inches deep, and feels well-built, as many Oxo products are. You can upgrade this coffee maker with a stainless steel carafe, which I didn’t test here, but other Oxo insulated carafes performed well in our testing over the years.
Ratio Eight Series 2 Coffee Maker
The only problem with the new Ratio 8 (currently available for preorder) is that it’s so damn expensive. But it’s also part coffee maker, part art object—with wooden accents and a hand-blown glass carafe—so for the right person, the price may well be worth it. The coffee it brews is superb: evenly bloomed, well-extracted, and just as easy to make as with the Ratio Six, thanks to the same single-button operation.
The new version of the Ratio Eight adds a half-carafe mode (just long-press the brew button) that adjusts bloom time and flow depending on the batch size. It also comes with the thermal carafe to end all thermal carafes; it’s the heaviest one I’ve ever used and kept water above 120°F for four hours.
Beautiful, functional, and built to last, this is a great machine. But with a price around $700, it’s in that echelon of luxury goods that isn’t accessible to a wide enough audience to earn it a top pick.
Breville Luxe Drip Coffee Machine
Newly released in 2025, Breville’s Luxe Brewer has the look and feel of something designed specifically to compete in this world of increasingly customizable, increasingly high-end drip coffee makers. It offers the ability to set bloom volume, bloom time, water temperature, and flow rate. Plus, it makes cold brew overnight.
This is undoubtedly a very good coffee maker, and once someone learns how to use it, we think they’ll be pleased with what they get. However, it costs almost the same amount as the Fellow Aiden, but it doesn’t give you quite as much. Bloom volume and flow rate, for example, can only be set to low, medium, and high. And while that might be plenty of optionality for most people in most situations, the point of having all these settings is to offer the ability to tease out exactly the flavor you want from any batch of beans. And we think the Fellow’s more precise capabilities are worth an extra 20 bucks.
The interface of the Breville is also a little confusing. When you turn it on, it’s not immediately clear whether you’re adjusting settings or starting a brew cycle, and many of the customization options are represented by unlabeled icons. In an era of increasingly complex appliances, an intuitive, user-friendly interface is more important than ever, and here is where the Luxe Brewer falls short.
Breville Precision Brewer
Breville Precision Brewer
This is where the subjective part of our testing is going to show itself. The Breville Precision Brewer is, in many ways, the Fellow Aiden before there was a Fellow Aiden. It offers temperature control to a single degree, customizable bloom time and flow rate, different shaped filter baskets for different flavor profiles, and it even offers cold brew. We just liked the taste of the coffee from the Fellow more.
