Best Black Coffee Makers

There are tons of ways to brew coffee, but you can group all of them into 4 categories based on their brewing style: immersion, drip, pressure, and boiling.

Let’s take a quick look at the brewers in each category and what you should expect from coffee brewed using each style.

Immersion Brewers

Examples: French press, Clever, soft brew, cold brew, siphon brew

In immersion brewing, the water is in direct contact with the coffee throughout the brewing process. This could be hot water with a short brew time (3-5 minutes) or cold water with a long brew time (18-24 hours).

The most common immersion brewers, like French press and soft brew, use metal filters instead of cloth or paper. This results in a full-bodied cup of coffee with a strong flavor and aroma but also lets more grit and sediment into the cup, even if you use a coarse grind.

You’ll also find some hybrid immersion methods that do use extra filtration, like siphon brewers (cloth-filtered) and clever brewers (paper-filtered). These are a good option if you want the body of immersion brewing but with a smoother texture in the cup.

Drip Brewers

Examples: Automatic drip, pod brewers, pour-over, Chemex, percolators

In drip brewing, hot water is dispensed over ground coffee and allowed to drip down through a filter into a cup or carafe. The filter ensures a grit-free cup and also removes some of the coffee’s oils, resulting a more balanced, nuanced flavor than immersion brew.

Automatic versions are the top choice for convenience. Single-serve pod brewers, like K-Cup and Nespresso brewers, can produce a cup in minutes with no messy clean-up. Automatic drip machines often include features like pre-programmability to add to their convenience.

Of all the brewing methods, manual drip brewers like Chemex and pour-over drippers give the user the most control over the process. This is what makes them so popular with baristas but also gives them a reputation for being difficult and finnicky.

Pressure Brewers

Examples: Pump-driven espresso, Portable espresso, Moka pot, AeroPress
These machines use pressure to force the water through the ground coffee, extracting tons of flavor in the process. This results in the strong flavor, creamy texture, and frothy crema that espresso is known for.

The main difference between these brewers is how much pressure they produce. Pump-driven electronic machines, like the espresso makers you’ll see in cafes, produce the most consistently high pressure. They’re also expensive and bulky, though, and good ones are rare on the home market.

A Moka pot or hand-held espresso maker is a more compact and affordable option, and they’re also much more portable for when you’re traveling. The trade-off is they don’t always produce the full 15 bars of pressure during brewing that you need for a true espresso shot.

Boil Brewers

Boiling coffee was the traditional way to prepare it, but it’s the least-common brewing method in the modern world.

Aside from low-tech options like cowboy coffee, the only commercial boil brewer is the Ibrik, a copper pot used for making Turkish coffee.