Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of fancy contraptions for brewing coffee at home. Yet, many folks still rely on the simple convenience of good, old drip coffee. It just the easiest way to brew enough cups for everyone at home. Sure, it’s hardly as good as single-serve machines, dedicated espresso makers, and other fancy countertop brewers, but it gets the job done. The Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker combines the convenience of humble drip brewers with the exceptional taste of fancy coffee machines.
Certified by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), the countertop brewer holds up to the exacting standards of the professional organization in temperature, time, extraction, and consistency. That means, it will churn out better tasting drinks than what you’d normally get from drip brewers in homes, office pantries, and everywhere else you get free coffee, allowing you to enjoy better coffee without any laborious work or additional recurring expense.
The Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker should look familiar to anyone who’s used a drip brewer. There’s a water tank on the upper left side, a filter basket on the upper right side, controls on the lower left side, and a heater plate for the pot on the lower right section. Using it works much like any drip brewer: fill the tank with water, put coffee inside the filter, slide the pot underneath the filter, and get the whole thing cooking. It uses a reusable titanium-plated metal filter, by the way, which comes covered in micro fine mesh.
Unlike standard drip brewers, it allows a bit more control over the brewing process. It offers four brewing modes, namely gold, light, medium, and bold, with the gold being the one setting backed by SCA certification, ensuring it turns out the perfect-tasting coffee each time out. While each brewing mode come with preprogrammed settings, you can adjust the brew temperature (185 to 205 degrees) and strength to your liking, allowing you to maximize the flavor profile of whatever coffee grounds you’re cooking.
The Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker can brew up to 10 cups of coffee in one go, making it a viable coffee maker for family homes, offices, and other places where you have plenty of people who might want to get a cup at some point during the day. It has a display timer in the body, although, from what we can tell, it only shows the current time (programmable), so you can’t set advanced brewing schedules right from the appliance.
The good news? It comes with built-in Wi-Fi, as well as compatibility with the smartHQ app, so you can use that to program it to brew right before you get up in the morning, as well as operate the machine remotely. There’s also support for Alexa and Google Assistant, so you can use voice commands to your intelligent assistant of choice to operate the coffee maker in the kitchen while you’re lounging in the living room.
The Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker is available now, priced at $349.