Best Keurig Coffee Makers for 2024 – CNET [CNET]

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Andrew Blok has been an editor at CNET covering HVAC and home energy, with a focus on solar, since October 2021. As an environmental journalist, he navigates the changing energy landscape to help people make smart energy decisions. He’s a graduate of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State and has written for several publications in the Great Lakes region, including Great Lakes Now and Environmental Health News, since 2019. You can find him in western Michigan watching birds.

Expertise Solar providers and portable solar power; coffee makers, grinders and products Credentials

• Master’s degree in environmental journalism

The best thing about the K-Mini is how simple and easy it is to use. While you have to add water to the reservoir each time you want to make coffee, it’s easily accessible, even when I had it under my kitchen cabinets. It’s simple to clean and doesn’t take up a lot of space. It’s an unfussy, capable machine at under $100.

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The Keurig K-Mini is simple, fast, convenient and small.

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The K-Mini is about as simple as it gets. Fill your mug with water, empty it into the reservoir, add your coffee pod and punch the brew button. In less than 2 minutes, your cup of coffee is ready. The coffee I got from the K-Mini, like all of the options here, didn’t reach our extraction standards for brewed coffee, but it consistently brewed stronger than any other machine I tested. With a brew time of 1 minute, 45 seconds, it’s a little slower than some of the Keurig machines I tested, but it’s still faster than some other brands.

The best thing about the K-Mini is how simple and easy it is to use. While you have to add water to the reservoir each time you want to make coffee, it’s easily accessible, even when I had it under my kitchen cabinets. It’s simple to clean and doesn’t take up a lot of space. It’s an unfussy, capable machine at under $100.

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Frigidaire 1-Cup Single Serve Retro Coffee Maker: This machine from Frigidaire was a speedy and did the job. It has no frills and is the cheapest option on the list at just $40. It does feel and look a bit cheaper than the others on this list, but will brew a cup of coffee in under 2 minutes.

Proctor Silex Single Serve Coffee Maker: Proctor Silex’s entry on this list is in the same tier as the above Frigidaire. It’s a bit slower than that one, but provides a similar bargain price.

Hamilton Beach FlexBrew Single-Serve Coffee Maker: The Hamilton Beach single-serve option is still quite affordable, just $75, but adds an additional feature: regular and robust settings. In our testing, the robust setting did have a modest but real increase in the strength of the coffee.

Hamilton Beach FlexBrew Dual Coffee Maker: This coffee maker is essentially the above Hamilton Beach attached to a drip machine. The single serve portion did not perform noticeably differently from its standalone counterpart. It’s a bit cheaper than the Keurig K-Duo listed above, but the K-Duo feels more solidly made and brewed coffee a bit better.

Cuisinart Coffee Center 2-in-1 coffee maker: The Cuisinart 2-in-1 Coffee Center brews both single servings and carafes with both bold and regular options. It has additional features — like the option to keep a carafe of coffee warmed to different temperatures — but none that made it comparable to the K-Duo in my estimation, which felt more solidly constructed and brewed better in our tests.

Keurig K-Supreme: The K-Supreme, like the other Keurig machines on the list, performed a bit better than other brands. It’s a smaller option with a detachable reservoir. It has four size options and settings for strong coffee and brewing over ice. If you want a couple more options than the K-Mini, but don’t want to inundate yourself, it’s a good choice.

Ninja Dual Brew Pro: This Ninja coffee maker can do it all and was a close contender with the K-Cafe Smart for best for customizing. It can froth milk brew carafes and coffee pods and even has a separate dispenser for hot water, all with a smaller footprint than the K-Cafe Smart. To my taste and our tests it didn’t brew quite as well as the K-Cafe Smart, but at $180, is relatively cheap comparatively.

Testing K-cup compatible coffee makers varies from testing other coffee makers, but still involves a mix of objective and subjective measures.

To test single-serve coffee makers, we measure how fast the machine brews, and the extraction percentage and temperature of the final cup of coffee. The speed test is a simple matter of using a stopwatch to measure the time from pushing the button to start the brew to the time the cycle is complete.

Measuring temperature is less reliable in single serve machines than in drip machines because it can’t feasibly be measured at the point the grounds and water are actually meeting. For these Keurig-style machines, we measured the temperature in the mug of brewed coffee rather than the brew basket. Because the conditions are harder to control outside the coffee maker (mug temperature being the big variable), the temperature reading has less weight in the rankings here than in other coffee makers.

The most valuable data to ranking Keurig-style coffee makers is the extraction percentage — the amount of coffee that is actually moves from the ground coffee to the final cup. We calculate this by starting with a Brix reading from a refractometer. (Brix is one measure of dissolved solids in a liquid. A refractometer calculates Brix, and other measures) by reading how much light bends when passing through a liquid.) For each machine, we brew three test cups and take 10 Brix measurements from each. We calculate the average Brix measurement for each cup and use that to calculate the extraction percentage.

Testing also relies on subjective criteria. We look at how easy the machines are to use and clean. We also sip each cup we brew to see which one makes the tastiest coffee. We explore specific use cases as best as we can. For example, our pick for small spaces was determined by the machines actual dimensions, but also, using each candidate in an actual small space.

For machines without large reservoirs, the process follows the same basic steps of cleaning, soaking and rinsing. Keurig and most other brands mentioned on this list provide model-specific instructions on each product’s webpage.