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Sep 16, 2023

The 4 Best Pour

There’s a reason pour-over is the preferred brewing method at high-end cafés:

There's a reason pour-over is the preferred brewing method at high-end cafés: It's a simple way to make coffee with intricate flavors that you might not get from a machine. For the best results, start with a good dripper. After brewing more than 150 cups, we found the Kalita Wave 185 Dripper to be the most consistent and easy to master. If you want to brew a truly great cup, we also recommend a grinder, kettle, and scale.

The Kalita Wave's flat bottom ensures the most even extraction—and the best-tasting coffee—of all the pour-over drippers we’ve tested.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $27.

The Kalita Wave 185 produced the most consistent, flavorful, and balanced cups of coffee among the drippers we tested. In part that's thanks to its flat-bottomed design, which promotes more even water drainage, making it easier even for beginners to get consistent results. And you can choose to get the Wave in either glass or stainless steel. One drawback: The proprietary "wavy" filters are slightly more expensive than basic, wedge-shaped Melitta filters, and though they're usually available at online retailers, they can be difficult to find in local stores.

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The Hario dripper should appeal to pour-over experts, because it requires more precision and careful attention to the rate and aim of your pour. It produced some of the best brew in our tests.

If you want a dripper that further captures the essence of pour-over's ritualistic appeal, we recommend the Hario V-60 Coffee Dripper (Size 02). Once you’re comfortable with your technique, it's a lot of fun to match your spiral pour to this dripper's wide, conical shape. The V-60 is capable of brewing coffee that's just as flavorful, interesting, and well-rounded as the Kalita Wave makes. With the Hario, it just takes a little more practice and focus to get consistently great results. Like the Kalita, the Hario uses proprietary filters, but they’re widely available at specialty coffee shops and online.

This dripper uses cheap filters that are available in grocery stores, making it ideal for beginners who prioritize convenience over mastering the nuances of pour-over coffee.

If you want a dripper that uses widely available filters, we recommend the Bee House Ceramic Coffee Dripper (large). It brewed less-complex coffee than our other picks, but it's the most convenient option for beginners who just want a simple way to brew a cup. It uses standard #2 Melitta paper filters, which you can find at most supermarkets.

As gorgeous as it is usable, the Chemex makes several cups at once, and it produced a delicious, bright brew that our testers loved.

We also love the Chemex Six Cup Classic Series. It's a good choice for those who want to brew a few cups of coffee at a time, as well as for fans of great design. (The Chemex was invented by chemist Peter Schlumbohm in 1941, and it's included in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.) It features a built-in carafe, and in our tests the Chemex produced balanced, nuanced coffee. Like most of our other picks, it uses proprietary filters not usually available in grocery stores, but they’re easy enough to buy online or from high-end coffee shops.

The Kalita Wave's flat bottom ensures the most even extraction—and the best-tasting coffee—of all the pour-over drippers we’ve tested.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $27.

The Hario dripper should appeal to pour-over experts, because it requires more precision and careful attention to the rate and aim of your pour. It produced some of the best brew in our tests.

This dripper uses cheap filters that are available in grocery stores, making it ideal for beginners who prioritize convenience over mastering the nuances of pour-over coffee.

As gorgeous as it is usable, the Chemex makes several cups at once, and it produced a delicious, bright brew that our testers loved.

For our 2019 update we researched brew guides from Blue Bottle Coffee, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Counter Culture Coffee, and Café Grumpy, and consulted various coffee blogs, like Home Grounds, Dripped Coffee, and the Coffee Chronicler. We also discussed approaches to the pour-over method with Yuki Izumi of Hi-Collar in New York and Erick Vlassidis of Nine Bar Espresso in Boston. During our 2016 tests, we spoke to noted author, columnist, and coffee expert Oliver Strand (who writes for The New York Times), Nick Cho of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, and Zachary Carlsen, senior editor of Sprudge. All of these experts provided professional opinions on pour-over gear and technique. For the earlier version of this guide, we also solicited testing help and input from Lofted Coffee, which was a lauded small-batch coffee roaster based in Brooklyn, New York; the team we worked with has since closed Lofted and started Sey Coffee.

Justin Vassallo, who worked on the 2019 update, is a former barista with extensive experience in high-end shops in New York and Boston. He has also worked on Wirecutter's guides to espresso machines and cheap coffee makers, and regularly brews pour-over at home. Thais Wilson-Soler, who wrote the 2016 update, worked for more than three years as a barista in various high-volume Brooklyn coffee shops and restaurants. In 2017, Daniel Varghese, then a Wirecutter updates writer, conducted additional testing. This guide also builds on work by Cale Guthrie Weissman.

Pour-over is a method of brewing a small batch of filtered coffee by gradually pouring hot water over fresh grounds. The dripper and the filter help control the rate at which water flows through and extracts flavor from your coffee grounds. But your recipe and technique also matter. To get consistent, delicious results, you’ll need to use a precise ratio of coffee to water, and to control the coarseness of your coffee grounds, the temperature of the water, and the speed of your pour.

Once you’ve got the right gear and method, pour-over is a simple, inexpensive, and fun way to make the best-tasting coffee.

You can find numerous recipes and guides online, but most suggest using 25 to 30 grams of coffee and about 400 grams of water to brew a 12-ounce portion. The coffee should be ground medium-fine (a little finer than coarse sea salt), and the water should be heated to between 196 and 203 degrees Fahrenheit (the exact temperature you settle on will depend on your preferences and on the coffee, with more delicate roasts requiring lower temperatures). In order to brew evenly, it's important that you pour your water in a steady spiral motion from the center to the edge, usually every 40 to 50 seconds. A 12-ounce batch typically brews in just over three minutes.

To control all these variables, you’ll need a number of tools beyond the dripper itself. A full pour-over set-up includes:

These items are optional:

It's also imperative that you use fresh, high-quality beans, whether you prefer blends or single-origin offerings. Pour-over isn't the ideal method for brewing super-oily dark roasts, and you should avoid it altogether when using cheap, pre-ground coffee.

If you use an auto-drip coffee maker to brew your coffee, you may find a multistep, gear-intensive method a daunting and complicated prospect. But once you’ve got the right gear and method, pour-over is a simple, inexpensive, and fun way to make the best-tasting coffee. A major benefit to pour-over is that, by controlling every variable, you can refine the flavor and body of the coffee to your tastes. For people who don't mind experimenting, it's worth that extra effort, and you’ll learn more about coffee along the way.

In choosing and testing pour-over drippers, we considered the factors listed below.

Size: We looked at how much ground coffee a dripper could hold. This affects how big a cup you can reasonably brew, and we chose to test only those drippers that could brew 12 ounces of coffee or more—enough to fill a mug. A few we tested, like the Chemex, are big enough to brew several cups at once, but none can match the volume of an electric drip coffee maker.

Shape: Pour-over drippers generally come in one of three shapes: conical, flat-bottomed, or wedge. We tested all three styles, noting how each shape affected the flavor of the coffee and the way it drained from the filter bed. Ultimately, the flat-bottomed Kalita Wave was our favorite, partly because of its shape, which helped water saturate the grounds more evenly before draining, leading to more consistent results.

Filter type: We’ve learned from our testing that reusable filters made of stainless steel mesh unfortunately yield unpleasantly silty coffee, so we prefer drippers that work with a paper filter. A number of the drippers we tested required proprietary paper filters, which you can't find in most grocery stores. While this was annoying, we don't think it's a deal breaker for everyone, since it's easy to get those filters online. But for people who prioritize convenience, we have one pick, the Bee House dripper, that uses filters readily available at most grocery stores. Generally we recommend choosing white paper filters over brown, unbleached ones, because brown filters can make coffee taste more like the paper, which is a big no-no for expert coffee tasters. But if you can't tell the difference, unbleached filters are cheaper and more environmentally friendly because they require less processing.

Materials: Most drippers are made from ceramic, glass, plastic, or metal. Ceramic and plastic are typically better insulators than glass and metal (though insulation ability also depends on the thickness of the material), which is important if you’re sensitive to the effect that small changes in temperature can have on the flavor of your coffee. But after testing drippers made from all four materials, we think most people wouldn't notice the difference. For that reason, we didn't dismiss drippers based on material, but we did give bonus points to models that were available in multiple materials. It's nice to be able to choose your material based on how you’ll use the dripper: If you plan to travel with it, you might want metal or plastic, and you might choose ceramic for its looks.

In all, since 2014 we’ve tested 15 drippers (more, if you count the multiple versions of some models made from different materials) and considered many others.

For our 2019 tests, we decided to try brewing two different types of coffee with each dripper: Blue Bottle Coffee's Bella Donovan blend (a darker medium roast) and Café Grumpy's Kenyan Gatuyaini (a lighter, brighter single-origin roast). Sampling both allowed us to better compare minute changes among brews and to determine how much complexity each dripper could consistently capture.

The recipes we settled on for testing are based on both my own experience as a barista and my research on what roasters and other experts recommend. Although we experimented with the ratios a little bit, we generally stuck with 28 grams of the Bella Donovan or 26 grams of the Gatuyaini to about 400 grams of water. We also conducted several single-cup tests, using 19 grams of Bella Donovan to about 315 grams of water. We brewed the Bella Donovan with water at around 201 degrees Fahrenheit and the Gatuyaini with water at around 196 degrees. A lower dose and slightly cooler water for the Gatuyaini made sense because single origins often are more delicate and temperamental, and they taste better when not over-concentrated. We ground both coffees using the Baratza Virtuoso (an older model of our upgrade pick coffee grinder) set to 10 (a medium-fine grind). After an initial pour to "bloom" the coffee (releasing carbon dioxide from the grounds), we aimed to brew a 12-ounce carafe with a series of three subsequent pours.

We brewed multiple batches with each dripper, usually weighing each pour to ensure the most exact brewing process. But we also brewed some rounds where we eyeballed the amount of water per pour, as some people might do at home. Doing so helped show how intuitive each dripper was to use, and how easy it was to get consistent results.

Aside from a few outliers, most of the drippers we tested brewed decent-tasting coffee, but we focused on the ones that produced the most expressive yet well-rounded cups of coffee. We rated each brew based on its range of flavors, intensity and depth, balance, acidity, mouthfeel, aftertaste, and compatibility with milk. We noted how long it took, on average, to brew a 12-ounce portion and how easy it was to get consistent results. We also had some people who were less experienced with pour-over methods try our picks to see what they thought of them.

In past rounds of testing, we used a similar recipe, and we invited a few coffee experts as well as amateurs to help us rate the results.

The Kalita Wave's flat bottom ensures the most even extraction—and the best-tasting coffee—of all the pour-over drippers we’ve tested.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $27.

The Kalita Wave 185 Dripper is easy to use and consistently makes great-tasting coffee, capturing the more nuanced flavors of your beans. If you’re not a pour-over expert, the Kalita is reliable, and out of all the drippers we tested, it was the best at extracting complex, rich flavors from our coffee.

The Kalita's flat bottom means that grounds are simultaneously saturated and brewed over a larger surface area, lending the coffee a more balanced taste and fuller body overall. We brewed the most outstanding cups of both the Bella Donovan and the Gatuyaini on the Kalita, capturing abundant notes of tart and juicy plum, dark chocolate, citrus, and hints of melon. This nuance and range are what you should expect from pour-over coffee in a high-quality café, and it was encouraging that these results were largely replicable across numerous tests with the Kalita. In particular, we brewed the best versions of the Gatuyaini in the Kalita, leading us to believe that it can successfully meet the expectations of single-origin enthusiasts.

Even if you haven't had much practice with the pour-over method, the Kalita is very easy to use. We found that it made great coffee even when we eyeballed the amount of water per pour, so we think beginners will get enjoyable results more quickly with the Kalita than with other drippers. The Kalita requires less meticulous aim and timing as you pour, because its flat bottom better regulates the rate at which the water drains. Cone-bottom drippers like the Hario drain out of a single point, making the taste of the coffee more dependent on how you pour. If mastering the more-demanding rhythm of cone-bottom drippers sounds a bit stressful to you, the Kalita's design allows for a less-exact technique.

We like that the Kalita comes in a stainless steel version as well as glass. Picking one material over another is ultimately a matter of personal preference. The Kalita's glass version is quite thin—much thinner than the Hario V60's glass version—but we’ve used one for several years in our test kitchen without breaking it. There's also a smaller version, the Kalita Wave 155, which is available in ceramic, but since we think the 185 is itself a bit small, we believe you’ll be better off perfecting standard pour-over recipes on the 185.

The Kalita Wave's greatest flaw is the hassle involved in acquiring its proprietary wavy filters. Because the filters are a Japanese import, they’re harder to come by and a little more expensive than standard Melitta filters. They are, however, often available through online specialty coffee retailers. Order some when you buy the dripper, and you’ll be fine for a while.

One aspect that could frustrate some people is that the Kalita doesn't have much volume, which limits the amount of ground coffee you can reasonably use. We also found that with fresher, gassier beans, the bloom from the infusion pour could be so full that we had to exercise caution with the next pour to avoid overflow. In this respect, you should become acquainted with how your favorite beans typically brew, and expect to pour more slowly when brewing larger amounts of freshly roasted beans.

In addition, some people may have an issue with the way the coffee grounds sit in the filter, because it's not always clear that the grounds dispersed between the filter's folds are getting evenly saturated with water. This was something that all of our inexperienced testers noted: They weren't sure whether they should pour over the ridges in the filter or just in the center. But considering the Kalita's frequently great results, we think this is more a matter of perception than an actual drawback in the Kalita's design.

The Hario dripper should appeal to pour-over experts, because it requires more precision and careful attention to the rate and aim of your pour. It produced some of the best brew in our tests.

The Hario V-60 Coffee Dripper (Size 02) has an iconic design and brews tasty, dynamic coffee that's on a par with coffee brewed by the Kalita Wave. But it also requires you to be more precise and engaged with the brewing process. For serious aficionados, the Hario is a worthy alternative to the Kalita, with a style that really encapsulates the ritual of pour-over.

The key to perfecting your coffee's flavor in the Hario lies in mastering the spiral pouring method.

The Hario brewed good to great coffee for most tests, though the Kalita retained an edge when it came to brewing the most nuanced, best-tasting cups. That said, at its best the Hario captured a range of flavors similar to those produced in the Kalita, and brewed well-rounded coffee that took milk well.

The key to drawing out your coffee's flavor in the Hario lies in mastering the spiral pour, from the center of the coffee bed out toward the periphery. But the Hario's large single hole and more concave shape make it drain quickly, so perfecting that pour requires a little more practice. The cone filter typically does a great job of containing the coffee's initial bloom. But from there, you should time your subsequent pours well to avoid total drainage between pours (which experts recommend).

The upside of the Hario's design is that it exemplifies the ritualistic feel of pour-over coffee, and it arguably allows for greater experimentation than other drippers. The Hario requires you to pay close attention to your pour, but once you become familiar with it, you can explore how different beans and roast profiles respond to adjustments in water temperature, grind size, and the rate of your pour. The Hario dripper is deeper and has more total volume than the Kalita, which means you can brew a few more ounces in the Hario than you can in the Kalita if you have a large enough carafe.

Like the Kalita, the Hario uses proprietary filters that are easily available online and that can be found in specialty coffee shops, too. And we love that the Hario comes in four different materials: ceramic, glass (which is notably thicker than the Kalita's glass), metal, and plastic (not an option with the Kalita).

This dripper uses cheap filters that are available in grocery stores, making it ideal for beginners who prioritize convenience over mastering the nuances of pour-over coffee.

The Bee House Ceramic Coffee Dripper is affordable and produces well-rounded (though less-nuanced) coffee. It's a great, straightforward pick for a beginner, or for someone who would like a dripper that uses the more widely available #2 Melitta coffee filters, which you can find in any major supermarket.

In taste tests, the Bee House received favorable marks from our less-experienced testers. Some of our expert testers, however, found that coffee from the Bee House dripper didn't quite capture a coffee's range of flavor and depth the way the Kalita Wave, Hario, or Chemex did. But people who simply want an easy, compact way to brew a good cup of coffee might prefer (or at least not mind) the Bee House's tendency to produce simpler, "classic"-tasting filtered coffee.

Perhaps the Bee House's greatest selling point is the fact that its filters are easy to find in supermarkets, something that can't be said for the Kalita Wave, the Hario V60, or the Chemex. This convenience might outweigh all else if you’re not interested in getting into the intricacies of the pour-over method. But if you love trying coffee with wild, unconventional notes, or you just want rich, potent coffee with a smooth finish, you’re better off with the Kalita or the Hario.

As gorgeous as it is usable, the Chemex makes several cups at once, and it produced a delicious, bright brew that our testers loved.

The Chemex Six Cup Classic Series produces great-tasting coffee, is simple to use, and looks gorgeous. In addition to winning high marks in both of our taste competitions, it created less of a mess than the other drippers we tested, because it acts as its own pitcher. The Chemex is also the only one of our picks that easily accommodates making three or more 6-ounce cups of coffee at a time. It's a timeless example of great design, mostly unchanged since 1941 (it has a spot in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection).

In our previous tests, panelists found the Chemex's coffee to be "juicy and fruity," and for our 2019 update this model proved to be just as good as the Kalita and the Hario at brewing complex yet balanced coffee. If you’re following standard pour-over recipes, the Chemex's results should be as consistent as those of the Kalita and the Hario. The Chemex really brought out satisfying dark chocolate notes without our having to increase the coffee dose, and though the coffee's flavors lingered a little more on the palate, the finish was still smooth. Such results are partly due to Chemex's thick proprietary filters, which reduce the oils that can lend coffee a bitter or smoky flavor. However, you should bear in mind that when you brew up to six cups, you’ll have to tinker with how much coffee you dose, the number of pours you conduct, and the amount of water you think is optimal per pour.

Filters for the Chemex can be hard to find in most grocery stores, but they are available on Williams Sonoma and have become increasingly available in local high-end coffee shops and at grocery-store chains. The Chemex also requires a bit more cleaning than the other drippers we tried; the narrow neck of its pitcher is harder to get your hand through, but a proper bottle brush makes the task easier.

We liked the new Blue Bottle Coffee Dripper better than some of the other drippers we tested in 2017, but it produced a cup with uneven flavor and without much body. If you do purchase or receive the Blue Bottle dripper, don't worry too much about using the company's expensive, proprietary bamboo-based filters. After deciding to dismiss the Blue Bottle dripper, we made a cup with it using a Melitta filter; it ended up tasting much better, but still not as good as the coffee we made with the Kalita Wave.

The OXO Pour-Over Coffee Maker with Water Tank has a unique design that allows you to make pour-over coffee without any of the fuss that's usually essential to the brewing method. Instead of pouring water directly onto the grounds in the filter, you pour them into a plastic tank with holes in the bottom. The water drips through the holes over the grounds at a controlled rate, freeing you up to do other things. Unfortunately, all of our testers thought the coffee it produced was weak and under-extracted.

We tested the single-cup Melitta Pour-Over Coffee Brewer because it's a cheap classic and generally well liked, but we found that it wasn't a rival to the other wedge-shaped models in terms of taste or usability.

The Bonmac ceramic dripper was likewise similar to the wedge-shaped Bee House dripper, but it produced fewer solid cups of coffee.

Although the Clever Coffee Dripper doesn't technically use the pour-over method, we included it in our 2019 tests because it makes filtered coffee that is closer in flavor to pour-over than other brew methods. The bottom of the dripper is sealed, and you’re supposed to steep your coffee for four minutes. Placing the dripper on top of your mug opens a valve, allowing coffee to drain, which can take more than two minutes to complete. Although it produced decent coffee when we followed the instructions, the Clever dripper took twice as long to make a pour-over. We also found that the Clever needed more coffee and a finer grind than other drippers.

We tested the Able Brewing Kone Coffee Filter, as an alternative to paper filters, but found that the larger holes in the metal Kone produced a coffee that was high in sediment and too sludgy for most people.

We tried the 34-ounce Bodum Pour Over primarily because it's comparable in size to the Chemex, and we wanted to give an option with a mesh, permanent filter another shot. But it was impossible to avoid a silty brew. Clean, sediment-free coffee is a must with pour-over, and the Bodum's underwhelming and strangely woody-tasting results led to a quick dismissal.

This article was edited by Marguerite Preston and Raphael Brion.

The Brew Guide, Stumptown Coffee Roasters

Brew Guides, George Howell Coffee

Brew Guides, Blue Bottle Coffee

Home Brewing Guides, Café Grumpy

Quick + Easy Pour Over, Counter Culture Coffee

Yuki Izumi, barista, Hi-Collar, email interview, May 28, 2019

Erick Vlassidis, manager, Nine Bar Espresso, email interview, May 29, 2019

Asser Christensen, Choosing the Best Pour Over Coffee Maker, The Coffee Chronicler, August 11, 2019

Dennies John, Best Pour Over Coffee Makers - Reviews & Buyer's Guide, Dripped Coffee, July 2, 2019

The Best Pour Over Coffee Makers - Reviews and Buying Guide, Home Grounds

Justin Vassallo

Thais Wilson-Soler

Daniel Varghese

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