Best Coffee Makers for One Person

Brewing ten cups for one drinker is a choice between stale coffee and wasted coffee. Single-serve avoids both by making what you are about to drink, and the trade is one nobody puts on the box.

Cost per cup usually goes up, not down

This is the arithmetic to do first. A pod, sachet or capsule carries packaging you pay for every single morning, so the convenience is priced per cup rather than paid once. A Nespresso Original capsule works out around $180 a kilo of coffee and a K-Cup in a small box is not much better; a bag of good beans is $40 to $70 a kilo.

Manual single-serve brewers - an AeroPress, a small pour-over, a one-cup press - avoid that entirely, because the only recurring cost is coffee and a paper filter. If you drink one cup a day and want it cheap, that is the answer; if you want it in ninety seconds without thinking, it is not.

Size is the point, so check the actual footprint

A single-serve machine that occupies as much counter as a drip maker has given up its main advantage. Depth matters more than width in most kitchens, because the cupboard above decides how tall a machine can be and the worktop decides how far forward it sits.

Speed is real, and it is what you are buying

A capsule machine is ready in under a minute and finished in another. Grinding, weighing and pouring by hand is five minutes. That difference is the entire proposition of the category and is worth paying for if your morning is short - just be clear that speed, not coffee quality, is what the money buys.

What to ignore

Cup-size buttons on a capsule machine. On a sealed pod the dose is fixed, so a larger cup setting passes more water through the same coffee and gives you a weaker drink rather than a bigger one. The size that tastes right is the one the capsule was designed for.