Dana Whitfield

I write the buying guides here and keep the product data behind them honest. Right now that means 81 products across 41 brands.

Most of the job is saying no. There are a few hundred coffee makers you could buy and roughly seven worth recommending, and the rest of the work is being able to explain why those seven.

I check specs rather than repeat them. When a manufacturer won’t say what something is made of — the plastic in a brew basket, the seal in a French press plunger — I say so, and note when I last looked. The plastic-free guide calls two stainless brewers "stainless brew path" instead of plastic-free for that reason. Neither company will tell me what the gasket is.

Prices come from Amazon directly, not from memory. They’re pulled when the site builds, so nothing here quotes a number from last quarter. It also means a delisted product gets flagged instead of sitting there as a link that looks fine and takes you nowhere useful. That has already happened once.

I’d rather recommend something that stays good. A machine with a five-year warranty and parts you can replace beats a slightly better one that’s landfill in three years. That’s a bias and I’d rather name it than pretend I don’t have one.