Best Coffee Makers for Iced Coffee

The CM401 is the Swiss Army knife of drip coffee makers. It's one of the few SCA-certified machines that can brew a single cup, a travel mug, a half carafe, or a full pot — all without changing the water level manually. The four brew styles (Classic, Rich, Over Ice, and Specialty) genuinely taste different, and the Specialty mode produces a concentrated brew that works surprisingly well as a base for lattes when paired with the fold-away frother. It's a lot of machine for the money.

The Aiden is what happens when pour-over nerds design a drip machine. You can control bloom time, brew temperature, ratio, pulse count and the time between pulses — or just hit the one-button Instant Brew and let it handle everything. The thermal carafe keeps coffee hot without a hotplate, and the companion app lets you download brew profiles from specialty roasters so you're making coffee exactly as they intended. It's the most customizable drip machine on the market.

This is the grind-and-brew that doesn't make you choose between a single cup and a pot. Six sizes run from a 3 oz espresso-style pour and an 8 oz cup up to a 40 oz carafe. De'Longhi states a conical burr rather than leaving the grinder type vague, which most machines in this class do. The over-ice style brews stronger to survive dilution instead of just brewing hot coffee onto cubes.

Most cold brew makers are a jar with a filter in it. This one solves the two things that actually go wrong: the rainmaker top wets the bed of grounds evenly instead of channeling straight down the middle, and a brew-release switch lets you drain on your schedule rather than the moment you remember. It cuts off automatically when you lift the carafe, so you don't over-extract by leaving it draining. The concentrate keeps in the glass carafe in the fridge.

The simplest honest answer to cold brew, and the one to buy if you'd rather your coffee didn't sit in plastic overnight. Grounds go in the mesh basket, water goes in, it lives in the fridge door until morning. The body is Hario heatproof glass and the basket lifts straight out, so cleaning is a rinse rather than a disassembly. Brew and serve from the same vessel — there's no carafe to decant into.

Most espresso machines treat an iced latte as your problem. The Dedica Duo puts it on the front panel: three preset recipes — espresso, double espresso and a cold brew setting — on a touch display, so the drink most people actually order at a café is a button rather than a workaround. Underneath it is a proper semi-automatic: you fill and tamp the portafilter, the pump runs low-pressure pre-infusion and then a steady 9 bars, and the shot stops itself. The My LatteArt wand is the commercial-style kind rather than a frothing sleeve, so it will texture milk for a cappuccino once you learn it. De'Longhi says the cold brew setting takes under five minutes, using what it calls Cold Extraction Technology, but doesn't say how that differs from a slow espresso, so judge it on taste, not on the name.