The Specialty Coffee Association’s (SCA) holy list of certified coffee brewers has been updated.
Easily the most rigorous third-party testing program for coffee makers, the SCA’s brutal inspection and testing standards now certifies ultra-high performance in 30 different brewers — a two brewer increase since we last reported in October 2019, but still a small count relative to the number of drip coffee brewers out there.
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What’s new? Oxo’s follow-up to its 9-cup Barista Brain, the 8-Cup Coffee Maker ($180), made the list. (We can confirm it’s a great coffee maker.) With its push-to-brew functionality, makes it easy to brew a single-serving of coffee or a whole carafe. While the brewer is SCA-certified, only its carafe coffee achieves the Gold Cup standard (the SCA has yet to set a Gold Cup standard for single-serve coffee). A late 2019 addition to the list was the Paderno 9-Cup Balanced-Brew Coffee Maker ($200). The Canadian-based brand’s coffee maker came out in 2019, and its notable features include a “Small Batch” brew setting, mid-brew pause function and a built-in filter basket that foregoes paper filters. It also shares a similar design to the Oxo Barista Brain swapping its cylindrical water reservoir for a cuboid shape.
Long-time favorites like Oxo’s Barista Brain ($200), Breville’s Precision Brewer ($300), Bonavita’s One-Touch ($150) and a host of Moccamasters all remain on the list.
If you want to read more on what the SCA tests for, both its minimum requirements for certification and extraction performance and consistency evaluation processes are available to anybody.