"Throw Out Your Drip Coffee Brewer!" by Karen Paterson
Manual pour over coffee is hot. Coffee shops all over the United States are offering manual pour over cups of coffee starting at $5.00 a cup. A well done pour over coffee is significantly better than a cup of automatic drip brewed coffee. The difference is that the coffee is pulsed into the brew basket slowly to extend the extraction time. You can make a manual pour over yourself but you have to commit about 4 minutes to brew the coffee. In our convenience oriented society, few people are willing to stand over a coffee filter and pour water for 4 minutes.
Brewer manufactures have caught on, and there is a rush to design and manufacture automatic pour over coffee makers for the home market. There is a significant taste improvement in pour over coffee over automatic drip coffee. It is our prediction that within a few years automatic drip coffee makers will have followed percolators into coffee history. Capsule and pod markers will still have a place in the home based on their convenience, but unless they improve some of their defects they won’t be dominate. Of course, there will always be purists who brew coffee manually and at the top end, there will also be automatic french presses like the Bunn Trifecta.
You should expect a flood of new automatic pour over machines on the market in the next year. Many manufacturers will convert their current automatic drip makers so that they pulse water into the brew basket. Commercial brewer manufacturers have already converted their brewers.
New automatic pour over brewers are on the expensive side. If you wait the prices will come down. However, if you are an “early adopter” here are some of the current and soon to be released models.
A new automatic pour over maker is the Ratio. They have designed a “one-button” brewer that pulses water in 
for a pre-infusion of the grounds. Total brew time is about 6 minutes. The first 500 brewers sold out before they came on the market. The design is a work of art. So far there are no reviews on the coffee quality. The price from the manufacturer is $480.
Hario has created a new automatic coffee brewer, the V60 Coffee King. They have taken the 
V60 coffee cone used for manual pour overs and placed it into an automatic brewer that pulses the brew water into the cone. The reviews are excellent. The V60 Coffee King is being sold by Amazon and on EBay. The price is $171. (Be sure you get the 110 volt American model unless you have 240 volt wiring)
Kitchen Aid is bringing out an automatic pour over brewer in August. Kitchen Aid claims that the new brewer mimics the manual pour over process. There are no reviews yet on the machine. The MSRP is $229.99
has an automatic pour over machine on the market the BODUM Bistro B. it is getting good reviews for the taste of the coffee and a lot of bad reviews for the quality of construction. One problem is that the brew basket overflows and wets the power switch – not a good idea. It is being heavily discounted from its MSRP of $250.
The Behmor Brazen allows the user to set the water temperature anywhere between 190-210°F. The brewer has a function that pre-soaks the grounds. It is getting good reviews, however, it has a few complaints that the carafe drips and the water pump fails. The brewer uses an insulated carafe instead of a hot plate, which is a strong plus. The price is $199.
Should you throw out your automatic drip coffee maker? Maybe not yet, but when you need to replace your old coffee maker because the water temperature is going down, then you should replace it with an automatic pour over. When we installed our commercial automatic pour over at the Hula Daddy visitor center, our tour guides wanted to know where we got the new coffee. It wasn’t new coffee, it was the same coffee they had tasted the day before in our drip coffee maker, it was just more flavorful in the pour over coffee brewer.
