In my years of testing and covering coffee I’ve watched drip coffee makers take a turn for the fancy. I’m talking water temperature controlled with precise thermostats, automated bloom time to off-gas coffee beans, and well-engineered thermal carafes that do away with the need for coffee-ruining hot plates. If that all sounds like a lot to you, here’s the good news: You can still make coffee with all these fancy machines by pushing a single button. The newest automatic brewer of fine coffee comes from luxury design company Aarke, and it’s not just a coffee brewer. Along with a hefty burr grinder that connects directly to the brewer, Aarke’s newest product is a complete coffee system.
I spent a month with the Aarke coffee maker to see if the coffee it made was worth its premium price tag. Here’s how it went:
How the Aarke coffee system works
Both the Aarke brewer and grinder can be used separately, but they’re designed to work together. The Aarke coffee maker is similar to other high-end, single-button automatic coffee makers. It has a wide showerhead that does a stellar job of wetting the entire coffee bed. It has an optional bloom function that adds a small amount of water to the ground coffee to release some of the CO2 that can cause off flavors. It also does a nice job regulating water temperature; the water I ran straight through the machine without any coffee came out between 202 and 205, which is right in the precise range you want for most coffee beans.
What differentiates the Aarke from almost everything else on the market is the burr grinder that connects to the coffee maker. On its own, the grinder performed similarly to other well-reviewed grinders like the Fellow Opus or the Baratza Encore ESP. It has settings to grind enough coffee for 2 and 10 cups, and consistently ground about nine grams of coffee per cup. It’s a flat burr grinder, which tends to produce a more consistent, even grind than conical burr grinders (flat burrs also tend to be more expensive), and it has 50 grind settings along with a micro adjustment wheel to tweak the dose of coffee (the strength of the brew). In addition to using it with the Aarke brewer, I made espresso, pour-over, and French press coffee. The grinder was versatile enough to handle all of them. That’s good news if you, like me, have people in your house that like coffee brewed in different styles.
The automatic setting (“AutoGrind Integration”) is the most impressive feature, though. Connect the grinder to the brewer with ⅛ mm plug, the kind you’d use on old corded headphones. The grinder will read how much water is in the coffee maker’s tank, producing the exact right amount of coffee to hit the Specialty Coffee Association’s (SCA) Golden Cup standard. I tried this out with lots of different volumes of water, and it really does work. Filling the reservoir to the four cup mark, for example, produced 38.7 grams of ground coffee, almost right on the 1:18 coffee to water ratio recommended by the SCA.
What I liked about the Aarke coffee system
Like all the Aarke products we’ve tested here over the years, the coffee system is beautiful and well-made. There are luxe design touches right down to the heavy glass lid of the coffee grinder that’s etched with suggestions for what settings to use for different brewing methods and the also beautiful glass carafe that comes with the brewer. Part of what you’re paying for is undoubtedly the aesthetic appeal, but the brewer does make very tasty coffee.
The grinder is versatile enough to work on its own. It produced a very even grind on every setting I tried. Plus, its accurate integration with the brewer makes it a better bet than a machine with a built-in grinders like the Café Grind and Brew.
What I didn’t like about the Aarke coffee system
I found myself wishing the brewer had at least one more button or switch. The single button on the Aarke brewer does the following: Begin a brew, set the bloom function (if you hold it for three seconds), and turn the hot plate on or off (if you hold it for seven seconds if the reservoir is empty). That’s a lot for one unlabeled button, and if I didn’t thoroughly read the instructions I would have had a hard time figuring all that out. I think the point of a drip coffee maker is that it should be simple enough for anyone to use and the Aarke doesn’t quite check that box.
I didn’t love the catch cup of the grinder, which is just an open-topped stainless-steel cup. It doesn’t fit perfectly flush with the grinder and lets a bit of coffee on to the counter, though the instructions do suggest grinding straight into the brewer’s filter basket.
Finally, the thermal carafe—which comes included if you buy the whole coffee system—is good but not great. It kept coffee above 110 for about 90 minutes, which is less than either the carafe included with the Fellow Aiden or the Ratio Six.
Is the Aarke coffee system worth it?
Together, the entire system costs over $800. That’s a lot of money. But for a high-end coffee maker and grinder, it’s actually not an outlier. A Fellow Aiden brewer and Fellow Ode grinder, for example, cost over $700 together. And Aarke’s components, while they may not top BA’s list of individual coffee grinders and coffee makers, work incredibly well together. If you are the kind of person who wants to invest serious money in an automatic coffee set up, Aarke’s will keep good coffee flowing easily every morning.
