My old Mr. Coffee died on a Tuesday and I spent an embarrassing amount of that evening reading drip-coffee forums. The thing every serious recommendation pointed at was the Bonavita Connoisseur, a homely little machine that has been sitting in the corner of the specialty-coffee world for a decade. I ordered it that night and have made roughly four cups a day on it since.
What Bonavita got right is the part you cannot see. The water actually reaches the SCA-recommended brew temperature of around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and it stays there for the duration of the brew. Most cheap drip machines top out around 185, which is the difference between a cup that tastes like coffee and a cup that tastes like the idea of coffee. There is also a pre-infusion step — about thirty seconds where the machine wets the grounds and pauses before the full pour — which lets the bed bloom the way a pour-over would. The first cup I made on it was clearly better than the first cup I made on the Mr. Coffee, with the same beans and the same grind.
The shower head is the other thing that matters. Most drip machines drip from a single hole in the middle and leave the outer ring of grounds essentially untouched. The Bonavita has a wide flat showerhead that wets the entire bed evenly, which is the part everyone serious about pour-over coffee will tell you is non-negotiable. You can see it work through the lid.
The machine is also extremely boring to operate, which is what I want from a coffee maker at six in the morning. There is one button. You press it. It makes coffee. There is no clock, no schedule, no app, no LCD, no "intuitive" capacitive touch surface that doesn't work when your hands are wet. The thermal carafe keeps the coffee at temperature for a few hours without scorching it on a hotplate — there is no hotplate at all, which is the right answer.
The annoyances are real. The carafe lid is a screw-on plastic affair that you have to align just so, and it leaks if you don't. The water reservoir is sealed at the top and awkward to fill from a faucet — most people end up using a separate pitcher, which is one more thing to wash. The flat-bottom filter basket means you're buying a specific size of paper filter (Melitta #4 fits), and if you grab the wrong box at the grocery store you'll be frustrated. And the brewer doesn't make a single cup well — under about four cups, the bed is too shallow to extract evenly.
A word on the alternatives. The Technivorm Moccamaster does the same thing for closer to $350 with a metal body and a lifetime warranty. It is prettier and arguably better-built, but it does not make better coffee than this. If you care about how the machine looks on your counter, spend the money. If you care about how the coffee tastes in the cup, you don't have to.
Verdict: Buy this if you want pour-over-quality coffee without standing over a kettle every morning.