Looking for a quick and convenient way to make iced coffee? Good news – the latest generation of coffee machines can create delicious drinks with the same taste as traditional cold-brew, and do it in minutes rather than hours.
Cold brewing produces a different flavor profile to preparing coffee using hot water, extracting the sweeter compounds from the beans while leaving most of the bitter notes behind for a drink that tastes noticeably smoother.
The big drawback to making cold-brew coffee the traditional way is time. It takes a lot longer for flavor compounds to dissolve in cold water, so you need to prepare your cold-brew coffee the day before you want to drink it, by steeping ground coffee in cold water and leaving it in the fridge.
Thankfully though, that’s no longer your only option, as an increasing number of the best coffee machines now offer a dedicated cold-brew mode that uses cold water and high pressure to create cold-extracted espresso. Add iced water, and you can achieve the same (or a very similar) taste as old-fashioned cold brewing in a fraction of the time.
If you’re looking for a way to make chilled coffee at home fast, here are two of the best options available right now, plus one drip machine for preparing it the traditional way, but without the mess.
Sage Luxe Brewer Thermal
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The Luxe Brewer Thermal (sold under the Sage brand in the UK, and Breville everywhere else) is the best drip coffee maker I’ve tested this year, and as well as making excellent hot coffee. it also prepares excellent cold-brew the traditional way, by steeping the grounds in cold water overnight.
The advantage of using the Luxe Brewer Thermal rather than a jar in the fridge is that it times exactly how long your coffee has been brewing, and sounds an chime when it’s ready to enjoy. The machine’s insulated carafe is excellent, and during my tests it kept half a quantity of freshly brewed coffee hot for over hour hours. Toss some ice into your cold brew, and it should stay perfectly chilled for even longer. It’s super easy, and there’s no messy pouring and filtering.
The Luxe Brewer Thermal does its job exceptionally well and is the most affordable option in this list. Rather than over-complicating the simple process of making pour-over (I’m looking at you, Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker), it offers just a small handful of customizable settings. If you choose to brew hot, you can pick the bloom volume (how much water is allowed to soak into your ground coffee to pre-infuse it), bloom time, brew temperature, and flow rate, but that’s all.
Read our full Sage Luxe Brewer Thermal review
De’Longhi La Specialista Touch
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So you want authentic-tasting chilled coffee, you want it fast, and you don’t want to re-mortgage your house. The De’Longhi La Specialista Touch might just be the machine for you, and it’s a great choice for small kitchens too.
The La Specialista Touch takes up much less space than most bean-to-cup coffee machines, but don’t let its petite proportions fool you. This is a seriously good coffee maker, and with a little practice it’ll have even complete novices preparing consistently great espresso. It guides you through each step of the process, from choosing the best grind size to getting the right dose of coffee, tamping it down, and timing your shot to see whether it’s properly extracted.
It also has an excellent cold-brew function, which takes a little longer than pulling a shot of hot espresso, but still produces a flavor that’s strikingly similar to coffee prepared overnight. It’s not quite as flavorful as cold-infused coffee made by the Jura J10 below, but considering De’Longhi’s machine is half the price, it’s very impressive.
Just be aware that, unlike the Jura, the La Specialista Touch can’t foam cold milk (it just has a steam wand), so iced cappuccinos and lattes will be out unless you use a standalone milk frother like the Dreo Baristamaker.
Read our full De’Longhi La Specialista Touch review
Jura J10
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If you love iced coffee and your budget will stretch to it, the Jura J10 makes the most well-rounded cold-extracted espresso I’ve had from any home coffee maker, and in a blind taste test, I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference between the J10’s cold americano and coffee steeped in a pitcher overnight.
Unlike earlier Jura models, the J10 uses pulses of high-pressure water to make its cold espresso, which extracts more flavor from the freshly-ground beans. It definitely does seem to work, and there’s a noticeable difference between coffee brewed using this and the La Specialista Touch. Even though I used the same beans in both, coffee from the Jura had more body.
Another point in Jura’s favor is the ability to foam both hot and cold milk – yes, you can finally make iced latte macchiatos in the comfort of your own kitchen. If your usual coffee order is particularly complicated, you’ll also love the syrup infusion system (known as SweetFoam), which adds your preferred flavor to the milk as it’s foamed. During testing, I found it made both hot and cold foam more stable, so it lasts to the last sip.
All of this comes at a price though, and the Jura J10 is one of the most expensive coffee makers I’ve ever had my hands on. It’s hard to argue with its results though.
Read our full Jura J10 review
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