Review: Aarke Coffee System

A coffee maker’s purpose is not to be beautiful. I have to tell myself this when looking at Aarke’s new drip coffee maker, because the Aarke Coffee System is beautiful. This fact could serve to distract me from other important things.

The Aarke is Swedish, designed by Swedes in the Swedish modernist design tradition. But it also looks a little like a full Turkish tea service has been reimagined as a shiny new gasworks. It fills me with longing for a life I don’t lead: functional, clean, freed from the messiness of a world marked by trivial disappointments.

Including a flat-burr grinder, the entire system costs north of $700, which is perhaps the price of such a life. The Aarke is part of a quiet renaissance among drip brewers, which had long been sidelined in the luxury world by espresso and pour-over. But a new generation of machines aims to elevate the home drip coffee game to the stuff of true connoisseurship, bringing out the most delicate flavors from premium beans at minimal effort on your part.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The Aarke is among just a couple dozen brewers now certified by the international Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as being capable of maintaining enormous precision in every particular: temperature, brewing time, coffee extraction, and probably also the purity of heart. The number of certified makers has doubled in the past half-decade. But the Aarke, with its shiny stainless steel exterior and modern industrial minimalism, just might be the fanciest-looking of the bunch.

Beneath its flashy reflective exterior, there some quite interesting engineering going on. The Aarke also offers a capability unlike any drip coffee setup I’ve tested: It promises to grind the exact right amount of fresh coffee beans for each batch of drip, using a sensor that measures whatever random amount of water you’ve freehanded into it. Wild stuff! More on that later.

So Shiny, So Chrome

At the most basic level, the Aarke is a thoughtfully designed coffee maker, much like the carbonation system the company is best known for. Whatever its sophisticated sensors, it requires little effort to learn. It feels old-school. At 15 inches high it’s not small by any stretch, but its heft could also be described as sturdiness. The Aarke also has what phone people like to call “haptics.” The brew basket slides in with a satisfying mechanical clunk, and even the device’s sole button offers pleasing resistance.

When you pour water in, the tank glows a subtle blue in response. This is the discreet way the Aarke says hello each morning. There are no beeps anywhere, no noises that aren’t grinding or brewing. To start a brew, just add the appropriate amount of ground coffee to a standard No. 4 conical filter in the basket. Then, press the button.

Press that button quickly, it’ll brew like a standard drip coffee maker. Press it for three seconds until the little light turns on, and it’ll first bloom the coffee by wetting it down and waiting for trapped carbon dioxide to escape from the fresh-ground beans.

Theoretically, the machine takes care of the rest, including maintaining the water at an SCA-certified brewing temperature between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit on any size batch. The Aarke’s showerhead offers water agitation similar to pour-over. A brew takes three to five minutes. The carafe’s heating element is likewise automated, ramping down over the course of about 40 minutes to avoid burning the coffee before shutting off.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The carafes I’ve made from the Aarke have been delicious—almost austere in the machine’s devotion to balance. The brew leans neither sweet nor bitter, and isn’t always as full-bodied as some. The coffee maker feels instead precise, like a Broadway singer hitting her marks. But I’d recommend keeping to batches four cups or larger, which on this device yields about two 8-ounce coffee mugs.

The Aarke says it’ll make a single-mug, “2-cup” brew, but honestly I wouldn’t. Single-mug coffee comes out less fully extracted, and frankly less hot. If you make single-mug batches often, I’d turn instead to the sweet, lovely, round coffee made by the Ratio Four (8/10, WIRED Recommends).

The Aarke’s price tag, at $379 apiece for the coffee machine and grinder, is both enormously expensive and also not much of surprise for an SCA-certified brewer with a stainless-steel carapace, lots of fancy sensors, and an expensive flat-burr grinder. This falls in the same range as last year’s Fellow Aiden (8/10, WIRED Recommends), which lists around $700 for the machine and Ode Gen 2 flat-burr grinder together.

But at this price, the Aiden offers an enormous amount of app-driven coffee customization, not to mention a quite interesting cold-brew setting. The Aarke is much more narrowly tailored. In exchange, it offers its unique paired grinder and pretty much opposite design vibes. Here is Aarke, shiny and chrome.

Back to the Grind

Now, on to what’s truly interesting and sometimes also frustrating about the full Aarke brewing system: the grinder. The bean grinder and the brewer are sold separately, but they’re designed as a system. Unlike pretty much every other drip coffee maker, the Aarke offers the ability to pair your grinder to your brewer to grind the right amount of coffee each time.

Photograph: Aarke

For now this doesn’t happen through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi but rather an awkward technology called “a short length of cord,” which joins the bottoms of each device. Nonetheless, the pairing is a terrific idea. It's a convenience that espresso lovers take for granted (see our guide to the best automated espresso makers), but it’s unheard of in drip coffee, which almost always involves a separate scale or an imprecise scoop.

The grinder spout is placed so you can skip the catch cup, grind directly into the coffe maker’s filter basket, and then slot the basket into the machine to brew. All the benefits of fresh coffee, and a lot less fuss. I kinda love it.

But my auto-grind setting was not well-calibrated out of the box. When I manually set the grinder to make enough for four “cups” of coffee using a manual turn of the dial, the grinder reliably filed 30 grams of evenly ground coffee into the filter, give or take a half a gram—pretty close to the 1:17 coffee-to-water “golden ratio” often prized by fancy coffee people.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But when I filled the coffee maker to the 4-cup mark and set the device to auto-grind, it consistently ground 25 percent more coffee. The grinder does come with a coffee strength dial, so once I noticed it was running strong I could simply dial back the auto-grind two ticks to the left and return to harmony and beauty. But on a $750 coffee system, each quirk or imprecision is a source of petty outrage.

(Note that for the Aarke, a “cup” is a petite 125 milliliters, or 4.2 ounces. Other coffee machines have larger 5- or 6-ounce “cups” that are still smaller than a standard 8-ounce cup. Coffee math is weird.)

The grinder is about as loud as expected (80 decibels) and offers a beautifully even grind all the way from fine AeroPress settings to a coarse grind suitable for cold brew or French press. But it doesn’t grind fine enough for espresso—and like all flat-burr grinders, it’s quite expensive. So if you need an espresso grinder, you’ll still need one after buying this.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Some users have reported online that the Aarke grinder can clog up, a common potential side effect of flat burrs modeled after the aggressive geometry of the SSP Multi-Shape burrs currently fashionable among the coffee tech set. That said, I didn’t really have this problem. I had to torture the Aarke to get it to jam, and it was pretty easy to get it going again using the included cleaning brush. But as a buyer, the experiences of other people would still be difficult to ignore.

All of this is to say: You may end up having a complicated relationship with this coffee system, assuming you’re the sort of person who is prone to having complicated relationships with coffee machines. At a price so high, the cautious might wait for a second-generation device.

But even out of the gate, the Aarke is a stylish showpiece of a machine, with innovative features and thoughtful details that make it possible to fall in love with. If you do fall in love, your love will require forgiveness.