Equipment Review: Ratio Four Coffee Machine

Over the past 10 years, Portland, Oregon-based Ratio has gone a long way in broadening the niche of beautiful, well-wrought, simple-to-use automatic home drip coffeemakers.

The company’s first two machines, the Eight and the Six, have both earned accolades not only for their good looks and serene user experiences but also, importantly, their effective delivery and dispersal of hot water at a steady temperature over an entire bed of grounds for an even and delicious batch of brew.

Both excel at filling every cup around the Sunday brunch table, but neither is optimized for the average weekday morning or afternoon pick-me-up when just one quick cup is in order. Both also tend to be too tall for use beneath the lower kitchen cabinets found in older homes, and though their value becomes clear as soon as one experiences the build quality and performance, neither is inexpensive.

Ratio heard the call. About a year ago the company revealed the Four, a lower-profile Ratio machine built specifically to brew batches ranging from 5 to 20 ounces. It’s also Ratio’s most affordable machine to date, priced at $259 and on sale for a limited-time pre-order price of $225.

As a longtime lover of the Ratio Six, I have been watching and waiting for the Four to touch down. I was fortunate enough to spend a week testing one, and now I’m even more excited.

The Four Scores

I tried every which way to get a single-cup brew out of my Ratio Six. The height of the brewer and its larger-batch-oriented bloom phase ultimately drove me back to manually pouring my single cups every morning. With the Four, I feel taken care of, at last.

Sleek, low-profile and minimalist in design, the Four is Ratio’s first machine to include a mechanical pump, which very quietly drives water through a nimble 1200-watt flow-through aluminum water heater. Together these complete a brew within about four minutes, which is swift enough that to run it twice in order to serve a whole table is actually not out of the question.

Like all Ratio brewers, the Four is dead simple to use. No screen, dials, apps or timers — just add coffee, water, push one button and enjoy. One can easily recommend this machine to any casual coffee drinker seeking a no-brainer, high-quality cup.

Adjusting the brew temperature is also possible by refreshingly analog means. With the basket docked up closer to the 18-hole stainless steel showerhead (which consistently spread water to every inch of the brew bed), Ratio says the brew temperature is a steady 201F.

With the basket on the carafe, allowing a couple inches of open air between the spout and the grounds, the brew temperature lands closer to 195F, according to Ratio.

Another feature new to the brand is the Four’s dual built-in brew profiles. For larger brews, a single light press of the brew button enacts the main profile that delivers a 100-gram bloom pour, pauses for 30 seconds, pulse-pours to the 2-minute mark and shifts into “continuous flow” until all the water is gone.

Smaller brews benefit from pressing and holding the brew button for three seconds to start the brew, triggering a bloom pour of only 60 grams followed by the same rest of the cycle.

The machine accepts standard 8-12-cup basket-shaped paper filters — a common grocery store item. It plays just as nicely with Kalita 185 (the larger size) paper filters, which is an item often found in the cupboards of manual brewing fans, and Ratio is working on releasing its own “faster flow” paper filters that are optimized for the Four.

Fun for Geeks, Too

As a manual pour-over devotee who’s also a chronic over-thinker, I quickly learned to relish the handoff of water-pouring duties to the Four. A vast selection of brewers will fit between the Four’s base and showerhead, either on a mug or on a carafe, which encouraged me to revisit some older conical brewers that I’d gravitated away from in favor of more forgiving basket-shaped brewers.

My Phoenix 70 conical brewer, for example, had become more of an art piece than a brewer as it languished on a shelf over the years. The Four brought it right back to high esteem for the juicy cup it yielded, as well as its fun look on the machine. My daily driver — an Origami brewer with Kalita paper filter — also delivered excellent cups via the Four.

Key to this joy is the Four’s flexible reservoir system. The attractive crystal-clear standalone cylinder is light enough to detach one-handedly from its weighted base; it’s easy to shuttle to the sink to fill up; and best of all, it’s an excellent size and shape for setting on a scale to weigh out exactly the volume of water for a specific pour-over recipe.

You can also be confident that every drop will be delivered to the coffee for that recipe, as the pump revs up at the end of each brew to purge the line free of standing water between brews. When not in use the whole system is empty and dry.

Small Compromises

There’s a lot of plastic on the Four, including the case, basket and reservoir. This may be off-putting for some, in principle, although in practice, I found the materials to be a worthwhile compromise for the price, given that in all cases there are also benefits.

The matte-black sheen of its case is almost indistinguishable from metal at a glance. The reservoir is made of the same stuff as Nalgene water bottles, therefore certainly safe enough for its short stints in contact with water, plus it won’t break if you drop it. The brew basket, while lightweight, benefits from the material’s effective heat-trapping properties. Ratio also has a ceramic brewer for the Four in development, and I’ll be excited to try that out when it’s ready.

Meanwhile, one might think that a brewer of smaller cups would be smaller than its larger-batch forebears in every way, but the Four is not. If cabinets were the main obstacle to your ownership of a Ratio machine, you can comfortably now join the club. However, for cramped corners where surface area is what counts, the Four may not fit everywhere that the Six does, as its footprint is ¾-inch wider.

Users willing to forgo the Four’s lovely hand-blown smoke-tinted glass carafe in favor of brewing straight into a mug (one less item to clean) will need a leg up. The distance from the spout to the brew bed in some setups may result in undue turbulence and potentially water cooling. I use a tiny bean storage tin as a stepstool for brewing directly into an Origami brewer atop my standard mug, though my hope is that Ratio will develop a matching brew pedestal to free me from this kludge.

And finally, one of the hallmarks of both the Eight and the Six designs is the wondrous and calming thermodynamic spectacle of water gurgling up a vertical glass tube on its way to the coffee. The Four looks great, sounds nice, brews fantastically, but offers no such theater.

Four For Sure

That said, the space I cleared on the brew bar to accommodate the Four will remain clear until the company has machines fully in stock and I can pick one up for keeps. I’m excited for this to become my new daily brewer, and I can offer no higher praise than that.

Pros:

• Visually appealing
• Simple, fun and flexible use
• Excellent brewing performance
• Two built-in brew profiles
• Fair price

Cons:

• Lightweight materials
• Slightly wide footprint
• Could use a pedestal for mugs

The Ratio Four Coffee Machine can be purchased on the Ratio Website.  Coffee Review does not receive commissions or referral fees for any sales that may be generated from our equipment reviews. However, in some cases, products were reviewed as part of our fee-based service offerings.