The Best Nut Milk Makers

I tested the pricey Almond Cow Starter Set, which includes the milk maker and a few accessories, such as a rather cute branded glass milk jug, and a cleaning brush. You just need to add water to the vessel (between 5 and 6 cups), put the dry ingredients in the filter cup, twist it onto the bottom of the lid so the blender arm is in the materials, put the lid on, and press the button. The Almond Cow then grinds and mixes everything, a process that takes a few minutes. When it is done, the light on the top turns blue, and the milk is ready. The pulp is kept in the filter cup, which you remove and clean by hand. A collector cup is included, which fits over the filter cup to stop it dripping everywhere. The vessel also has to be rinsed out between uses.

The high-speed blender with multiple blades meant the almonds were well blended, and little or no grainy plant material was left behind. However, after using the Almond Cow, there is a lot of cleaning: Clean the filter cup, rinse the top off (the milk gets splashed inside the vessel as it is blended), and clean the vessel itself. It makes well-blended milk in decent quantities and does it pretty quickly. What it does not do, however, is handle the variety of other types of milk some machines can. You are limited to raw milk like almonds, cashews, and oats. —Richard Baguley

This machine automates the process of milk-making but allows plenty of flexibility in the source and quantity, and has an auto-clean feature that saves a lot of time. It looks like a coffee machine, with a loader at the top and a glass carafe at the front. There’s even a water reservoir at the back, like a Keurig or other capsule coffee maker, though you have to refill it every time you use it. After filling the water tank in the back and adding your preferred ingredients, you'll select the cycle from the control panel, and it brews you up a batch in the handy milk jug on the front of the machine. That process took about 18 minutes for oat milk and 45 minutes for soy milk. Once complete, the Milkmade beeps contentedly and runs a cleaning cycle that purges the system and dumps the cleaning water into an internal hopper. Once the cleaning cycle is complete, empty the hopper, and the Milkmade is ready to run again.

It's simple and effective, but the downside is that you must refill the water reservoir and empty the internal water hopper every time you use it. The Milkmade did an excellent job blending the milk but didn’t filter it, meaning the milk can have a slightly gritty texture from bits of the source material. The control panel provides six presets (almond, soy, oat, cashew, macadamia, and coconut) but you must select your desired preset by pressing the program button repeatedly until the one you want is selected. Additionally, you can only set a delay; there is no true timer. There is also no way to customize the presets, so you can’t raise or lower the mix temperature or tweak the grinding time. —Richard Baguley

The Numilk is unique for nut milk makers in that you don’t actually insert nuts and water into the machine. I like the final product, but I’m not sure why this entire machine is necessary to make these milks. It comes with a variety of concentrated flavor packets, which you then tear and insert into the top of the machine. You fill the provided container with water, place it in the machine, and then the packet empties out into the water and gets blended together.

They do get mixed very well, but you could really just use a blender if you don’t want to buy a whole extra gadget. The flavor packets are pretty tasty, so you could in theory just buy those on their own and blend them yourself. The container that the flavor packet pours into to be both the best and worst design aspect of this product. I like that it comes with a sturdy container that the milk gets poured into directly. The silicon lid is also very tight and doesn’t have any leakage when you shake it to mix the inevitable separation. However, you can’t swap this container for another because it’s custom to the Numilk and needs to snap in place so the blender works properly. So when you have one milk sitting in the fridge, you’re not able to make another until you’re finished with that one. —Andrew Watman

Looking like a slightly overgrown electric kettle, the Tribest Soyabella is a simple plant milk maker that can do other things, such as make soups, infusions, and tofu. It is rather too simple, though—the only option is to make raw or heated milk, chosen by a pair of buttons on the top of the device. This top lifts off to reveal the device's workings: a blender arm and a filter cup. To make a batch of milk, you put up to 4 cups of water in the vessel and a cup of your plant material into the filter cup, which twists to lock onto the top. The blender then grinds up the material and mixes it with the water, while the filter cup keeps the plant pulp contained. The process takes about a minute for raw milk and between 15 and 25 minutes for hot milk, depending on how much water you add. I found the results from the suggested recipes relatively weak and watery; the instructions suggest that you run the cycle two or three times to get a better result, which was a good idea. It would be better if there were a way to set a longer blend time. There is also no provision here for automatically soaking the plant source, so you must do that manually.

The short manual shows how to use it to make soup, sauces, and soft tofu, and includes a good selection of recipes for various dishes. A grinding cup is also included, which fits over the blender arm to grind dry ingredients. The Tribest Soyabella tries to be a jack-of-all-trades but doesn’t master any of them. It makes decent milk, but only if you run it twice or thrice. —Richard Baguley