To fully enjoy your choice of coffee, which we will also recommend and help you to choose on this site, requires a superior method of extracting the awesome flavors of those beans and blends.
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While there are a variety of methods and devices to extract coffee from the beans, most serious coffee drinkers look for a method that produces a consistent flavor, caters for individual drinking preferences, is easy to use and does not require a lot of maintenance / cleaning. To meet these goals, I can personally recommend the use of what is referred to as a bean-to-cup coffee machine.
Why use a Bean-to-cup coffee machine?
Pros: * Easy to use; * Easy and programmable personalised coffee extraction; * Makes consistent coffee; * Very little mess; * Easy to clean; * Great when making coffee for multiple people; * Fairly accurate with "standard" Ristretto and Espresso creation; * Pre-infusion built-in
Cons: * Expensive; * Difficult to experiment with dose and extraction; * No ability to control temperature or pressure
You can start enjoying beautiful fresh-ground coffee today, by having one of these DeLonghi-Magnifica Automatic Coffee machines shipped to your door from Amazon
Having personally used a variety of machines from stove-top percolators, drip-filters, manual grinder / manual extractors through to pod-systems, we can testify along with many of the reviewers of the machine we are recommending, that an excellent compromise between professionally barista served coffee and the hassle and mess of manually extracting your own drinks, are the Bean-to-Cup machines which are so readily available to almost anyone who wants one these days.
While there are both much-less and much-more expensive options available, the one we have chosen to present to you is what we call middle-of-the-price-range. It sits in a 'sweet-spot' where cost-savings and convenience over purchased coffees more than offsets the the slightly higher dollar value of the machine.
In other reviews (such as From bean to cup on a budget) we will look at the cheaper and dearer options for those who are happy to compromise on quality of their coffee for the sake of their budget vs those who believe that a top-end method of coffee extraction will deliver a superior coffee experience which justifies the cost of top-end machines.
Our personal experience of the DeLonghi bean-to-cup machines was that the first one finally died after more than 7 years regular daily usage, and our second one is currently going strong heading into its second year.
From the many hundreds of reviews of this machine, 75% (over 523 reviewers!) rated the machine as 5 out of 5 stars with at-least one user even making the effort to return after a year to increase their original 4 star rating to the full 5 stars, they were so pleased with the machine.
Recurring comments summarised from those reviews are:
Easy to fill, use and clean
Settings are straight forward and easy to program to individual preferences
Makes great cafe-quality coffee and easy to adjust to your liking.
Milk Frother is very easy to use.
Produces plenty of crema
Saves money over buying takeaway coffees
Less hassle \ mess than capsules or manual extraction
Much less waste than capsule based systems
There were very few negative comments but the one commonly recurring comment was
The water tank is a little on the small side
although as more than one comment noted, this can actually be a positive in the sense that it encourages there always being fresh water in the tank.
A couple of the individual comments are reproduced here for your enjoyment
bought and used it for more than 6 months now and I can say it is an amazingly perfect coffee machine to have at home!
After suffering through pod machines and then trying reusable pods, this one really does the trick.
Some of the features we particularly love are:
Ease of cleaning and an automated periodic decalcification process
If you like your coffee white, you can either use the supplied Cappuccino frothing carafe, or steam your own milk in a small jug
The inbuilt grinder is nowhere near as noisy as earlier bean-to-cup products and is fairly un-obtrusive on other sound sources such as conversation or television in the same room, plus the grinder offers 13 grind-coarseness settings.
The other neat feature is that you can intersperse your regular coffee with individual one-off preferences by grinding other beans or blends on the side and introducing them directly to the machine's extractor, using the 'manual grind' (spoon) setting
So don't spend hours sifting through the dozens of makes and models of coffee machines to decide on a good one, we just did all that research work for you so you can confidently click this link to have a well-recommended machine delivered to you right away.
NOTE: this web site is NOT focused on reviewing coffee machines, I've just added these posts to offer some researched guidance on what machines you can use to enjoy the benefits of what the rest of the site is about ... coffee beans and blending