Automatic Coffee Machines

Automatic Coffee Machines

A fully automatic coffee machine takes every decision away. Beans and water go in, you press one button, and a finished drink comes out with the milk already textured and poured. No grinding to judge, no tamping, no steam wand technique, and on the better machines no cleaning routine to remember either, because they run their own rinse cycles at switch-on and switch-off. That makes this the right format in two specific situations. The first is a busy household where several people want different drinks and nobody wants a hobby: saved profiles mean one person gets a long black and another gets a cappuccino at their own strength, from the same machine, at one press. The second is an office, a shop or a small cafe, where the machine has to work for people who will never be trained on it and must not be able to make a mess of it. For that use, look at the water tank and bean hopper capacity above everything else, because refilling a 1.8 litre tank several times a day is what makes a domestic machine unsuitable for a workplace, and look for a plumbed-in option or a larger 2.2 litre tank if the volume is real. Other things worth checking: whether the brew unit removes for rinsing, since that is the part that decides long-term reliability; how many drinks are preset and whether strength, volume and temperature can be adjusted per drink; and whether the milk system uses a carafe that lifts into the fridge between uses, which is far more hygienic than a tube into a jug. Cost per cup lands between a pod machine and a manual espresso setup, closer to the manual end, since these run on whole beans.

Siemens covers the EQ range, with the EQ300 and EQ500 for the home and the EQ6 above them. Delonghi supplies the Magnifica Start and Magnifica Plus at the accessible end, the Rivelia, and the PrimaDonna Soul with a 2.2 litre tank for higher volume. Bosch brings the Series 2 VeroCafe EQ300, and Ninja the AutoBarista and AutoBarista Pro. If you would rather pull the shot yourself, see semi automatic coffee machines, and for more see coffee machines.

For an office, a shop or a small cafe, a reduced price on a machine with a larger tank and hopper is worth more than the same reduction on a domestic model, because capacity is what decides whether the machine copes at all. Prices are live all year, so see what is reduced now on coffee machines on sale.