I was spending an obscene amount of money at our local coffee shop, so my husband got this for me for a birthday/Christmas combo gift. My first impressions were very good, and I figured I would begin to recoup my cost of the machine after the first year of owning it. Unfortunately, right about the 12 month and 2 week mark, I noticed the first couple of issues. I’m grateful now that I purchased an extended warranty, but even that is likely to have its problems (I need to find a box sturdy and enormous enough for shipping, and who knows how long I’ll be without the machine while it’s being repaired). I’ll mention the dysfunctional parts in the “cons” below. First, the PROS: I make primarily iced Americanos, so it’s super easy to hit the double shot button and walk away with a delicious iced coffee just a minute or two later. Warm up doesn’t take very long. I get my cup and cream ready while it wakes up and gets warm. The ability to adjust where the espresso comes out of the machine is nice. My taller glasses fit well underneath, but if I have a short mug, I can adjust the machine so espresso doesn’t splatter everywhere. The automatic milk frothing jug makes wonderfully frothed milk. I know others don’t care for the temperature (commenting that it’s not hot enough) but I find that it’s just right if I drink my macchiato right away. That said, I only drink hot beverages about one month of the year, and I do drink them right away, so this wouldn’t be a major concern of mine anyway. Being able to adjust how fine the grind is, how much milk comes out for each programmed beverage, and the heat of the espresso are helpful features. I like to make flat whites, and I’ve essentially programmed the macchiato button to make those for me. Getting to the spent puck bin and dirty water collection tray is simple, because it’s behind the front of the machine, and the door is easy to access, open, and close. I love that the machine auto cleans the tubing in the dairy carafe. CONS: The pop up door on the top of the machine where you can bypass the grinder (where you might use decaf grounds for someone who doesn’t drink caffeine) is temperamental. Ours is now broken and won’t close at all. The plastic surface inside the bean hopper isn’t durable in the least. Something from our beans (perhaps the oil?) must have reacted with the plastic, and the beans stuck. When we removed the beans, chips of the plastic surface came off. I called the US office for the manufacturer, and they were as stumped as I was. Their best guess was that some chemical from the decaffeination process degraded the plastic. Their suggestion was to switch to a Swiss water process decaf. I’ll do that for my health, but I think it says something about the materials used in that part that it can’t handle whatever kind of bean a consumer wishes to use. A thin layer of stainless steel in that spot, just where the beans sit, would make sense. The water tank is a royal pain to empty/refill. The machine is so tall, that it must be moved forward, out of the way of upper cabinets, if it’s stored on a countertop that has wall cabinets above. We refill our tank with fresh water daily, so it’s the one access point of the machine that sees the most frequent use. The bean hopper is also on the top, covered by a door, but we don’t open that more than once a week or so. We empty the puck and rinse water containers almost as often as we fill the fresh water tank, so it helps that it is easy to access. But if I were designing a unit that would most often be stored underneath wall cabinets, I would put the most used tank or bin in front, so it could very easily be reached. Because the feet of the machine are rubber, it doesn’t slide well at all. I added felt pads to the bottom of ours to make sliding it forward and back much easier. It’s a heavy machine, so I’m certainly not worried about someone accidentally pushing it off the counter. There is no indicator to show that the water tank is almost empty. On a regular basis, I press the button for a drink and the coffee beans are ground and a puck formed, only to have the process stop mid-cycle, because the machine didn’t realize that there wasn’t enough water to complete the process. Some kind of indicator would be nice. The bypass hopper for ground coffee is VERY sensitive to just slightly more than the required amount of grounds. If a tad too much is added, the machine will dump perfectly good grounds into the waste bin without brewing anything. I’ll try to update the review once I’ve received it back from the extended warranty company. I’m hoping it doesn’t take an eternity to be repaired, and that I’m back up and running quickly. I am hoping I somehow got a faulty coffee hopper part, and that I’m not dealing with the exact same plastic problem a year from now. I love that home automatic espresso machines are available, and I plan to keep one in our home as long as we can afford to have one; I’m just not sure that this is the one I’d choose a second time around.
