Good hot drinks. Loud. Pretty.
This super automatic works surprisingly well. It has conical steel burrs on the grinder that feed a brew group directly below the bean chute. The brew group is sideways and uses a loud motor to turn a big screw for compressing the puck. While that puck will be denser on the bottom than the top because of gravity, it still extracts very well when using a coarser setting than typical for espresso on a portafilter. The screen is big and pretty and easy to use. It has no customization for things I would like (temperature, water amount, grind amount, pre-infusion time). I have not found a service menu despite lots of online searching. I have seen this machine in many resellers and have started calling it the two's. It makes a hot espresso shot and equally hot latte macchiato. The brew group is easy to remove and rinse but most of the moving parts look a bit hard to access for maintenance. The rinse cycle dumps into the grounds hopper, so the pucks end up as soup. Water capacity is decent, but the bean hopper seems to be taken up by the large grind adjustment dial. The machine is very loud. More so than most of the name brand machines I use. The milk canister has no gasket on the lid and the hose is fiddly. If left attached, the machine will spray milk all over the counter when it times out and self-cleans. Read more
