Great coffee, but some annoying problems.
I am now more than a month in. First off, after I owned this for a couple of weeks the beans started feeding in better. Still not great. I now have a habbit of opening the top and mixing the beans everytime, if my hands are clean. I found if I am willing to push the coffee into the hopper I can also use ground coffee which is good for using up my old stock. Eventually though the grounder seems to stop accepting enough coffee. Then I scoop out any remaining grounds and switch back to full beans for awhile... For those wondering what the drink types really mean: Espresso - A single small shot of coffee Americano - It seems like this is slightly longer shot of coffee and then lots of hot water. Lungo - A long shot of coffee. If you are the type of person who likes to re-use pods in a pod based machine, this is the type for you. Red Eye - Lungo followed by Espresso You can only select Red Eye as a My Brew option. It helps to know what the drinks consist of because if you run out of beans and half to resume a you know what to resume with. And if you run out of water, and an Cafe Americano has finished the coffee portion, the hot water button will flash for resuming. I still don't recommend doing any more than two shots in a My Brew button. As it is easy to tell if it completed the first one before it decided it wanted you to remix the beans. It is not so clear if it has done two for a three shot selection. Original review: I am only on day two of owning this machine. Overall, I like the coffee. I don't know why some complain it is too weak, I'm now on a permanent caffeine buzz. However, there are some very annoying problems. First I read the caveat to avoid Dark Roast due to bean oil. So I picked up a bag of medium roast from Costco. But every few cups I still get the dreaded stir or add beans message. I've set the my brew button to do a tripple shot. The consequence of this error means it will stop before doing the coffee, and unless I have been standing by the machine I don't know how many shots of coffee are in my cup... This is a design flaw. As they went with a flat bean hopper with little depth, so the weight of the beans is not enough to push the beans where they need to be. I am experimenting with ways to work around this issue before I throwing in the towel. The next problem is it is horribly complicated to get the app installed. To start with they give a URL that no longer works, and no QR code. The app itself is only available in some regions. I have many google accounts, so after I picked the one registered in the US I was able to get past that problem. The setup process itself starts bad by having a long list of password requirements and then rejecting every single password that bitwarden generates meeting those criteria. It turns out the want a strong password but they truncate the password to be extremely short, removing special characters and such. Actually registering is not much better. By the time you are to this step you probably have your coffee maker setup. Yet they insist you collect information printed on the back of the machine and the bottom of the machine. Try doing that without making a big mess, or accidentally hitting the brew buttons. You cannot unplug the machine unless you want to start the process over again. I finally opted for blindly taking pictures until I had ones that were clear enough to read the information. What most manufactures do is put a QR code on the machine you can scan, and also include a copy of the QR code you can stick in your manual. It would be a much easier process. I sort of regret not waiting for Prime day, as I expect one of the other models on sale are better. But I really like the coffee, so I will try and work through the issues. Read more
