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(More customer reviews)I thought this would be the machine of my dreams, (at this price it should be!), it is not. My machine will not "wake up" from standby mode or put itself into standby mode, so I have to wait in the morning for it to heat up. Which completely eliminates why I bought the $$$ machine rather than the $ machine. I will be returning it, but here is the lowdown on how it works.
This machine will grind up to 10ish grams of coffee and dispense that into a maximum of 18ish ounces of water (you get less coffee though b/c the puck absorbs some of that water). You can set each of the three icons to dispense whatever custom combination of temperature(a,b,c), preinfusion time (a,b, off), grind volume (a,b,c, preground) and water volume (slider on 1.5" bar adjustable by roughly 1/20th of an ounce) you would like and there is a dial on the front to additionally control how long the water takes to pass through the puck which affects the "Strength" of the coffee.
Rather than using the somewhat inscrutable "coffee volume" slider you can manually do a beverage and hit the "stop" button when you want it to stop flowing, and then save that setting. So for me to get my morning thermos of 16oz of strong crema coffee I had to program "Long Coffee" to be preinfusion=strong, aroma(amount of beans ground)=strong, turn the front dial all the way to the right and I had to hit "Stop" when it filled my measuring cup with 8oz coffee and save it, which meant that when I hit "Long Coffee" twice (it will do twice in a row if you hit it twice but no more than that) it would spew out 16oz of coffee.
So theoretically (were it to wake itself up in the morning) all I would have to do is hit that button twice and put my cup (thermos is too tall) under there to catch it, it would take about 3 minutes or more to fill that cup. As it is I have to wait for it to "Rinse" (put a cup under the spout to catch the "Rinse"), and then warm up before I can have coffee. It doesn't take long, but it seems long when you are walking out the door, like more than 5 minutes for coffee, when I could just pour it out from a regular automatic grind_n_brew pot and be on my way.
I have additionally programmed the "Coffee" icon to make me a 12oz mug when pressed twice and my "Espresso" button to make me a long espresso, which when I press twice gives me a nice amount for my latte.
Ugh, my latte, the frothing on this thing is vexing. I can froth and latte art pretty well with a regular one hole steam wand, and always prided myself on my microfoam. I can barely steam milk with this thing. The steam wand on the left moves about two inches fore or aft but does not move up or down or swing out in any way. So my milk pitcher is always smacking into the spouts on the front. The rubber handle on the steam wand (so you don't get burned moving it) is so close to the bottom of the wand that once your milk starts frothing you can't push the wand back to the bottom of the milk container or it will come up over the handle. Once you are done steaming you can't just rest your milk under the steam wand (to catch the drips) because the drip tray is curved and the steam wand is over the narrow part, so your jug of milk would just fall off the tray.
The drip tray is electric which is stupid, small and flimsy. It is bound to fail and doesn't hold your full cup without bending almost enough that your cup is going to slide right onto the floor. I would just leave it at the bottom setting unless you are really pulling shots into two tiny espresso cups.
How's the coffee you ask. It's decent. You wouldn't be disappointed if you paid $2.50 for it, but it is not the best espresso you've ever had, or even close to the espresso I can make on my semi-automatic machine. But it's faster and I can do it with less effort. The grind seems fine enough and the temperature seems hot enough to do a good extraction, no sourness or bitterness (left temp on medium as it came set on). It is crema coffee, not drip, so don't expect it to taste like your coffee maker. Some of the crema is fake and white due to the dial being turned all the way to the right and creating that extra sort-of fake back pressure on the puck, so it can seem floamy, but dialing it back a notch fixes that without affecting strength.
It's prompts you to fill the water tank when it is 3/4 empty and dump the pucks when there are maybe 6 of them in there, so you might as well just make it a habit to do them both at the same time anyway b/c it will stop your coffee and prompt you to do so and if you take too long it will cancel your coffee and dump your puck even if you didn't get all the way done.
The bypass doser only accepts one scoop of preground coffee at a time so don't think you will be making anything other than decaf single small pucks and then pulling your desired quantity of water through them.
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