The amazing Barista Caffe automatic coffee machine

Features of a machine twice the price!

The first thing that will grab you when you unpack the machine is the design. Elegant black and silver lines make up the distictive look of this compact coffee machine. At around 9kg, it fits easily onto any kitchen shelf or table.

We found the manual to be easy to understand, to the point and being full of small diagrammes, easy to apply to the machine itself. Having read the important parts, we were ready to switch on. It's really simple. Switching on takes the machine through a start up sequence that ends with a thorough rinsing of the coffee making parts. Nice to know that there is a focus on cleanliness!

First step is to programme your preferences into the memory. Do you want strong coffee, normal coffee or weak coffee? Do you want the water to be super hot (near boiling), normal or slightly cooler? These and some eight other programmable functions allow you to customise your taste. What was also quite impressive was the water hardness test and the ability to use the results of this quick dipstick test to tell the machine to manage the cleaning cycle of your machine. The harder the water, the sooner you'll need to clean it to avoid scale build up in the boilers.

Boilers...yes that brings me to the joy of having a machine with two flash boilers. So after finalising the preferred settings, we set off to make a cappuccino and an espresso. Simple operation. First we took two cups that had been heated up by the heating pad on top of the machine (nice feature!) and placed them under the coffee spout. Having filled both the generous coffee bean and removable water container with 2l of water, we pressed for a cup of coffee. The machine went into action drawing off about 7g of beans (we set this in the menu!)and then proceeded to grind the beans to a fineness that we had previously also set. This was then dropped automatically into the brew unit and we could then hear the water pump kicking in at over 9 bar of pressure to deliver piping hot water and pressure to the ground coffee. Lo and behold a stream of dark, rich smelling coffee began to flow into the cup.

We let the coffee run for 40ml (about 10 seconds) which was what we had set, and the nice feature on the machine was that we could set this "on the go" so to speak, by just pressing a "+" or "-" button as the coffee poured. The temperature was good and the crema on the espresso was exceptional.

Making a cappuccino was exactly the same, but we started by frothing milk using steam from the second boiler. This then allowed the machine to make cup after cup wthout waiting for the boiler to build up steam after making the coffee part of the capuccino. A real benefit!

The cappuccino frother is great. It allows you to set the amount of air mixing with the milk and you can get anything from hot steamed milk, with few bubbles, to layers of aerated milk with superfine bubbles that characterises great cappuccino!. The option to pour off just hot water for tea is availavble too.

Cleaning the machine was also easy as the cappuccino frother is just a rubber part into which everything just press fits into. Taking it apart took two seconds and the parts were placed in hot water for a few minutes before a two second re-assembly. The used coffee grounds fall neatly into a small tray and the machine will automatically alert you to the need to empty it. On that, should your water run low, or beans empty or if anything is not right, the machine will alert you to the fact. It's a machine for anyone from Nobel prize winning physicists to the technically challenged!

With a price tag of R5900-00, and because it possesses features only found in coffee machines twice the price, the Barista Caffe will make serious inroads into the homes of coffee lovers acrosss the country! Quality was good and after 4000 cups, we have had nothing go wrong.

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