Depending on who you ask, around half the people on this planet drink at least one cup of coffee a day as a matter of routine – with a significant proportion having strong feelings about the origin of bean, manner of roasting, size of grain, and the multitude of brewing considerations that come with the world’s most beloved beverage. In order to help those who live on caffeine find the ideal brewer, we took on the Herculean task of reviewing the best coffee makers around to bring you our top five favourites available in Malaysia.
Image Credit: Breville
From Breville, the Australian manufacturer of kitchen appliances that brought us the world’s first sandwich toaster, the brushed stainless steel beauty that is the BES920 is for those among us who yearn for a commercial-grade coffee machine that appears to have been assembled by a team of propulsion engineers. The Breville BES920 is a dual boiler – for those in the know, that means it dishes out coffee at the ideal temperature of 96 degrees Celsius and steam for milk at 71 degrees Celsius without skipping a beat. Mechanisms used in industrial applications control the device’s temperature and pressure: a kind of automatic cruise-control regulates temperature, while pressure is limited to 10 bars by an overpressure valve. The digital display keeps users informed of temperature and duration to enable the precise control of brewing parameters, while a series of uncomplicated buttons define whether a shot is made single, double, or manually for a caffe lungo.
Image Credit: De’Longhi
For those who just want a simple cup of coffee, and would rather not wrestle with obscure details such as ideal temperature, pressure, and duration of preinfusion and extraction, the De’Longhi Eletta is a compact device that takes 400 grams of your selection of whole beans, grinds them as needed, extracts the magic bean sweat, produces a layer of milk froth, and cleans itself when it is all done. The digital display and touch sensor buttons enable the effortless selection of different qualities of coffee and milk, while the smart programming alters the temperature and density of the results automatically.
Image Credit: Krups
While most automatic offerings detract from the finer points of coffee making, capsule-based coffee machines provide exact and easily-repeatable coffees without requiring a familiarity with the art of brewing. The German appliance maker’s collaboration with the food and beverage giant, Nestlé, was made famous by a prolonged relationship of endorsement with a certain grizzled movie star – resulting in the wide availability of pods containing various blends sold out of department stores and coffee boutiques worldwide. Any one of Krups’ capsule-based devices would be appropriate for a light drinker of coffee, or a beginner unconcerned with things like bean origin and roasting duration, but the relative affordability of the Krups Mini Me makes it an ideal starting point.
Image Credit: Miele
A family-owned and operated producer of kitchen appliances with over a century of experience, Miele, provides us with what could be arguably called the Tesla of domestic coffee machines. While other premium coffee machines require gratuitous swathes of countertop space only to appear as disembodied jet engines that seem out of place in today’s compact kitchens, the Miele CVA6800 is an automatic bean-to-cup device that is made to blend seamlessly with walls. Aside from the ability to turn half a kilo of whole beans into customisable blends on demand, the most notable feature of the CVA6800 is its ability to automatically clean itself by flushing its internal pipes and reservoirs with hot water.
Image Credit: Morphy Richards
From the Accents range of Morphy Richards products, comes a bright-red coffee machine that bridges the gap between capsule-based and ground coffee. Capsule-based machines are ideal for infrequent coffee drinkers but tastes will mature – habits will change, and sooner or later, someone will want to graduate from the expense of capsules to the relative affordability and customisability of ground beans of their choosing. Rather than getting a new machine to suit changing tastes, one could start with the Easy Serve pods in the Accents coffee machine and subsequently make the switch to more ecologically-conscientious bags of ground beans when the need to explore different flavours develops.
*Brands are listed alphabetically
