The drip coffee is meh, granted. But more than perhaps any semiautomatic machine in its price range, the Ninja Cafe Luxe Premier is geared to absolute ease and versatility—with an intuitive digital user interface that helps you along. Depending on your chosen drink, the Ninja Luxe will recommend the appropriate grind size on its display screen and help you dial it in. (This may take a couple tries.) Milk frothing is easy, and the automatic milk frothing is shockingly good. Plus, you can froth cold foam, for silly cold-foam drinks. See what I mean? Ninja is fun. We look forward to testing Ninja's new Cafe Luxe Pro ($750), which costs a little more but adds a welcome auto-tamper and hot water spout.
Best Budget Latte Machine
This Mr. Coffee machine was once our top pick. Why? Because it sits so nicely at a comfortable intersection where ease of use meets automation and affordability. This is about the lowest-priced machine you can ever expect to find with automatic milk frothing at the press of a single button, with options of late foam or cappuccino froth. Just load fine-ground coffee into the portafilter, tamp it down, and twist it on. The machine will mix up a cappuccino or a latte macchiato at the press of a button.
This machine has a forgiving (but not overly intense or nuanced) pressurized portafiter, which means it will work with almost any “espresso-grind” coffee from your local café or the grocery store. Just note you'll still get a better shot of espresso if you buy a grinder and use fresh beans from a good specialty roaster. But all in all, this is about the easiest $200 latte machine we know. Like, the hardest thing about it is that the milk canister can be removed and stored in the fridge, and you have to clean it out once a week.
Best Budget Superautomatic Espresso Machine
The Cafe Affetto is one of the few fully automatic machines that we've enjoyed in this price range. The Affetto features a built-in steaming wand, produces 20 bars of pump pressure to ensure your espresso is fully extracted, and is a slick little machine. It's very slim and fits comfortably on a small apartment countertop without having to rearrange everything. Because coffee production is automated, you just need to fill the water tank and put whole beans in the hopper, and you're good to go. You can brew one or two shots with just the press of a button, and there's a programmable button to create your favorite drinks (like an Americano with just the right amount of water).
The milk frother does a lot of the work on its own. Just pour some of your favorite milk into the frothing pitcher, submerge the wand, and hit the steam button. If you're new to frothing milk, you don't even need to move the pitcher to produce a creamy and consistent microfoam. We tested the frother with dairy milk, oat milk, and soy milk. It produced soft and creamy café-grade froth each time. Just make sure it's topped up with water and beans and that you clean out the spent grounds container regularly, and it works like a dream. —Jaina Grey
Best Semiautomatic Espresso Machine
The Breville Oracle Jet (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is my favorite of the seven new espresso machines I've tried so far this year. It's the one I recommend as my top pick in WIRED's guide to the Best Espresso Machines, over other estimable contenders from Breville that include the Barista Touch ($1,000) and the Barista Pro ($849). And it's the one that best mixes full-flavored, nuanced espresso with the ease of machine-guided, touchscreen operation. It's versatile, it's powerful, its PID controller means the temperature is quite stable, and it makes absolutely lovely cups—espresso that's denser and more intensely aromatic than the coffee made by any other machine on this list, whether in bringing out the fruity berry notes in an anaerobic light roast, or the dark chocolate of a roasty Italian.
In the finicky, often difficult world of classic home espresso machines, the Oracle Jet is a paragon of simplicity and machine-guided brewing: It's a miracle that one can so easily pull such delicious and nuanced shots, that remain so sensitive to the character of each bean. But that sensitivity still makes the Oracle Jet a little more finicky than other machines on this list. And while the automatic milk frothing is quite good, it's not as failsafe as our favorites here. (I still like steaming milk manually on the Breville, versus using the auto-froth.) But if you want espresso that will distill he beauteous character of fresh-roasted beans but still don't want to try overly hard—on a machine whose intuitive touchscreen tutorial will guide you to lovely flat whites and capps? This is your huckleberry.
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