design

Prepare your kitchen for the invasion of the coffee-snatchers

The Smarter Coffee Machine is a coffee cook, the other two are chefs

What brings these three machines together is that you put coffee beans in at the top and you get coffee out of the bottom. And often with as little as one button-press inbetween. Pretty cool, right?

The obvious question here is: how can De’Longhi ask for £1,500 for its machine when Smarter wants so much less for the same basic idea? We’ll cover the whole gamut of differences, but let’s start with the basics.

Where the De’Longhi PrimaDonna Elite and the Gaggia Anima Deluxe are really espresso-makers with smart grinders stitched onto the top, at its heart the Smarter Coffee Machine is a filter-coffee device. The difference? Espresso machines fire steam and a small amount of hot water through tightly packed coffee grounds relatively slowly, whereas drip-filter machines literally plonk near-boiling water directly onto fairly loose grounds. Gravity does the work.

In practical terms, what this means is that where the De’Longhi and Gaggia are geared to make single drinks – from a single shot of pure black, early-morning livener to an ultra-milky latte – the Smarter Coffee Machine is desperate to make a giant carafe of plain coffee. It’s a coffee cook, whereas the other two are coffee chefs. Still, it has its benefits; you can customise the colour of the Smarter with plastic front plates, and it’s the easiest to fit into dinky kitchens.

The Gaggia Anima Deluxe’s design is simple; pared-back. Just press one of the six buttons on the front to output the coffee-building blocks: espresso, hot milk, hot water and so on. Its milk-steamer attachment outputs lovely foamy froth with zero effort. The downside: no presets means you need to know what you’re doing.

The De’Longhi is the tech wiz of these three, with its giant colour touchscreen making it a real coffee computer. It’s very big, it’s impressive and it’s bloody expensive. It’ll suck up your kitchen worktop space like nothing else, and a separate milk module demands fridge space, too. It’s not for technophobe bedsit-dwellers, then, but it’s still amazing.