I’d not heard of it, because it’s not for plebes, like me.
Grinds and brews a perfect cuppa in about a minute.
I used to have a toddy maker, where you dumped a whole pound of ground coffee into a bucket of water, let it sit overnight, in the fridge, then you drained through a filter.
The resulting thick liquid was like really good instant coffee. You threw a bit into a cup, added hot water, and it tasted great.
The main issue that I would have, is maintenance. I would guess that it would need a fair bit of cleaning.
I just use a fairly basic Braun Melitta filter, and it does great.
About half as frequently, it'll also ask you to put in a descaling tablet. Similar process.
Beyond that, day-to-day, it can make about 8 shots of espresso before the grounds hopper is full. You just dump it and rinse it in the sink (no need for a thorough wash) and it's ready to use again. Less cleanup than a regular drip coffee maker (no filters to deal with, no grind dust to rinse/brush, no glassware, nothing to dry).
It's super convenient. The main downside is really just taste. I tried to do a blind taste test with my coffee snob friend (he's the kinda guy who measures everything down to the milligram and gives his grounds acupuncture before sending them to the spa). We used the same bag of beans, same water, same cups, etc. His came out with a layer of fine oils and sparkling foam. Mine looked like someone opened a dishwasher prematurely. We couldn't even get to the taste test part because you could smell the difference with your eyes closed. And I had a clogged nose that day.
Maybe the $3k Jura is different, but my janky little unit is definitely a poor man's machine – the hand-me-down Civic of superautomatic coffee makers. I'd buy it again in a heartbeat though.
Anyway, as others said ... good coffee they make, and some effort on cleaning they need (deserve).
On office coffee machines ... give me anything but syrup post-mix. Douwe-Egberts, I call you out. You make decent machines as well, stop peddling those abominations.
Reliable, repeatable, the coffee is not super duper excellent, but it's also not terrible. It's perfectly passable and it's free. My type of coffee.
It's kind of unavoidable that it's going to be expensive and higher-maintenance to be able to make espresso at home, so I simply don't. Not worth it for me when I already have access to high-end espresso machines at work 5 days a week.
If you have an office where the machine makes 100+ coffees it makes perfect sense. In a domestic setup it makes 0 sense.
You can get Juras for pretty cheap if you go bargain hunting. There are also other similar but cheaper brands. As a category, they're called "superautomatic espresso machines". I don't know why they're not more popular, but it's been a total game-changer for me.
I got my Jura A1 (their discontinued base model) used, third-hand re-refurbished, a decade ago for like $700. A chunk of change upfront to be sure, but since then it's consistently made like 4-8 shots of espresso a day, every day. If reliable mediocrity were a virtue, this thing would be the patron saint of saints. And if a cup of store coffee were $5 (which is cheap nowadays), the machine pays for itself in 3-5 months. Best purchase I ever made.
The mediocrity disappeared. It produces a fantastic brew close to the quality of the shop where I buy the beans.
Before attempting all this, I ran an experiment. I had my shop grind the coffee one notch back from where they grind for their in-house espresso. Then I put that into the by-pass chute and brewed it. This confirmed to me that machine’s grinder was not getting fine enough.
If you grind truly as fine as you would for an espresso machine, you may get a very slightly better brew, but it will come with a 5% chance of clogging the machine and wasting the ground coffee. Best not to fly too close to the sun.
A friend who knows a few things about coffee stopped by not too long after I did this conversion and asked if I had bought new beans, because “this shit is top notch”. It was a revealing experiment about the importance of the grind.
It’s a fascinating machine to take apart. We’ve had it for 15 years and I’m optimistic it will just keep going. At this point my goal it see when the espresso counter will roll over back to zero.
