aliexpress Machine
The £299 Aldi Espresso Machine – How Bad Could It Be?
[Music] a little bit of an unusual one today if i’m honest this is not the sort of thing i’d typically review here on the channel but i couldn’t sort of pass it up it was too ridiculous now this is a coffee machine from aldi a supermarket group you may be familiar with a place that’s really cheap but people tend to be like oh but the wine’s really good i don’t shop at aldi not out of any real snobbery or anything i just don’t have one near me so you know i’m not dissing you audi i’m just i’m just i’m just not you know a customer but people aren’t people like it and i shouldn’t joke about the whole wine obsession people have with it it’s getting off topic aldi do cheap stuff that people say is surprisingly good and so when aldi dropped this well i had to have a look it’s a 299 pound coffee machine it’s a kind of super automatic in a way it’s got a built-in grinder but it is portafilter based comparable i guess to machines like the sage bristol express which is twice the price and delonghi’s very sage-like la specialista that’s again the same sort of price though that one has a pressurized portafilter so i kind of put that off to the side this has a regular portafilter with proper holes and everything in fact it’s got quite a fancy portafilter not only is it really quite a nice little handle on this thing here but they’ve even got like a little rubberized flat bit on the bottom for your tamping how thoughtful how considerate how surprising for 299 pounds though it doesn’t come with a dose recommendation just a little max line on the side we’ll get into brewing coffee with this in a second i’ve just turned on i’ve got it hot i have yet to make coffee with it now it’s got a little steam wand the steam settings on the side here imply that it’s it’s one thermoblock heating everything because you’ve got to put the machine into preheat mode which i presume heats that main thermal block up super hot and then you can get steam out of it you’d then probably have to cool it down afterwards to get coffee out of it again that’s not unusual in a cheaper machine but but a grinder in a cheaper machine is definitely a surprising thing it is pretty bad design it looks like it’s okay but you know stuff like the badly stuck-on badge here that’s just not quite level or the fact that the drip tray appears to be designed to be whatever space is left and therefore not really enough space to put like three cups on top it’s just a little car crash up here so far but hey it’s early let’s not judge too much let’s let’s put some coffee in it now this isn’t just like a hey look here’s a weird cheap thing that’s surprisingly cheap but the question is is it good value for money you know just because it’s cheap it might be terrible value for money if it just can’t make anything resembling vaguely good espresso but if it can make good espresso that would be astonishing wouldn’t it though feels unlikely at this point i mean unwrapping this thing it was not your nice like peel off the nice plastic from the stainless steel it was more like just like wrapped a couple times in cling film in a slightly sloppy forgetful way that doesn’t you know inspire confidence when you’re opening a coffee machine up it doesn’t do a particularly good job of protecting it either it would seem from the scratches on the side we’re getting off the point so let’s let’s make some coffee with this i think oops uh we’ve got we’ve got a good amount of coffee in here i’m not quite at my max fill line and i’m at 17 and a half grams of coffee and this has just been a bit of a mess so far but we’re gonna be okay i believe in us now this is a uh programmed dose as i understand it so i’m just gonna push my two cup button and i hope for the best see what happens with this pre-infusion [Music] looking like a pretty fast shot i think anyone’s surprised that this is a faster shot yeah that’s a uh it’s a pretty generous portion i don’t think we’re going to let the volumetrics control it next time i think we might put the scale underneath because our 17 grams yielded 74 grams of liquid a bit more than we wanted in a sort of one to two one to two and a half ratio here so so we’re not drinking that one so we’ll go two steps finer and then we’ll give it a go again our dose may be 18 grams and i’ll aim for like 36 to 40 out i think you know less than 36 would be deeply unwise and we’ll see how long that takes okay i’m gonna try and tease okay we’re at 16.3 we need some more coffee i just don’t know if i can get past these little pinches without damaging things i hate you so much right now we’re not gonna be friends we’re just not gonna be friends when you lock the portafilter in let me just let me just try and explain this this this portafilter gets incredibly close to the grinding mechanism but you couldn’t put your hand in there that’s just stupid okay i’m gonna be okay though it’s all gonna be okay it’s gonna be fine everything’s gonna be okay let’s brew profusion we’re not we’re not getting much yet it’s 23 seconds into the shot oh there it is like like nectar or just like a really slow espresso that’s gonna taste awful a little hissing something’s not happy well then what just happened there well i i suspect a number of terrible things happened at once to yield what we just saw now firstly the gauge here got up to what it said was like 16 bars which is which is a lot of pressure too much pressure at those kind of pressures you compress the cake so much that you compound the problem like you make the cake harder to get through which in this case makes this machine pump water harder it’s a very stupid cycle to get into you don’t want a machine running at really high pressure where you just get your ideal pressure by varying the resistance that’s just that’s just not a good way to work because of the issues with puck compression and then what you saw at the end with that steamy release was i i guess the water spent too long in contact with the thermal block because it was flowing too slowly these things are not particularly accurate they’re designed to keep water at a kind of fixed flow rate we were obviously much slower than that flow rate so it got heated more than it should have been so all in all everything went wrong with that shot i will go back a little bit coarser because i went too far and i’ll go back one coarser and i’ll just make sure my dose is like 17.5 as much as i can with this god awful grinder and then we’ll see if we can pull like a decent shot because i think i think together we can achieve anything anyone who’s able to withdraw their portafilter without spilling coffee is is a jedi master of sorts [Music] why are we still at 16 bars i mean why why do you hate me right we’re gonna go we’re gonna go apparently much coarser we’re gonna go much coarser because nothing makes sense and i hate everything about this grinder this is not a good experience so far okay what will happen now what will happen now oh pump’s got a little high this espresso looks terrible there’s still a 34 35 second shot to hit our ratio i can’t tell you how much i don’t want to drink this i mean the coffee in was nice this is a stupid coffee machine i hate this coffee machine it’s a stupid coffee machine look at this point the grind is definitely too coarse you need to grind finer but because this thing’s pump pressure is determined by resistance you can’t get good espresso out of it can’t be done because once you produce adequate resistance this thing will spike massive pressures at the pump compress the cake and choke your shot you won’t be able to get a normal flow rate from your very fine properly ground espresso ground coffee it’s the stupidest coffee machine we’ve seen on this channel by a long way i hate it i really hate it i feel like you know picking up the portafilter gave me this moment of like maybe this one completely suck but it completely sucks all of the good ideas belong entirely in the portafilter with this nice rubber bit for tamping the tamper that comes with it is of course plasticky nonsense but it’s a 299 pound coffee machine i’m not so weird as to presume that it would be actually good or useful the water tank seems nice it’s got a nice lid that’s that’s that’s you know good but it can’t make good coffee and having a cup tray where if you put cups on top make it really noisy is also stupid it’s just sloppily designed buy something better if you want something like this get the sage don’t buy this this is 299 pounds for a reason and it’s an absolute waste of money it’s terrible value it is for what you get far too expensive you would be happier with like a mocha pot and and like a whisk and some some i don’t know the steaming on this comes with a little clacky twisty dial thing which is which is weird there’s a little light flashing so indeed that thermal block is is heating up there’s a steamy release it’s too hot to make coffee so it’s cooling system it’s kind of nice that it does automatically probably looks pretty dramatic it seems to have adequate pressure for steam it’s a single hole tip which i don’t love but but i’m sure it could steam adequate milk unspectacular probably but i mean you know to pour into what garbage tasting disgusting espresso that this thing will produce ambiano why do they even call it we want to stick aldi on the front why don’t you just give in be honest about it shock horror cheap supermarket does cheap coffee machine that is cheap and not good this is offensive to me as a coffee machine this is why we have climate change issues like how much resource how much energy how much material went into building this monstrosity to ship it around the world this there’s just this is just waste i hate it i i am just so upset that this existed i feel stupid that i thought that a 299 pound coffee machine might be fun to look at i’m just mad now i’m not gonna give this away on patreon i think i mean i’ll offer it up but i would suggest that no one really asks for it unless you want to hack it if you want to take this to pieces rewire it make it work add an over pressure valve into the pump line so it can’t produce stupid pressures maybe maybe you could get some good results out of this maybe it’s a project for somebody i don’t know but it’s it’s just bad for some good news apart from this being a potential patreon giveaway every video right now has a coffee giveaway if you need coffee if you can’t afford coffee if you’re in a difficult situation right now and coffee is part of your life hit the link up in the description down below i’ll give away 10 bags to 10 people anywhere in the world that i can ship coffee to and and i’ll do my best to share a little bit of love uh right now but actually if you’re watching this and you’ve got one of these how’s it been for you if you had a good experience if you pulled good tasting espresso on it is that possible have you achieved a miracle have you got the little gauge to go into the normal place or is it just gushing through just terrible terrible espresso of terribleness let me know down in the comments below for now i’ll say thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a great day [Music] you
