aliexpress Machine
Reviewing My AliExpress Coffee Equipment Haul
– Hi, I have been shopping on AliExpress. And today we’re gonna
go through my purchases. Have I done a good job? Have I found maybe some hidden gems? Let’s find out. (costume rustling) Oops. I need some hair product. So let me explain how we chose the things that are on the bench in front of me, because if you’ve been on AliExpress to look for coffee stuff you
probably felt like I felt, which is completely overwhelmed. Now, in choosing stuff, I chose things that I genuinely
wanted to test and try. Some of them are a little bit ridiculous, I’m not gonna lie to you. Some them are kind of entertaining, and we’re gonna break it
up into four sections. We’re gonna do brewing first, like filter coffee brewing, sort of. Then we’re gonna do latte art for reasons that will make sense, because after that is espresso. Then after that, just briefly, it’s a little coffee roasting. We actually didn’t pick any grinders because I do feel like
grinders from AliExpress is perhaps its own video in the future. So this is just not grinders. Straight away, I feel
like I’ve lied to you because the first brew
method we’re gonna look at is a kind of Turkish coffee brewer. Lots of different names
for this style of brewing, but what I was most interested in wasn’t the brewing pot, it wasn’t the free
coffee that came with it, it was this thing here. Now, this is a sand heater which is a very traditional way of heating or brewing Turkish coffee. Brewing with sand, using
that as the heat source means that you sort of cover all around, just jacket the brewer. Rather than having a
heat source at the base, this will be kind of all
around, which is kind of, I don’t know, different. This is the other thing
I’m gonna use with it. This is very exciting to me. I’ve long complained about scoops. I’ve said, “Scoops are bad, use scales.” But this says, “Why not both?” It’s a scoop scale. (chuckling) (plastic cover rustles and clatters) (James chuckling) It’s kind of more bulbous than
I expected, if I’m honest. You can use this to weigh as you scoop. So you’ve got an on off button, a mode button, and a hold button. I’m gonna tare mine, and now we’re gonna get
seven grams of coffee. I’m gonna use the stuff that came with this Turkish coffee maker because, I don’t know, why not? Oh, 7.5, a little bit less. 8.7. Okay, how about you? 6.8, I’m gonna go with it. I gotta say from a
workflow perspective, no, I thought this would be
joyful, it’s miserable. Anyway, in you go. Now, I haven’t covered
this kind of brewing on the channel before, and so, I’m just gonna go
with a kind of popular recipe for it where we’re gonna
do sort of 10 to one. So seven grams of coffee, 70 grams of water in 60 degrees Celsius. And aiming for a brew time of
two to two and a half minutes. Now, I don’t really know what temperature I should set my sand. Didn’t think I’d say that today. Let’s go with a hundred. Let’s have a little look
at the temperature here. This sand is 150 degrees
Celsius right now. It’s getting hot real quick. Is something smoking? This is emanating a very terrible smell, like burnt old fish. Get in that sand. Sand’s at like deep-frying temperatures. So 150, 170, somewhere around there. It’s pretty hot. It’s pretty hot. I didn’t think it would
be that hot that fast. I also didn’t think
smoke would be coming out of it occasionally. So at £130, a questionably
built hot plate, a small bag of sand,
and a decorative outer, I’m not sold that this is a good idea or good value, but you’ve
got free coffee so, and okay, we have foam, and then we’re gonna
pour, wait a little while for those grounds to sink to the bottom, and then we’ll have a taste. Now, I’m not sold on the actual coffee that we started with, but we’ll see. (slurps) I’m not sure I can blame the brewer. That’s not my favorite tasting coffee. I’d love to learn how to use one properly, understand the sort of tips
and techniques of that, and maybe I’ll go and maybe
I’ll find that out one day and make a video about it. But, for now, from a
safety perspective alone, let alone smell or anything
else, probably a no. So this is the brewed coffee
stuff that’s left over. I’ll just run through it really quickly. We have a collapsible travel kettle. Very exciting. I bought a refractometer. There’s this kind of
coffee brewer that loads of people ask me about, like a lot of you. There’s this self-stirring mug. This, what I think is like
a ember-style smart thermos, and then this carafe just had a great box. The refractometer, I’m actually not gonna test and review, because when I bought it and it arrived, I was kind of terrified. Because to review this properly, needed lots of science, lots
of testing, lots of validation, and so thank you Lance Hedrick for doing all of that in a recent video. This turns out to be not very good. Probably don’t buy this. Check Lance’s video if you wanna know why. So yeah, no. Buy a better refractometer. To sort of test as many of
these things as possible we’re gonna brew coffee with this thing. It’s battery powered in here. Takes a couple of double A batteries. So in here, there’s a little metal filter. It’s gonna hold your coffee. This sits on top, and then
it will rotate this thing where you put your boiling water in to a max-fill line, and it
will gently spin it for you to do a kind of automatic,
swirly pour over very slowly. and brew it maybe into, well this. I’m excited for this
part of the experience. (James grunts) (James chuckling) There’s like a little
dial on the side here. If this is a temperature-controlled
collapsible kettle, that would be kind of amazing. I’m just gonna, I think tell it to boil. I guess, that’s boil. Ooh! (lid tapping) Angry, snappy lid. Now I do have some bad news. Having checked the price,
including shipping, delivery, everything else, this was £100. Which is maybe too much money. Let me get some coffee. I will continue to use
the scoop I don’t like. I just feel like I have
to give it a fair go. I was so excited for it and
it feels so, so terrible. (beans rustling) What do you say? You say 11.2. (coffee beans pouring) 8.5, never mind. On the lid of the brewer, it does say 10 grams to 150 grams. So that’s what I’m doing. A little bit finer than I’d
normally grind a pour over. You’ve just woken up, welcome. Classic metal filter, plastic mesh. Just quickly, the
magnetic-stirring mug is chaos. It’s got a little sort of pill, and it’s spun by a sort of
magnet motor underneath the base. So if you drop it in, (magnet clanks) it sticks just there,
and if you turn it on, (magnet rattling) it went in the coffee. I presume it is more controlled
when there’s liquid inside, but we’re gonna find out. And just so you can see, when I push the button,
where’s the button? (button clicks) The top will spin. Gonna say, a bit of a
flaw with the kettle. You sort of want a
detachable base for a kettle, cuz now the cord is very short. That’s the whole cord. I’m gonna have to unplug the cord, pour my water in (water pouring) and go. Now, it feels like the
flow rate’s much faster at the start when there’s more water in. I wonder if pulsing water in might sort of help slow the flow. Ground, relatively fine, but it’s brewing pretty quickly. Nice, even a flat bed below. We’ve made coffee. I feel like I’m not sure if I should leave the lid off for this for
the first time I spin it. So, I’m gonna put the lid on to spin it. It’s a big mug. Our 150 mls left lots of space inside. Here we go. (button clicks) (mug buzzing and rattling) Oh! Okay, that’s messy but
it looks kinda cool. That’s definitely a lid on
experience, if I’m honest. Better than I thought,
but it’s good coffee, good water, good grinder. I feel like this brewer
probably brews a bit cool. Probably works better with dark and more developed roasts
that you wanna brew as filter coffee. I would say that’s not the
best brewer for lighter roasts, but it is kind of fun, and I’m kind of into
battery-powered brewers. Not the best, not the worst, not the best. Now to talk about this mug,
I actually need to empty it. So I’ll put this coffee
into my smart thermos. (strainer rasps and clanks) Little strainer inside is a bonus. Some silica gel, always a delicious treat. Don’t eat it. You currently say 24 C, that’s a lie. How do I make you on? It’s doing the ambient
air temperature inside, which I guess will equalize eventually, but it’s not telling me the temperature of the liquid in the base.
I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t think that’s very useful. This is powered by triple A batteries that live under this
very flimsy thing here. Like this doesn’t seal meaningfully. There’s just two batteries there. This is a mug. You might wanna wash it now and again, I don’t think that’s a good idea to just have a battery door that’s just a flimsy piece of silicon that just sort of vaguely
squishes into place. I kind of always wanted
an auto-stirring mug even though I don’t take
milk or cream in my coffee. But the idea of a spinny
thing always just pleased me. But this one, maybe I
wouldn’t recommend solely because it just feels
like you’re gonna break it the minute you wash it. I’m still cross with this. I’m trying, if I turn it upside down, it thinks it’s 37, so this doesn’t work. This just doesn’t work. Okay, let’s put this into
this beautiful carafe because that actually is pretty great. I’m actually pretty into this
nice, little amber glass jug. It was £11.20 delivered,
which is actually cheap. It’s cheap, and I feel
like that’s good value. It also has a hilarious box. I think it does up to 400 mls, £11.20. I like it. So, to recap: the kettle – way too expensive, wildly inconvenient, but collapsible and kind of fun. Refractometer. Lance says avoid it. I listened to Lance. This thing for more developed roasts, fun, kind of enjoyable. This thing did not work,
don’t really get it. This: very nice. I like it. And then, the stirring
mug, maybe great once. Let’s talk about latte art because that’s where I’m
getting pretty excited. I’m not gonna lie, this is the main event. This is it. This enormous thing here is, by far, the most expensive thing we bought. It was £1500 delivered. But it’s the most exciting,
wonderful, amazing thing. It’s a latte art printer. It prints art on lattes. It doesn’t just draw
the squiggles that we do with milk pitchers. This is a full color latte art printer. This is the Evebot. This, when you install it the first time and you put it together,
you connect it to the wifi, and you are gonna talk to
it through the internet. You can, through a QR code, upload any image you like to this thing. Then, at the push of a button, it will print said image
onto a cup of coffee. Now, this one is full color – full color! They do say on the website there’s little certificates and stuff, this is food safe. You pull out the little cartridge, it looks like a printer ink cartridge. Apparently, you should not
consume regular printer ink. But apparently this is okay. So I need an image, a little selfie. Let’s go with a horrified me. All I have to do now is scan a QR code, and I upload from my photo library. Let’s choose disgusted me. I think I can just go full, full face. That’s what I’m proposing to print. I have arrived on screen,
I get print options. I get to choose how I print my face. Let’s find a cup to print into, and I actually have one just here. This, I bought believing
it was an espresso cup and that, it turns out, was a lie. (ceramic saucer is placed down) Not, not an espresso cup. This handle, like as an espresso
cup size, might be okay. It’s just super weird this big. Okay, we’re looking at a print diameter of about 78mm. So I’m gonna take you up to 78mm three inches, three inches across. This brings us to this, which I am also very excited about. This is a steaming unit,
a milk-steaming unit. It’s just for making steam. We have to put it on the heat. It will boil water inside it, trap it. It’ll show as a pressure gauge. We’ve got a steam arm, little cool touch side here and a valve, and it came with no instructions. I’ve checked, it’s not induction friendly so we’re gonna stick it on a gas stove, put some water in it, and
we’ll see how it works. A lot of you wanted to see
an electric version of this. We tried to buy that several times, and it ultimately just didn’t work out, which is very frustrating
’cause I wanna know if it’s good too. I’ll be steaming milk in
this little steam pitcher. I liked this little temperature
grading on the side here. Let you know how hot or cold your milk is as you’re steaming. Very useful. We’re gonna be aiming for maybe 55, 60 degrees Celsius, which is the upper end
honestly of this thing, which is interesting. (water pouring) (Threading tightening) (stove clicks) So when it gets to 120, I’m gonna leave it on the heat
but drop the heat really low, and I’m gonna have to
turn it around to face me. We’ll try and show you both the gauge, and the temperature gauge
on the side of the jug. See how those are. Let’s see how you are to purge. (steam wand whooshing) Whoa. (James guffaws) Ready. Here we go. (steam wand spurting) Now trying to find a vortex position. It’s not bad pressure. (gauge whirring) So I have to say, texture from this, great, flawless, perfect. It seems really nicely. I really quite like using it. It brings me no pleasure to tell you that it costs nearly
£300 delivered in the UK, which is a bit too expensive. And at this point, you’re not far away from one of the sort of
better cheap machines (espresso machines) that
can steam milk automatically and do as good a job,
sometimes, better than me. Anyway, no coffee ’cause I
wanna give this thing a canvas, a blank canvas to work with. Pour, pour. All right. Now we make… art? Go (coffee printer buzzing) (James chuckling) Oh no. Missing a little color. I feel like the cartridge
maybe isn’t printing to its fullest potential. It’s skewing a little
green, maybe an issue with a little bit of magenta not quite coming out right. It leaves me no choice
but to taste my face. (James chuckling) Sorry face. They have no flavor. Okay, that feels reassuring. Let me just get a bit more
printer ink, is that wise? I feel like it should have
a flavor but it doesn’t, it doesn’t have a flavor. That’s amazing. How do you not want one of these? Obviously, it’s £1,500 for something you might use three times, and it would probably
terrify someone to serve them a literal printed picture from a printer on their coffee. Think of the potential, I
don’t know why it exists. In summary, not super into this. I felt it was very laggy, not the best. This, I really liked that thing. I really like steaming with it. It’s just way, way too much money. And this is way, way,
way, way too much money. It’s a printer, it needs
a lot of maintenance, it needs inks. Those are expensive. It
does a ridiculous thing. But aren’t you glad that it exists? Now, there’s one more item here. It’s billed, on the
website, as a latte art pen. And it’s this strange-looking
object, it’s a bird. It’s like a little bird. It’s got a button in it, and you put chocolate powder inside it, and then you can draw with
your chocolate powder, which is not latte art. I felt like that’s a lie, and I’m cross about it from the start. But let’s see how it works. Loading this feels like
it’s gonna go wrong. I’ve gotta get the
chocolate powder into there. I guess, there’s probably like a little vibrating motor in here. Let’s see what happens. (pen buzzing) (James chortles) Come on now. (pen buzzing) That doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. It’s three £3.30, more fool me. I just thought that might
work, but it clearly doesn’t. Maybe it needs a coarser grade of oh, oh. No, no it’s rubbish. I thought that would let
me draw beautiful patterns of chocolate powder or,
you know, crass images. Either way, I can’t do anything with this. It’s useless. Let’s go through the espresso
stuff that we bought. A couple of espresso machines,
which we’ll get into. But to use them, we’re gonna use some of the accessories that I bought, and there’s
a mix of accessories. One of them, I can’t really
use today but I just love it. This weird-looking creature
is made of just silicon, and it’s for filling your
espresso machine tank when the tank is tucked back
underneath your counter, and you just put this on top, pour the water in, and it
just sort of, I don’t know, periscopes it to the back. That’s not the right word, but it’ll do. I bought three things
from one particular store because that store looks like
one of the most legit stores for coffee on AliExpress, and that’s MHW-3Bomber. I bought this box, this sort of like tamping
station knock box stuff. I brought this espresso
brush for cleaning baskets, which I presume isn’t
gonna work that well. I just wanted to know. Dual wall glassware’s
been around for a while. I think Bodum were really
the company that started it. And so, I thought I would try their little cute dual
wall espresso glass thing. When the Niche came out, everyone loved the idea
of having a dosing cup that fit a 58mm portafilter, but Niche didn’t sell their
dosing cup to anyone else. So people have started
to make dosing cups. So I got one just to see how it is. This is not like the forced tamper, this just sort of has a depth meter. We’ll see how it is. Now, these are big, chunky manual, 58mm lever machines. On paper, these looked kind of cheap, but by the time that they were shipped and kind of went through delivery and customs clearance,
all the additional fees, they were both much more expensive. Close in price to the Flair Pro, and the Flair Pro is different to them because it has an active heating unit and these don’t, which is gonna be a lot
of what I talk about here. Let’s make some coffee
with maybe this one first. (James grunting) A quick look through, you get a tamper, got a gauge on the front
with a creature on it. Nice portafilter, wood handle, very nice. Weird locking mechanism. Feels kind of, I don’t know, you gotta get like a weird way round, and then you’re sort of pushing further. Feels kinda strange. But my biggest concern is
this enormous piece of metal which is very heavy, and also right now about 20 degrees Celsius, which is a long way from
the desired temperature of this metal, which is
93, 94 degrees Celsius, something around brew temperature, because when I put 60, 70, 80
mls of hot water into this, that water very quickly will go down towards 20 degrees Celsius, and this will not come up
to temperature very much, ‘cos the mass is so much
higher than the water. I guess to try and get
the best out of this, I’ll do a couple of rounds of preheating, but that already is kind of a pain and a waste and annoying. Yeah, that’s like, ooh, 50 max Celsius. (coffee grinder grinding) I’m not sure how I can review a tin. Does it fit? Oh, a little bit smaller. So maybe, actually, not bad if you were using,
say, a 57mm portafilter and wanted something
that fit that as well. But yeah, as a starting
point, nice distribution. Yeah, I have nothing bad
to say about that at all. This tamping station is very good. I like it. It’s well made. It feels solid. In we go. Fresh, boiling water. Go for a little pre-infusion. A little gentle pressure
till we get the first drops. And let’s pull the
pressure up a little bit. Let’s go for like, six. Now, if you’re looking at that coffee, it does not look quite right,
that does not look good. Very pale, wispy crema. Funny looking color. I would say, with a very
high degree of confidence that this probably got nowhere
near 80 degrees Celsius as a brew temperature. That’s not gonna taste good. Mm. So, in your dual wall glass, which tends to retain a lot of heat, that’s very sippably warm, wildly acidic, sour, sour, sour, sour, sour. And that’s just not hot enough. I just don’t know practically how you would use something like that and get really good results unless you wanted weirdly
low brew temperatures. This one’s a little different but also kind of the same. Let’s have a look. Of course, time to check
the knock box part of this. Does this feel like a satisfying thunk? Does it feel loud and rattly? (knock box thuds) Nice. Of course, have to test the brush. (brush scraping) That looks pretty clean. Just have a taste. If you run your finger on
the inside of the basket, stuff still came off. Taste it. Not very good. Not something I would want to contribute to my next cup of coffee. That’s why I prefer something like a sort of microfiber cloth
to get rid of everything that you can that’s inside there and leave you a kind of
neutral starting point. So this one has a slightly more
kind of chaotic vibe to me. Did come with a dosing ring. That’s always appreciated and
got a nice looking tamper, if you like that kind of a thing. This lever, if you lift it all the way up – that’s really hard to do. (James grunting) It’s quite a tight fit in the chamber. (lever clicks) Whew! That was… physical. So this piece actually just comes out. Portafilter, that’s nice. And so, you can sort of see, there’s a pretty typical shower
screen at the bottom there. You’ve got a gauge, which
is at a slightly weird angle when the whole thing’s put together. This is still a
substantial piece of metal. This weighs about 1.2 kilos. Preheating this adequately would require a decent
amount of boiling water. I don’t really know why it
comes to pieces like this. If you slide it all away, it’s actually now off
center with the piston. So it needs to come back a little bit to then be sort of centered. I’ve got some coffee. This has been preheated three times, and before we start, we
found another small problem. When the lever’s all the way down, which is the typical position where you’d want to
then use the portafilter well, this is in the way. So you’ve gotta sort of lift a little bit to get the portafilter out. I don’t like how sort of loose this feels. This is gonna be full of
hot pressurized water soon, and I don’t like it. When we fill this with water, and when we partially lift this, that would allow water to drain through the sort of piston mechanism
and start pre-infusion, and then you’d lift
this up and press down. All right, in we go. All right, let’s begin
to drain the water in. Oh, so awkward to lift this. Okay, now the gauge goes all the way to 25 bars, which um… is a little out of spec. Now weirdly, the end of this lever starts hitting things like, whoa! (a loud pop!) I guess there was pressure still in there, and I let go of this enough that the mechanism that
allows pre-infusion allowed some pressure out. I’m always torn in that situation whether to be like that was my fault for being an idiot or that’s bad design, but I feel like you’ve
gotta design products knowing that idiots like
me will be using them. So, I’m gonna put that on design. That smells bad and looks bad and … mm, tastes bad. Not as bad as the previous shot. So tastes hotter, slightly
higher brew temps, that’s a win. As an experience, I wouldn’t
like to use this machine if it stood between me and my first cup of coffee of the day. Overall, kind of fun, solid,
weighty constructions. They don’t feel like they’re
cheap in their build. They just feel both a little bit kind of
uninformed in the design. Like, there’s not enough
real coffee knowledge in the design of these. To round us out, just a
little bit of roasting. Now, I know this is
immediately gonna make you say, “When am I doing a roasting
series on the channel?” Good question. I don’t know. Would I like to? I think I would. These kind of roasters you can buy online quite easily in different places. The pricing will go from, it
seems like over a hundred, up to like £200. This one landed, delivered
all costs about £155. Not cheap. Not cheap. And the way it works is pretty simple. There is a fan inside this, and there is a heating element. And the controls of this primarily
control those two things. How hot is the element, how aggressive is the fan,
and the heat of the air, and the quantity of air
determine the speed of the roast. Typically, in commercial roasting, you would reduce the
heat throughout roasting. So you’d have your sort of maximum heat at the start broadly, and then
it would sort of taper down. We’re not gonna have any real insight into what’s happening in
the roasting chamber here other than looking at the beans. It has some sort of auto mode. We’ll see how auto that is. A hundred gram capacity,
80 gram recommendation. That’s what we’re going with. So we’ll open it up, put some coffee in. (green coffee pouring in) (lid clunking shut) Now, there are instructions with this, which I have read, that are in English but a little bit confusing. (roaster whooshing loudly) (roaster beeping) That was um, noisy. Well, roast: bit of a mess. So I pulled this relatively light. Looking at it, it’s not a very even roast. Now, to make it more difficult, this is a red honey
coffee from Costa Rica. So the way that the beans will look on the outside is a little bit different to say, a washed coffee, and there will be a little
bit more variation from that. But the roast was definitely too fast. Now, that’s the automatic program but the fact that that’s
a 10-minute program of that level of aggression, this was gonna end up at
the mythical third crack or as some call it, combustion. Well, probably not but very
dark, very oily at that point. I’m gonna roast this again
on manual mode this time. I definitely pulled it too early. I’m not saying it should have run the full 10 minutes ‘cos
it absolutely should not have run the full 10 minutes. Maybe get something
that’s gonna be drinkable. (roaster whooshing) (roaster beeping) The beeps say we’re done. This is actually my third roast, because my second roast was just bad also. That’s the kind of truth
of coffee roasting. You’re gonna make a bunch
of mistakes at the start, especially with a brand new roaster, and, you know, you should let
this rest before tasting it. So you’re gonna wait a few days to work out how you messed it up, and the whole thing takes a long time. It’s gonna be maybe 20, 30 roasts before you kinda know this roaster, and its real flaws or limitations. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then I should warn you, generally, away from home roasting. This is too fresh to taste good, but I know what you want. You want me to brew it
and drink it anyway. Let’s have a little smell. No. (slurping) It’s not my best roast. Ooh, that’s smokey, harsh,
bitter, bit too dark, also underdeveloped. It’s good raw coffee that I’ve made taste a bit like commercial coffee. Not my best, not my best efforts. Honestly, if I was gonna get
into a roaster like this, I would look for an existing model that has a community around it already that’s gonna give you a lot
of guidance and support. If you’re going with something like this, you just don’t know
what heat setting 4 is, compared to other roasters. In terms of little complaints, the fan button’s the wrong way around. I go more heat that way,
I go more time that way, but I go more fan this
way and that’s confusing. It should be more fan, less fan, and it’s the other way around. The mixing isn’t great. Those little holes maybe aren’t doing a good enough job of
really mixing the coffee. I found a couple of beans that really hadn’t moved very much and weren’t properly developed. So that’s a bit of a concern. Should you buy coffee
stuff from AliExpress? Having, you know, bought a bunch of stuff that I thought I wanted to try and test, I have come to a conclusion. And the answer is maybe, sometimes, maybe. If you’re looking for a cheap product, then in many cases, what
the sticker price is is not what you’re ultimately gonna pay, and by the time it’s shipped and customs are cleared
and all that kind of stuff, it may not be the bargain you hoped for. I think it’s a good place to buy stuff if you have a specific tool in
mind that you’re looking for, then there are reputable sellers making great quality products out there. I would certainly recommend that. And there’s some stuff here, little bits and pieces that I thought was really nice and worth keeping. Other stuff, not so much. And that’s okay, that would be the same if I was buying on eBay or
buying anywhere else really. There’s gonna be good
products and bad products. I hope you had fun. I had fun, and all
that’s left for me to say is say thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day. (waves with bean mitten)
