It was a bit of a surprise when Ruslan Kogan decided to enter the home appliance market late last year. But there’s something appealing about a $449 automatic espresso machine, so despite a lack of true barista skills, we got one in to caffeinate ourselves over the past month. The good news is that it works pretty well!
The Kogan espresso machine has all the hardware requirements you need to make yourself a nice cup of coffee. It grinds the beans, heats the water to push through the ground coffee and has a steam arm to froth your milk. All the machine’s functions are controlled through the touchscreen LCD, with the exception of the steam arm, which has a manual control to manage the strength of the steam. After a few attempts, we had the Kogan making us creamy flat whites with next to no effort. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing.
For a start, the machine is noisy. Sure, all coffee machines are noisy, but as one person in the office commented, “I felt like I needed to run from the Texas Chainsaw killer”.
The second was the act of frothing milk. All the actions of the Kogan espresso machine are customisable – you can select how course you want the beans ground, how much coffee should be in a shot, and what temperature you want the water. But there’s one aspect you can control that was frustrating and that’s the amount of time the steam arm will froth for.
Rather than just allow you to put it in steam mode and switch it on and off as required, you need to set a time period for the steam arm to be active and adjust the pressure as required. But if you set the arm for 40 seconds, you may not get the right temperature, but 50 seconds may not be enough. You may be frothing slightly warmer milk from one time to another. Having the ability to manually control the steam duration would be a much better solution.
But other than that, the coffee tasted good (we were using beans from Coffee Alchemy) and on the whole the machine was easy to use and easy to clean. Given the astronomical prices some of these machines can climb up to, this is a bargain, given you can tolerate the noises and the fiddly steam settings.
Evan Whiteside
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 3:21 PMCoffee Alchemy for the win!
James B
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 5:57 PMI always get annoyed with auto coffee machines that have hopeless steam arms – Most of the auto machines I’ve used have some stupid system where it tries to make it foolproof for inexperienced users, basically resulting in a very coarse bead froth. The better machines I’ve used allow you to remove this external casing, letting more experienced users get access to the actual steam wand head, allowing us to control the depth of the steam wand etc. Does this machine allow that? (basically, can you pull off that big metal bit at the end of the steam wand)
Sam Timmins
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 6:07 PMWas I the only one who read that as KROGAN?
Elephant Fresh
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 6:18 PMBuild quality in an LCD TV – not so important, since it has no moving parts, and isn’t regularly handled. So on that one, Kogan can get by on shitty quality. But I highly, highly doubt that (going on past performance) they have the engineering and design skills (buying stock designs from china skills?) to deliver a product that would stand up to something like a De’Longhi or Gaggia
Bruce Cameron
Monday, April 18, 2011 at 11:42 AMThe last comment seems to miss the point about $$$. Overly expensive european versions can be $2,500 to $3500. Compared to $449…..get the point?
Terri Rice
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:03 PMHaving now tried our new coffe machine out a few times we have got the settings correct to our liking & have little problems EXCEPT reading the frothing button (have to use a magnifying glass!!)
o.k.we might be in our “mature” years but even so this is very poorly displayed to read & seems to be a design fault.Apart from that & having to download the instructions as they are a “paperless” office we have no complaints although email answers also don’t seem able to be addressed on any query. Does any human work at the head office?
Rob M
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 3:49 AMI just bought one of these machines and due to the lack of bad reviews was expecting something fairly reasonable for the price. All I can say is that I am very disappointed with the quality of the coffee – the proverbial dishwater comes to mind as a description. At present I’m using some “Lavazza il Perfetto” beans – so reasonable quality stock. The output is nearly bordering on undrinkable. I have previously used a fully automatic from one of the more expensive brands (not saying which brand, cause I’m not here to spruke any one product) and was impressed with the quality of the espresso – right up there with what I get from my manual machine.
I dunno – maybe the one I got is just broken or something? It makes all the right noises and there is no reason that it would be ruined. Frankly, I wish I had put the ~$400 toward a better machine.
John E
Saturday, March 31, 2012 at 6:11 PMHi Rob M
Are you sure you are not trying to drink the dirty looking water extracted after the machine is turned on and goes throught its self-clean cycle? I made this mistake at first and then realised I had not waited long enough to get it to actually asked it to make a short black coffee. I t was working well for us and coffee was atsting good. My adult son had a go and may have presed two areas of screen at once. Our machine nows grinds the beans, but often goes into calibrate mode, and the manual which is in Chinglish and poorly translated is confusing. I am about to email Kogan for advice.
John E