- Today we're gonna review this, it's the Aram Espresso Maker. It's a manual espresso maker from Brazil. And I know what you're thinking, it looks like a grinder. And it does, but it's not. It doesn't grind coffee. This is just for making espresso, and it's quite interesting. Now, this is a highly,
highly requested review. Lots of you wanna know
what I think about this, and I can see why. Now this is expensive. It's $495 US before shipping. And what you get is what you see here. You get the espresso maker in the middle, you get the base and
sort of stand piece here, you get a little glass
that's actually quite clever, a little dosing funnel, and a tamper to go with it. Let me show you how it works. So this here is the basket
piece of the whole puzzle, and it's just a standard 53 ml basket. I think this one has La
Spaziale on the side, and it sits inside this
piece that helps it screw into the body of the machine. Like so. And this is where things get interesting. You put your hot water in the top here. And what's inside is a piston head attached to this central threaded piece. So what happens is when you
unscrew the central piece, this is causing that
piston head to lift up, and the water is pulled through it through a one-way valve. So that when you fully unwound it, what you should have
is your bed of coffee, your hot water, and then your piston head. And what you're gonna
do is twist the handle to build the pressure to push the water through the bed of coffee. Now, I don't know what pressure you can get up to with this thing. You can get pretty high, but I'm not sure how high. Now, if you are out and about, you can just clip the little glass it comes with in here and it stays, which is a nice little thing. But if you bring it home, what you'd wanna do is use the stand that it comes with. Now this is a hefty and well-made thing. There's a base piece that
has a drip tray in it, which is very nice, and then the clamp here
that holds it in place. To put it in, you do you have to remove the basket, sit it on top, tighten it up. But can it make good coffee? That's really the question
before we even get to is it worth $500? And the answer is yes. Yes, it can. With a few caveats. I don't think it's the most
versatile espresso brewer, but I think you can get
some really delicious espresso out of it. And that's what we should do right now, we should make some espresso with it. And what I would strongly recommend when using this is that
you run a preheat cycle, at least one preheat cycle. So I'm gonna put some hot water in this. I'm gonna prep my ground coffee, get it packed and tamped, rinse it through, and then we'll make some coffee. So we're just gonna pour until it's full, and then we're gonna leave it. What I've got here
actually is a thermometer. I've just put a thermocouple into the body of the brewer to see what's happening to the temperature. And generally I found
that if you put 95 Celsius water into a totally cold brewer, it dropped to the mid-60s. This thing soaks up a lot of heat. It's solid, it's heavy,
it's a big heat sink. And thermal management with this brewer is definitely an issue. We wanna leave this a couple of minutes, but at some point, it won't get hotter
than 65, and we need to, potentially for using a
pretty light roast coffee, do a second round of preheating. If you wanna use something a little bit more developed, a little bit darker, you're probably fine to brew straightaway. But I have so far struggled really to get this thing brewing in the 90s in terms of degrees Celsius, not anywhere near close to 100 Fahrenheit, for those of you with the
ancient money of temperature. So we're just gonna use something to dump this water into. And as I lift this up, water will flow through, and all the way back down again. Now to dose our coffee, that's pretty simple. You get a little funnel to put it in. They recommend a pretty heavy dose, and from my experience, I think that's a pretty good idea. And so this is 19 grams of coffee in. You got a neat little tamper with it. If you already had, say, a Spaziale, you'd probably use
whatever tamper you'd like. Now, occasionally I would
get a bit frustrated because the action of screwing this in can be a little bit finicky, just to find the start of the thread. If we screw it nice and tight, we are good to go. Now we're gonna need a
little weighing scale to put under here, and then some hot water in the top, and then we can go. Now as I start to lift up, that will effectively
start a pre-infusion phase. Water will be going
through the piston head and starting to soak
into the coffee below. And again, if I wanted to, I could only go a certain
number of turns up before pushing down again. By going all the way to the top, I will end up with more
water in the brewer than I may want to use for an espresso. But counting turns it's not really a viable thing for me. So we're at the top, and then we're gonna go pretty quickly to build up some pressure. And suddenly it should get hard to brew. Now at this point, we'll probably at reasonably high pressures, and that's a good thing. And we're just gonna
keep the pressure there. Now because I've got more
liquid above the coffee than I actually wanna push through it, I'm brewing on a scale and I'm essentially gonna pull it out of the way when I get to my desired beverage weight, which is about 38 to 40 grams out. And there's our espresso. It smells pretty good. We should obviously give it a stir. I've had some pretty tasty shots, and that's one of them. It's got nice texture. It's well-extracted. It tastes like it was brewed at a slightly lower pressure than nine bars. I will struggle to verbalize
to you how I know that or what that tastes like, but it's slightly a textural thing coupled with that extraction thing. I would want that extra temperature just to round it out, sweeten it up a little bit more, get rid of some of that
slightly unpleasant acidity that is in that espresso. If you like darker roasts, I think you wouldn't really
have a temperature problem. But I think if you like
pretty light roasts, whatever you define as light roasts, but certainly something
that's not near second crack, then you're gonna struggle a little bit to hit the kind of
temperatures that you want. Now in terms of grind
size, grind fussiness, you're definitely gonna need
a good grinder for this. I was going just slightly coarser than I would have done for, say, 19 grams going into a pump-powered
electric espresso machine. So again, it suggests
maybe we're not working at pressures of nine bars or close to it. You want a grinder where
you've got a good amount of control of your grind setting, and you would be essentially at an espresso grind setting. So that's how it works. You've seen how you make coffee with it. What I'll do now is clean up a little bit and give you a kind of
summary of my thoughts about the build, the machine, and the user experience. So let's start with the build, because this thing is $495 US, the build must have
something to do with it, and it certainly does. Everything is really
beautifully made here. No corners have been cut. The wood on the outside of
this is local in Brazil. It's stunning. The way the metal is
machined is very good. The base is extremely solid. It is a very well-made thing. In terms of longevity, it does have some seals inside it where the piston will be
moving around the chamber, and any seal will degrade over time, but I think there's only
a couple of seals in it, I think two or three. They're not particularly
complicated to change, I don't think, and they're not expensive
to change either. So most of it, it's designed, I think, to be a long-lasting product, not something that you would consider a disposable purchase. In terms of user experience, it's okay. The need to do substantial preheating is a bit frustrating for me. That's a downside. I think the locking in
and out of the brew basket can be a little bit
fiddly and frustrating, and that's a small downside for me. An upside for sure is how
portable this thing is. Of all of the manual espresso
makers that I've used, this is by far the most portable. The fact that it comes out of the stand, that the glass clicks into the bottom I think is really nice
and really thoughtful. And while it is portable, it is heavy. It's a solid, solid thing. So if you're thinking
just casually throw it in some luggage and not
worry about the weight, you're gonna notice it. It's definitely heavy. The biggest question on
UI, UX kind of stuff is, is it better to spin a
handle around and around, or to pull a lever down? Is one better than the other? And I will say that it feels easier to spin the handle, even when it gets pretty hard work. It doesn't feel quite as muscular, almost, as the pressing action at the peak of pressing on a lever machine. But I'm also not sure I'm generating the same kinds of pressures
doing it that way. The one upside of a lever machine is that feeling of a very direct feedback. Right, you pull and you feel the puck push back, almost, against you. It's quite a tactile experience, it's quite pleasant. That's a little bit
more disconnected here. Certainly the way that you spin, you can feel some level of feedback from the pressure inside the unit, but it's a very indirect kind of feeling compared to the directness of a lever. I'm not sure I would say
one is better or worse, but I could certainly see people having strong preferences
one way or the other. I do wish it had some
sort of pressure gauge, or the ability to be modified
to have a pressure gauge, but the nature of this kind of a brewer means that you could
never really have that in an easy or simple way. So you'll always be a little bit blind in that regard. Now, to clean it, it's pretty easy. You take out your brew basket, and then you would knock it out. You can knock it out against knock box, you can knock it into a bin. It's literally just a
basket sat in a holder. So it's incredibly easy to clean. And then this here you can see one of the gaskets here on the outside, and then your dispersion screen here. Keeping this clean has
been really pretty easy. Again, there's no back
flush needed on this because there's no pressure release back through the dispersion screen the way that there is in a
commercial espresso machine. Pretty easy to clean. Which leaves us the last question, can it make great coffee? I think the answer is it
can make very good coffee for a good number of people, but I think it doesn't
quite have the flexibility and the range of brewing of
something like the Flair, or the Robot, or the ROK. Those all had issues with preheating, but this one I think has a
bigger issue with preheating. I just think it's a much bigger mass that you're trying to preheat, the nature of this chamber
is kind of different. And also the sort of timings, it feels a little bit slower and you worry about heat loss from
that perspective, too. If high temperatures
aren't essential to you, then you may really enjoy
owning this espresso machine. And it is an enjoyable thing to use. I've really enjoyed making coffee, making espresso in more
manual ways recently. This is certainly not
the end of my journey in that regard. Now this machine I don't get to keep, as beautiful as it is, because this review is
powered by my Patreon. I have supporters on
Patreon who give me a budget to go out and buy these things, and so I'm not reliant on manufacturers giving them to me. I don't have to do biased reviews. I can be honest about what I think and tell you my truth. And that's what I've done here. I'd love to know your thoughts though. Do you have one of these? Have you found something very different to what I've found? Have you had a very different experience in terms of brewing espresso with it? Have you had very different
experience cleaning it, maintaining it, traveling with it? Did you want one of these? Let me know your thoughts. I'd love to hear from all of you in the comments down below. But I'm gonna say thank
you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.
slept in, went to the baker to get pretzels, came back, made coffee, sat down at my desk -- and there's a new Hoffmann video.
Ain't no better way to start the day.
At some point (and I realise that this may have to be mostly a 'clip show' as it would be very expensive to buy them all again) but would it be possible to do a run down of how the different manuals compare to each other, and also how they compare to non manual machines of a similar price range.
I bought the Robot off the back of your review (I was originally planning to get the Flair, but your review swung it to the Robot, and I don't regret it as it's so quick to pull shot after shot on it, and the thermal management on the Flair looked very awkward) - however the fact that you defaulted to the Flair first when listing the competition gives the impression that maybe that's your favourite manual so far?
I know I'm not the first to request a video like this (I've seen it in the comments on videos and on Twitter) and it does seem to be an area in coffee that's getting a lot more attention lately (including some questionable kickstarters I have received some aggressive targeted adverts for on social media...)
Great review! That is quite a beautiful espresso machine. I really like that you can take it and use it as a portable machine as well. Really smart design.
Is anyone able to comment on how this compares to the Flair and La Pavoni Europiccola? I'm new to manual espresso machines and currently trying to choose one of these three.