Melitta® LatteSelect® review. Coffee redefined.
There’s a new bean to cup coffee machine in town! Welcome to Melitta®’s LatteSelect®, a fully automated machine that has it all. With its snazzy coloured picture display, this has not only been designed for simplicity without compromising on taste, but also to stand out like a stylish supermodel in your kitchen.
So what’s all the fuss about… well, there are twelve coffee recipes to select from, or create and save your own! You can create the four classics (i.e. espresso, café crème, cappuccino and latte macchiato) as well as using the menu to make eight other coffee specialities such as a lungo, americano or espresso macchiato via the My Coffee memory function. You can save bespoke settings for up to 6x individuals, selecting milk foam, amount of coffee, temperature, bean strength etc.
But let’s talk a little more about these pre-programmed recipes for a minute – the preparation process follows an Italian recipe in the correct order. So for example, for a latte macchiato, the espresso is added after the milk and the milk froth. For a cappuccino, it’s the reverse. Clever eh!
The LatteSelect® has 2x bean chambers, allowing you to fill with your 2 favourite coffee beans, which is super handy if you like strong coffee in the morning and weaker coffee in the afternoon, like me. But that’s not all… you can amend the brewing strength to four settings and the grinding fineness to five settings. And if you’re entertaining, you can then fill two cups simultaneously with the Double Cup mode!
The water tank is 1.8litres, which is ample for your day’s coffee rituals. The tank has a limescale filter, meaning you only need to descale around once a year, but I guess this would be heavily dependent upon usage.
In terms of noise, this is super quiet. There’ll be no more shouting over a Latte in production ever again! In fact, this little beauty has received a Quiet Mark award in recognition.
But what you really want to know is ‘how does the coffee taste’ right? It’s early days for us, but so far we’ve put the machine through its paces with a selection of different strengths and recipes. We really have been trying to fault this machine, but we simply can’t. The taste along with the coffee presentation is easily equivalent to your local Nero or Costa, honestly. In fact, we’d go as far as saying that this machine empowers you to create a coffee, which you’ll hopefully put your feet up and truly enjoy.
Finally, let’s move to the cleaning aspect. We’ve had previous similar machines that quickly get dirty, smelly and start clogging, ultimately requiring a high degree of maintenance. But clearly this has been well thought out with the LatteSelect®, which auto cleans at the press of a button with hot water. This is especially true for the areas that come into contact with milk. The detachable parts are dishwasher proof and then easy to attach and start all over again. Even the plug-in milk system is dishwasher-safe, easy to remove and fits in any fridge.
This chic slice of German engineering has a RRP of £1,000, however we found it online for £700.
In summary. We love this machine. Yes, it’s a big, big investment for most, but if you love your coffee, you’ll not regret this purchase a day, a month or even a year later.
If you are like me and spend a small fortune at your local coffee outlet, you’ll quickly recoup your investment whilst not compromising on a similar professional quality. In fact, you’ll even be encouraged to start pushing your coffee taste boundaries with the amount of choices and recipes on offer.
This is coffee your way, no compromises on taste, quality or experience.
Check out the Melitta site here.