Roberto, the guy behind this site

The coffee résumé, in numbers

How I got here

I grew up in a small town outside Turin, where the espresso machine at my grandmother's house had been running since 1978 and nobody thought that was remarkable. The moka pot went on the hob every morning at 7:20 and the whole flat smelled of coffee by 7:25. That was the entire ritual. Nobody weighed anything, nobody argued about grind size, nobody had heard the word "extraction." The coffee was just good, because everyone in the chain, the roaster, the shop, my grandmother, knew what they were doing.

I moved to London in 2015 for work and discovered, roughly on day three, that I was going to have a problem. The office kettle produced a beverage I could not in good conscience call coffee. The high-street chains were expensive and inconsistent. The Nespresso a colleague swore by tasted like a plastic memory of coffee. By month six I had bought a Gaggia Classic off eBay for £180 and started making my own, badly, at first, then less badly, then obsessively.

What I am, and what I am not

I am not a barista. I have never worked in a coffee shop. I do not hold an SCA certification (I keep meaning to). I am not a mechanical engineer, and I could not repair a Marzocco if you paid me.

What I am is a home enthusiast who has drunk two to four coffees a day for ten straight years on 12+ machines across every category, moka, French press, AeroPress, capsule, filter, single-boiler espresso, dual-boiler prosumer, bean-to-cup. I have descaled the Jura three times. I have replaced the Gaggia's steam-wand O-ring four times. I have lived with the Bambino Plus for three years and the Moccamaster for four. That is the entire authority claim.

What's on my kitchen counter this week

Full transparency on what I actually make coffee with, so you can tell what I'm biased toward. This changes every few months as I rotate machines in for testing. Snapshot as of September 2026:

What's currently in the queue for testing: Sage Barista Touch Impress, Philips 5500 LatteGo, and the new Terra Kaffe TK-02. Reviews land as they finish the 2-week baseline.

My working rule: everything is dated

Prices, model numbers, firmware, availability, nothing in this market is stable for six months. A review written in 2023 describing "the current Magnifica" is probably describing a machine that is now three generations old and sold under a different code. So every product page on this site carries the date the review was last checked, and every price is quoted as an RRP guide with the word "indicative" next to it. If you see a number and it looks wildly wrong today, check the date.

The method, step by step

1. The machine is bought at retail or borrowed from a long-term owner. Never supplied by the manufacturer. If a PR agency emails me a "review sample" offer, I decline in one line.
2. Two weeks minimum of daily use before I write a word. Shiny-new bias is real; the honeymoon ends around day nine.
3. Same beans across all machines in the same test window. Rave Signature Blend (medium roast, £8/250g) is my baseline. If a machine only tastes good with £18 single-origin, that's a con, not a feature.
4. Same milk. Whole cow's milk from a UK supermarket. Oat milk texture noted separately when relevant, because half the people reading this drink oat.
5. Blind cup against the incumbent in the same category. My partner pours; I taste. If the £600 machine doesn't beat the £350 one in a blind taste, the £600 doesn't get the higher rating.
6. Every claim links to a source. Specs from the manufacturer's PDF; awards from the awarding body; prices dated on the day of writing.
7. Re-checked once a year for price shifts, discontinued models, firmware issues that emerged later.

Three things this method has found

The reason I bother with all of this is that the market rewards laziness. Here are three concrete examples from testing over the past year, none of which appear in any "best coffee machines UK 2026" listicle I have read:

• The De'Longhi Magnifica Evo ships under at least six different model codes (ECAM290.61.SB, ECAM290.81.TB, ECAM290.42.TB, ECAM290.22.B, plus two Argos exclusives), the same machine, priced anywhere from £399 to £549 depending on which listing Amazon serves you. A patient buyer saves £100 by cross-checking the code.
• The Nespresso Vertuo Plus is sold under three different SKU numbers across John Lewis, Currys and Amazon UK, with the same specifications and the same pod compatibility, at prices £30 apart. Nespresso themselves list none of the SKUs on their own site, they only show the marketing name.
• The Jura E8 was £849 on Amazon UK in November 2025 when Jura's UK site still listed £1,099 as the RRP. Every roundup I checked was quoting the £1,099 figure. Nobody had looked at the actual listing.

What I don't do, and why I say so

I do not run pressure-profile experiments with a scientific manometer. I do not measure TDS with a refractometer. I do not tear machines down to inspect the boilers. Those things are valuable, and other people do them well, Home-Barista.com and CoffeeGeek both cover the deep-technical angle better than I ever will, and I link to them when it matters.

What I do is what most buyers actually need: I make coffee in the machine, for months, with the beans and the water you'd actually use, and I write down honestly whether it produced something worth drinking. That's a smaller claim than most review sites make. It happens to be the one I can defend.

Why the full model code matters more than the name

A recurring theme on this site: the technical model code (ECAM290.81.TB) matters more than the marketing name (Magnifica Evo). This is not pedantry. The same "Magnifica" branding has covered dozens of machines over 15 years, with different burrs, different milk systems, different water tanks. If you buy on the marketing name you can end up with a very different machine to the one the review described.

Every review here leads with the full technical code. Every price comparison uses the code. If you take one habit from this site into your next coffee-machine purchase, take that one.

Things I won't do

• Fabricate a rating. If I haven't personally tested the machine for two weeks, there's no star rating on that page. Full stop.
• Accept a review unit. Not one. Not "for editorial consideration." Not "no obligation, keep it as long as you want." The offer changes the incentives; declining is the only clean position.
• Publish sponsored content. No paid placements, no "in partnership with," no guest posts from brand agencies.
• Silently rewrite a review after publication. If I get something wrong and a reader tells me, the page gets a dated "corrected" note at the bottom. Nothing is quietly changed.
• Push you to buy something you don't need. Several reviews on this site end with "actually, don't buy this, buy the one below it for £150 less." That is not a mistake; that is the point.

Where the money comes from (and where it doesn't)

Amazon UK pays me a small commission when a reader clicks an affiliate link and completes a purchase. That commission is paid by Amazon out of their margin, your price is the same either way. It runs at roughly 3–4% and is identical for a De'Longhi and a Sage, which means I have no incentive to favour one brand over another.

That's the whole business model. No display advertising, no email list monetisation, no consulting on the side for coffee brands, no equity in any machine manufacturer. If Amazon closed the Associates programme tomorrow, this site would still exist, I would just have to fund the testing out of my own pocket, which I did for the first four years anyway.

Long-term ownership log

Long-term reliability is a thing you cannot fake in a two-week loan. This is every machine I have owned personally, still in the flat or documented sold-on. Dates, incidents, verdict at the end. If you're spending £500 on a bean-to-cup, this is the column you care about, not the star rating.

Correction log

Every substantive correction to a page ends up here, with the date. Small typos and price refreshes are handled quietly. Errors of fact, misleading claims, or reversed opinions get named.

• 2026-08-14, Nespresso Vertuo Plus: corrected the pod-cost range from "£0.35–£0.55" to "£0.42–£0.60". A reader pointed out that Vertuo Plus pods (larger format) skew higher than original Nespresso.
• 2026-06-02, Moccamaster KBG Select: removed the claim of "SCA Gold Cup certified." The KBG carries general SCA certification, not the specific Gold Cup preset (that's the Sage Precision Brewer). Two different awards.
• 2026-04-19, Homepage: changed the recommended entry-level espresso pick from Delonghi Dedica to Sage Bambino Plus after long-term test data showed the Dedica's pressurised basket capped upgrade path harder than I had first written.
• 2026-02-08, Gaggia Classic Evo Pro: updated the water-tank capacity from "2.1 L" to "2.1 L (usable ~1.9 L)" after a reader noted the fill line sits below the physical max.

The publisher

The Coffee Corner is published by The Coffee Corner, registered in the United Kingdom. Full publisher information is on the legal notice. Privacy policy is here. Full affiliate disclosure is here.

Tell me I'm wrong

The single most useful thing a reader can do for this site is email me to say a review is out of date, a spec is wrong, a price is off, or a machine has been discontinued. Every correction gets acknowledged, and, if it's substantive, the page gets updated with a dated note.

Drop me a message via the contact form. I read every message from readers, usually reply within 48 hours. Corrections take priority over PR pitches (which don't get replies at all).

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