So, what’s the best coffee espresso gadget on the market? Oddly enough, that’s a little more difficult question than asking what’s the best NFL football team, or even who’s the best heart surgeon in Omaha, Nebraska. Football has playoffs, and you could take a look at the longevity of their patients to rank heart surgeons, but the best coffee espresso gadget? What do you mean by “best”?
Best usually means that something works better or lasts longer than the others. But with coffee espresso makers, you have such a wide range of prices that it’s hard to compare them. Not only that, but it’s really true that not all coffee espresso makers are made equal. They’re really not!
For instance, there are four types of coffee espresso makers to choose from. So, really, if you’re interested in the best coffee espresso gadget, you should really compare them only withing these four groups.
There are steam driven coffee espresso machines. These are the cheaper ones…well, to be honest, these are the cheap ones! You can get a Mr. Coffee espresso maker for $25! Steam driven machines sound great, and if you’re just interested in having fun with espresso, they are. But a steam machine can’t deliver the pressure or the heat to make a really great, frothy cup of espresso.
If you’re interested in a cheap cup of almost espresso, then Mr. Coffee makes some fine machines, which with a slight stretch of the imagination might be consider the best coffee espresso gadget, at least ‘best” when it comes to low priced.
If you’ve got more money…a lot more money…to spend on espresso, then maybe you should consider an automatic machine. Automatic espresso makers are, well, automatic. That is they do everything except drink the espresso for you. At the high end of this price range (over $500) DeLonghi and Saeco make some really nice single and double cup espresso machines, or gadgets. At the low end, you might be interested in what Nespresso has to offer. By low end, I mean $250 or so.
I’m not contending that these three manufacturers are the only ones you can consider as making the best espresso gadget, but they would surely be in the running for the top gadget that’s automatic and that’s in their respective price ranges.
In addition to all this, there are pump and piston driven machines.
Pump machines are prices usually somewhere between the steam machines and the automatic machines. DeLonghi makes some nice pump machines. So does Krups. Pump machines are a little more difficult to use than automatic machines. You have to grind the espresso just right to make these guys work well. As far as the best coffee espresso gadget, if you’re in the middle price ranges, then a DeLonghi might be just the ticket.