Make super-tasting coffee at home

If you love coffee but wonder how you can get better-tasting hot drinks at home, we feel you – many people make do with a substandard coffee when they brew it in their own kitchen, just because they’ve always done it that way. 

That’s why it’s great to explore speciality coffees with a fully-featured yet compact maker like the De’Longhi La Specialista Arte Manual Bean to Cup Espresso Machine. This beauty is designed to help you craft coffee at home without having to take hours out from work calls to achieve barista-quality results.

There are two one-touch coffee settings, for starters. And if you want to go deeper, you can pick from three one-touch infusion temperatures (92, 94 or 96°) and eight grind settings. The My Latte Art steam wand can be used to practise latte art, plus it makes great-tasting drinks too!

And it comes complete with a barista kit: a professional tamper, a tamping mat, a milk jug… and a guide to grinding and tamping your coffee with minimal mess.  The La Specialista Arte is De’Longhi’s most compact manual bean-to-cup machine ever, at 28.5cm wide.

Grinders keepers

De’Longhi coffee expert Matt Randle explains the fundamental stuff to bear in mind when looking for a new coffee machine: “No matter what machine you get, whether it’s fully automatic, fully manual or somewhere in between [like the La Specialista Arte], the fundamentals don’t change. You want to grind fresh and dose well, and use great water. Then it all depends on how much you want to engage with it.” 

And he adds: “A machine like this one is great if you want to engage a little bit more and spend another five minutes just to get that extra 5% out of the coffee you’ve bought.” 

Video: Stuff’s own frothy tips

Play

Join Stuff’s Basil Kronfli and coffee pro Matt Randle for coffee-making tips and tricks in an exclusive video that you can watch above. For example, Matt talks about the way location is naturally linked to flavour: “South American coffee is full-bodied, often chocolatey and caramelly, and it has low acidity… but if you enjoy a lighter coffee with delicate floral notes, look towards African varieties.”

Check out the La Specialista Arte at delonghi.com