Review on ☕ Delonghi EMK6: Experience the Authentic Delights of Italian Espresso with 6-Cup Capacity by Darrell Kiley

Alicia is a nice clean coffee maker. I'm glad to see such moka electric pans on the market. I've always wanted to use a moka pot in an office that doesn't have a stove, so I decided to give Alicia a try. All in all I am sadly disappointed. Alicia makes good coffee. I want to clarify that first. It's also easy to use. Fill the basket with about 22g of coffee (depending on the roast level), fill the lower tank with water, then turn it on and wait for the hissing/gurgling to stop. Coffee always comes out with a mild (but slightly burnt) taste, which is not bad for such a device. However, the product suffers from a few design issues that limit its potential. 1) No thermostat. The electric heater boils water, which is not good for a mocha kettle. In comparison, the beer is brewed too quickly. You cannot run this unit "slow and slow" like a stove unless you keep an eye on the unit and constantly flick the switch on and off to control heat production. If this does not happen, the coffee will be burned a little. Damn. In comparison, after heating the water, this device finishes the brewing process in about twenty seconds, which is too fast. Ideally with a moka pot you want a steam time of a few minutes. Low and slow. 2) As with the stovetop mocha pot, there is no insulation around the lower metal portion of the pot. This is just crazy to me as it is an electrical device. The lack of insulation at the bottom of the jug means you can't simply unscrew the jug to pour out the coffee after brewing. So if you want to bring more than one pot to a boil, you'll either have to wait for it to cool to be able to handle it safely, or come up with tricky and potentially dangerous ways of unscrewing the two parts (like running it under cold water hold to cool down). ). quickly, although I don't know if this could damage the electrical contacts on the kettle). 3) It's just not very big. As with a regular Moka kettle, you can control the amount of coffee produced by starting with more or less water. However, this cannot absorb very much water. This makes it incapable of brewing more than 8 ounces per brew. In comparison, when brewing with an AeroPress, I use nearly twice as much coffee and get more than twice the strength of coffee concentrate for large 16- to 18-ounce cups. It was a bummer. It just can't match the performance of an aeropress. You can think of it as "He makes small cups" or "He makes weak coffee." Expect 8-ounce mugs if you prefer relatively strong coffee. 4) Fine fraction is a very fine coffee grind (e.g. dust) that results from the grinding of coffee beans. They are caused by production irregularities in the grinders and the naturally chaotic grinding process, i.e. the grinding of grains into small pieces. Every coffee grinder produces fine particles and this jug, like the moka pot, does not have a filter fine enough to catch fine particles. When you combine this with the lack of temperature control on the unit, water that is too hot will result in too much steam. This creates too much pressure in the device and pushes fine coffee grounds up through the fountain. You'll get a different amount of evil in every cup. With a moka pot on the stovetop you avoid penalties by working with low heat and moving slowly so as not to build up too much pressure, but it takes a very manual process to achieve this with this brewer. 5) Parts of it are quite inaccessible for cleaning. Especially the top plastic parka. The fountain's metal base creates a small space between the perimeter of the base and the perimeter of the pitcher's outer wall. Coffee gets into this space when brewing, but there's no good way to get into this space to clean it. Also a fountain. To get there you need a special cleaning brush, e.g. B. a pipe brush or a small bottle brush. Because the filter in this machine is metal and not very thin, the oils from the ground coffee beans are released during brewing and settle on the coffee maker walls at the points of contact with the coffee. Over time, these oils become rancid. Rancid butter is the main reason coffee brewed in many restaurants tastes absolutely awful. They don't clean their cars well. It is almost impossible to clean this machine well, which over time will negatively affect the taste of the coffee made. In general, this device is much more difficult to use than the Aeropress and does not even give qualitatively equivalent results. Damn. It was a fun experiment, but I won't be using it and can't recommend it for any purpose other than novelty.