My family loves coffee. Truth be told, we love coffee more than we love some members of our family. So it felt like Christmas when I was asked to test out the Siemens EQ900 bean-to-cup coffee machine. We’d been promised an elevated brewing experience, aroma precision; barista-style coffee in our home! What our new arrival ultimately delivered went above and beyond such bold claims.
Undoubtedly the most impressive feature was the EQ900’s Home Connect app. We have a few smart devices in our home – our family likes to see ourselves as east London’s answer to The Jetsons. Adding the app to our smartphones, and later connecting Alexa, meant we could order our coffee from the comfort of our bed; the app shows your coffee settings and the drink’s progress. I’ll tell you, knowing there’s a freshly brewed barista-level coffee waiting for you in the kitchen is one hell of a motivation to get out of bed in the morning.
I work from home, my wife from an office, and whereas she has traditionally announced her return home with a text asking me to “put the kettle on”, now she could choose what style of coffee she wanted while sitting on the bus and begin brewing it on the walk down the street. Heaven for her – and me; her always-on-deadline journalist husband who sometimes struggles to prise himself away from his screen.
And the variety! The EQ900 comes programmed with 54 different coffee serves – and there are even more on the Siemens Home Connect app. Now I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know there were 54 different ways to serve coffee, so discovering and testing out different ways to enjoy a cup of joe was a proper joy. New (to me) discoveries included the Italian ristretto, meaning “short shot”, a more highly concentrated espresso, and the mirra, a bitter serve made from very finely ground beans – its name, in fact, derives from the Arabic “mur”, meaning bitter. Meanwhile, my wife ditched her usual flat white for a kleiner brauner (an Austrian coffee with a single espresso and a dash of warm milk), and would laugh that the image of Vienna, which showed on the touchscreen while her coffee brewed, transported her back to her visit to the opera there with her mum a few months earlier.
Siemens believes that when it comes to coffee, one size doesn’t fit all, so the EQ900’s customisation options are extensive. Want a professional brew with no hassle? Then run the machine in ComfortMode; the iAroma system and sensoFlow intelligent heater work together to deliver the ideal brewing temperature, water flow and grind size for each cup of coffee. But if you do want to play around and sharpen your skills, BaristaMode means that every cup of coffee can be adjusted to your personal preferences. I like a cappuccino, but I like it to be strong. No problem! Volume, brewing time, and coffee-to-milk ratio can all be tweaked and experimented with, then saved.
Sometimes it felt as if our shiny new arrival – aesthetically our kitchen surface had never looked more impressive – had been personally tailored to provide everything we ever wanted from our home coffee consumption, even different coffee bean preferences. The dualBean system has two separate containers and grinders, meaning it can switch between two different types of beans with no cross-contamination (which is particularly handy if you like to switch to decaf later in the day). Not only that, but the double spout can make two cups of coffee, of two different styles, at one time (which kind of feels like the machine equivalent of rubbing your tummy while tapping your head). I don’t like faff, as we say in my native Yorkshire. I found very little faff with the EQ900; it was incredibly intuitive and easy to use.
Photograph: Roo Lewis/Getty Images
I don’t like housework all that much either, so I was relieved to find that the machine was really low maintenance. It automatically rinses itself when it’s turned off, which I thought was a really nice touch. There’s an external milk container – the machine can produce properly steamed milk, not something other coffee machines that have graced our kitchen counter could claim. Happily for me, the container cleans easily after a warm soak (or pop it in the dishwasher). We had to regularly empty the coffee pucks and the drip tray, but both containers pull out from the front of the machine, so the process is far from fiddly.
As I said on the way in, our family already loved coffee prior to Siemens’ machine coming into our lives, but we did find ourselves becoming more cultured, even connoisseurly, about our coffee habits the longer the EQ900 was in our home. It might sound like hyperbole, but we are genuinely bigger fans of coffee because of it. Flavour became more important than quantity; we drank less coffee, but better coffee.
We’ve had to give our Siemens EQ900 back now. Our family is in mourning. Back to the cafe over the road we go. I really do wish it could be Christmas every day.
The future of coffee is here. Enjoy exquisite coffee brewed to perfection at the touch of a button, in the comfort of your own home, with the Siemens EQ900 bean-to-cup coffee machine. Find out more
