- Today we're gonna review this,
it's the Aram Espresso Maker.
It's a manual espresso maker from Brazil.
And I know what you're thinking,
it looks like a grinder.
And it does, but it's not.
It doesn't grind coffee.
This is just for making espresso,
and it's quite interesting.
Now, this is a highly, highly requested review.
Lots of you wanna know what I think about this,
and I can see why.
Now this is expensive.
It's $495 US before shipping.
And what you get is what you see here.
You get the espresso maker in the middle,
you get the base and sort of stand piece here,
you get a little glass that's actually quite clever,
a little dosing funnel,
and a tamper to go with it.
Let me show you how it works.
So this here is the basket piece of the whole puzzle,
and it's just a standard 53 ml basket.
I think this one has La Spaziale on the side,
and it sits inside this piece that helps it
screw into the body of the machine.
Like so.
And this is where things get interesting.
You put your hot water in the top here.
And what's inside is a piston head
attached to this central threaded piece.
So what happens is when you unscrew the central piece,
this is causing that piston head to lift up,
and the water is pulled through it
through a one-way valve.
So that when you fully unwound it,
what you should have is your bed of coffee,
your hot water, and then your piston head.
And what you're gonna do is twist the handle
to build the pressure to push the water
through the bed of coffee.
Now, I don't know what pressure
you can get up to with this thing.
You can get pretty high,
but I'm not sure how high.
Now, if you are out and about,
you can just clip the little glass
it comes with in here and it stays,
which is a nice little thing.
But if you bring it home,
what you'd wanna do is use the stand
that it comes with.
Now this is a hefty and well-made thing.
There's a base piece that has a drip tray in it,
which is very nice,
and then the clamp here that holds it in place.
To put it in,
you do you have to remove the basket,
sit it on top, tighten it up.
But can it make good coffee?
That's really the question before we even get
to is it worth $500?
And the answer is yes.
Yes, it can.
With a few caveats.
I don't think it's the most versatile espresso brewer,
but I think you can get some really delicious
espresso out of it.
And that's what we should do right now,
we should make some espresso with it.
And what I would strongly recommend
when using this is that you run a preheat cycle,
at least one preheat cycle.
So I'm gonna put some hot water in this.
I'm gonna prep my ground coffee,
get it packed and tamped,
rinse it through,
and then we'll make some coffee.
So we're just gonna pour until it's full,
and then we're gonna leave it.
What I've got here actually is a thermometer.
I've just put a thermocouple into the body
of the brewer to see what's happening
to the temperature.
And generally I found that if you put 95 Celsius
water into a totally cold brewer,
it dropped to the mid-60s.
This thing soaks up a lot of heat.
It's solid, it's heavy, it's a big heat sink.
And thermal management with this brewer
is definitely an issue.
We wanna leave this a couple of minutes,
but at some point,
it won't get hotter than 65, and we need to,
potentially for using a pretty light roast coffee,
do a second round of preheating.
If you wanna use something
a little bit more developed,
a little bit darker,
you're probably fine to brew straightaway.
But I have so far struggled really
to get this thing brewing in the 90s
in terms of degrees Celsius,
not anywhere near close to 100 Fahrenheit,
for those of you with the ancient money of temperature.
So we're just gonna use something
to dump this water into.
And as I lift this up,
water will flow through,
and all the way back down again.
Now to dose our coffee,
that's pretty simple.
You get a little funnel to put it in.
They recommend a pretty heavy dose,
and from my experience,
I think that's a pretty good idea.
And so this is 19 grams of coffee in.
You got a neat little tamper with it.
If you already had, say, a Spaziale,
you'd probably use whatever tamper you'd like.
Now, occasionally I would get a bit frustrated
because the action of screwing this in
can be a little bit finicky,
just to find the start of the thread.
If we screw it nice and tight,
we are good to go.
Now we're gonna need a little weighing scale
to put under here,
and then some hot water in the top,
and then we can go.
Now as I start to lift up,
that will effectively start a pre-infusion phase.
Water will be going through the piston head
and starting to soak into the coffee below.
And again, if I wanted to,
I could only go a certain number of turns up
before pushing down again.
By going all the way to the top,
I will end up with more water in the brewer
than I may want to use for an espresso.
But counting turns it's not really
a viable thing for me.
So we're at the top,
and then we're gonna go pretty quickly
to build up some pressure.
And suddenly it should get hard to brew.
Now at this point, we'll probably
at reasonably high pressures,
and that's a good thing.
And we're just gonna keep the pressure there.
Now because I've got more liquid above the coffee
than I actually wanna push through it,
I'm brewing on a scale and I'm essentially
gonna pull it out of the way
when I get to my desired beverage weight,
which is about 38 to 40 grams out.
And there's our espresso.
It smells pretty good.
We should obviously give it a stir.
I've had some pretty tasty shots,
and that's one of them.
It's got nice texture.
It's well-extracted.
It tastes like it was brewed at a slightly
lower pressure than nine bars.
I will struggle to verbalize to you how I know that
or what that tastes like,
but it's slightly a textural thing
coupled with that extraction thing.
I would want that extra temperature
just to round it out,
sweeten it up a little bit more,
get rid of some of that slightly unpleasant acidity
that is in that espresso.
If you like darker roasts,
I think you wouldn't really have a temperature problem.
But I think if you like pretty light roasts,
whatever you define as light roasts,
but certainly something that's not near second crack,
then you're gonna struggle a little bit
to hit the kind of temperatures that you want.
Now in terms of grind size, grind fussiness,
you're definitely gonna need a good grinder for this.
I was going just slightly coarser
than I would have done for, say, 19 grams
going into a pump-powered electric espresso machine.
So again, it suggests maybe we're not working
at pressures of nine bars or close to it.
You want a grinder where you've got a good amount
of control of your grind setting,
and you would be essentially
at an espresso grind setting.
So that's how it works.
You've seen how you make coffee with it.
What I'll do now is clean up a little bit
and give you a kind of summary of my thoughts
about the build, the machine,
and the user experience.
So let's start with the build,
because this thing is $495 US,
the build must have something to do with it,
and it certainly does.
Everything is really beautifully made here.
No corners have been cut.
The wood on the outside of this is local in Brazil.
It's stunning.
The way the metal is machined is very good.
The base is extremely solid.
It is a very well-made thing.
In terms of longevity,
it does have some seals inside it
where the piston will be moving around the chamber,
and any seal will degrade over time,
but I think there's only a couple of seals in it,
I think two or three.
They're not particularly complicated to change,
I don't think,
and they're not expensive to change either.
So most of it, it's designed, I think,
to be a long-lasting product,
not something that you would consider
a disposable purchase.
In terms of user experience, it's okay.
The need to do substantial preheating
is a bit frustrating for me.
That's a downside.
I think the locking in and out of the brew basket
can be a little bit fiddly and frustrating,
and that's a small downside for me.
An upside for sure is how portable this thing is.
Of all of the manual espresso makers that I've used,
this is by far the most portable.
The fact that it comes out of the stand,
that the glass clicks into the bottom
I think is really nice and really thoughtful.
And while it is portable, it is heavy.
It's a solid, solid thing.
So if you're thinking just casually throw it
in some luggage and not worry about the weight,
you're gonna notice it.
It's definitely heavy.
The biggest question on UI, UX kind of stuff is,
is it better to spin a handle around and around,
or to pull a lever down?
Is one better than the other?
And I will say that it feels easier
to spin the handle,
even when it gets pretty hard work.
It doesn't feel quite as muscular, almost,
as the pressing action at the peak
of pressing on a lever machine.
But I'm also not sure I'm generating
the same kinds of pressures doing it that way.
The one upside of a lever machine
is that feeling of a very direct feedback.
Right, you pull and you feel the puck
push back, almost, against you.
It's quite a tactile experience,
it's quite pleasant.
That's a little bit more disconnected here.
Certainly the way that you spin,
you can feel some level of feedback
from the pressure inside the unit,
but it's a very indirect kind of feeling
compared to the directness of a lever.
I'm not sure I would say one is better or worse,
but I could certainly see people
having strong preferences one way or the other.
I do wish it had some sort of pressure gauge,
or the ability to be modified to have a pressure gauge,
but the nature of this kind of a brewer
means that you could never really have that
in an easy or simple way.
So you'll always be a little bit blind
in that regard.
Now, to clean it, it's pretty easy.
You take out your brew basket,
and then you would knock it out.
You can knock it out against knock box,
you can knock it into a bin.
It's literally just a basket sat in a holder.
So it's incredibly easy to clean.
And then this here you can see
one of the gaskets here on the outside,
and then your dispersion screen here.
Keeping this clean has been really pretty easy.
Again, there's no back flush needed on this
because there's no pressure release
back through the dispersion screen the way
that there is in a commercial espresso machine.
Pretty easy to clean.
Which leaves us the last question,
can it make great coffee?
I think the answer is it can make very good coffee
for a good number of people,
but I think it doesn't quite have the flexibility
and the range of brewing of something like the Flair,
or the Robot, or the ROK.
Those all had issues with preheating,
but this one I think has a bigger issue with preheating.
I just think it's a much bigger mass
that you're trying to preheat,
the nature of this chamber is kind of different.
And also the sort of timings,
it feels a little bit slower and you worry
about heat loss from that perspective, too.
If high temperatures aren't essential to you,
then you may really enjoy owning this espresso machine.
And it is an enjoyable thing to use.
I've really enjoyed making coffee,
making espresso in more manual ways recently.
This is certainly not the end of my journey
in that regard.
Now this machine I don't get to keep,
as beautiful as it is,
because this review is powered by my Patreon.
I have supporters on Patreon who give me a budget
to go out and buy these things,
and so I'm not reliant on manufacturers
giving them to me.
I don't have to do biased reviews.
I can be honest about what I think
and tell you my truth.
And that's what I've done here.
I'd love to know your thoughts though.
Do you have one of these?
Have you found something very different
to what I've found?
Have you had a very different experience
in terms of brewing espresso with it?
Have you had very different experience cleaning it,
maintaining it, traveling with it?
Did you want one of these?
Let me know your thoughts.
I'd love to hear from all of you
in the comments down below.
But I'm gonna say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.