Stop Buying Appliance Store Coffee Machines Lelit Anita Overview

So Italian-made, PID-controlled, full-style group heads which you can adjust the temperatures. You've got an in-built grinder as well, in-built water tank, and it comes out of Italy for under $1,500. Well, yes, there is an option. It's the Lelit Anita. Let me tell you more about this machine while I make you a coffee. One of the biggest questions that I get asked when people are trying to buy a coffee machine is do they go and buy something from an appliance store or what can they do to get into the Italian-style coffee machines? And there's always been a huge gap between those prices of what an appliance store has and the Italian-made machines. But we've got a few options. Right now, there's certainly a bridging of those prices starting to happen and a huge amount of quality that are coming in like this Anita. So basically, you can get yourself an Italian-made machine with individual temperature control for brewing or steam. You've got your grinder, and it is under that $1,500 price point. So it's definitely a machine that you should look at, but I'm gonna make you a coffee and just take us through the whole process because a lot of people don't understand about the quality that you're gonna get from one of these Italian stainless steel machines and how you can actually utilize it to make that quality cafe product that you're looking for at home. So the first thing we're gonna look at is the grinder. It is an inbuilt grinder. It's a 38-mil conical burr set. Now, with this grinder, you can actually remove this whole hopper. There's a set of numbers, and really, they're just a reference guide. You can pick them up and move them as much as you like, and you just use the little notch here as a reference point. On the right-hand side, there's a knob there that's gonna let you go finer or coarser, and if you can't remember, finer will slow down your extraction and coarser is gonna make it a lot faster. We've got a portafilter handle here. There's a range of baskets that you can have between this 18-gram basket, there's about a 13-gram basket, your blind basket as well, and the good old seven grams. But in this basket here, I'm gonna aim for 19 grams. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna get my large scale that I don't have right now. There we go. And I'm going to tear off the portafilter handle. It's a full one-piece portafilter handle with a 57-mil diameter. So not quite a 58, but it is a wonderful size. It's much bigger than that 54 that we see in entry-level machines. So I've got that teared off. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start to grind some coffee, and we're gonna be looking to fill this basket to about two-thirds full. Just gonna bring it out, just give it a little level like that, and we're gonna grind off to another little mound. Okay, give that away. And we're at 17.6 grams. So I reckon we can fit the full 18 grams in there. Let's just give that one little tap, just get a little top-up on there. Sure, all right, 18.3. Let's give that a go. So we always wanna level our coffee out, and we're gonna use one of these 57-mil Lilit levelers because we wanna get good distribution in our coffee puck. So pop that in, give it a bit of a spin. Now, it needs to be tamped. The Anitta does have this in-built tamper, so you could put it into here, lift it up, and give it a tamp. But we do always recommend getting a much better tamper. So there is an aftermarket product here, which is a 57.35-millimeter tamper. That is really gonna seal around the outside because we wanna make sure that we get that seamless coffee compression in the puck so that the water won't have a gap around the outside. So definitely with this machine, getting that little upgrade is something I would highly recommend. We've got our coffee ready to go. Our handle is already hot, and we have the machine set on the brewing function. So it's a very simple single boiler machine, which is 0.25 of a liter or 250 mil, and that has been totally filled up because we're sitting at 94 degrees. That's the brew temperature for a good blend. Now, if you had a light roast coffee, you could increase that up to maybe 96, 97. Or a darker roast, you'd lower that down maybe to 92, 93. So we're ready to go. We've got the boiler full of water, and we're on the brew down the bottom. You've got your pump to be able to activate and give it a bit of a flush. We're gonna lock in our group handle here. I'm gonna grab my scale because it's all about recipes. So we've got our 18 and a half grams in our coffee basket. We're gonna look to get double that or a two-to-one. So popping on our cup, and we're gonna tear it off. It's really simple now. Because of the three-way switches, we're ready to brew. We are going to hit the pump on, and we're gonna watch the extraction come out through the double portafilter handle there. You can see it's quite slow, dark. Oh, I forgot to start my timer. Better give that a quick go. It's a nice, rich crema that's coming through. This is coffee that's about 10 days old as well. And just watching that extract right now. It's not doing super fast. It's keeping that nice, constant mouse tail that we're after, and I'll pop that off. Okay, now that got a 20-second extraction, and I got 39.1 grams. So if we wanted to slow that down, we would go finer on our grind or coarser with that easy knob on the side. Now, I reckon I had probably four seconds or so that I missed that timer. So it's pretty close for that extraction. So we wanna think about making our milk coffee. Now, essentially, we want to be able to froth. Now, it is a single boiler machine. So if we take out our puck, we can always inspect that as well. We can see there there's a little bit of a channel down that side, but there's definitely a bit of sponginess that's been able to allow that coffee to expand and brew nicely. We always wanna flush our heads. We'll just give that a quick little flush. And now in the three-way switch, if we had maybe a long black, we'd pop it into the middle. We turn on the pump, and then essentially we can open up the steam tap here, and we would get hot water. If we don't want hot water, and we wanna go to steam, we simply go to steam, turn the pump on, open up this valve for a little bit, pop the pump off again. And what's gonna happen now is that the boiler is heating up to a much hotter temperature. The PID here has changed. It's gonna try and get up to about 127 degrees. And as it heats, the hot water's gotta go somewhere. So it's forcing its way out of the boiler into the hose from the milk wand here, which is basically pushing out all the hot water. We've caught the hot water. We're gonna turn off the valve. You'll see that the pressure, or the temperature will start to rise quickly, and then it'll be ready to go. It's time to get some milk. So I got myself a small jug. And for a small cup, definitely use a small jug. Now, because we do have that 0.25 of a litre boiler, it's a nice, gentle steam. It's not crazy. It's not something you're gonna be afraid of, but it's gonna be a great pressure to get a vortex. And that's what we're looking for with any frothing unit, essentially. If we can't get a vortex, you don't have enough steam. If you get a good vortex and you can get a good hiss happening on your milk, you can get that really velvety, silky cafe quality. So right now we're at 126, and I know 127's where it's gonna stop. We're gonna purge first to get a little bit of that water out, as you do with any boiler. Position our wand. Now, the key with this one is make sure that that milk jug spout is actually in the steam wand. We're gonna pop it under, have that tip just under the liquid, and turn it on. There's surprisingly a good amount of steam there. Now, as we lower it, because that scream means we've got no hiss, we're gonna get the hiss. And that's getting that silky milk coming through, because that little crackle being constant is making milk foam right now. Now, the boiler's on. It's gonna keep that steam pressure up. So you can make multiple in a row if you need to now. So we're getting a good amount of foam, which is nice. It's getting warm. Just lift it up and keep it spinning. So you can see that vortex. There's plenty of steam pressure there to make a good vortex. It's getting a little bit too hot. We'll turn it off. Just make sure you let that noise stop and the steam make its way out of the steam wand. Give it a clean up, a bit of a squirt, and let your milk sit. Now, just while your milk's sitting, I'll just show you the gauge here. You do have the ability to see the pump pressure as well on this machine. So if you're finding that your coffee is just gushing out really quick and you're not getting pressure of around that nine in that green zone between eight and nine, you're way too coarse and the water is just passing through quickly. So the gauge there is a good little tip to see about the pressure that you're applying to the coffee bed. I've got my milk here ready with a couple of little bubbles on the top. We're gonna give it a little tap out. Give it a good swirl. And if you look at the side of the milk jug, you can see the quality of the bubbles, all right, or the microphone that you've made. There's one or two big bubbles, but essentially that is silky, beautiful milk. Like anything, I'm gonna give it a bit of a swirl, swirl our milk, start high, create a good base in there, go around the cup, come back to the middle and finish off with a nice little pretty pattern. So that is pretty impressive milk from a single boiler machine. And not a bad pattern at all. One thing I do like about the Anita is that you have a wet drip tray and a dry drip tray. So there is space for you to deal with the grinds and the wet totally separate because you don't wanna have those two mixed in together. So that's a cool little feature that the machine has. In terms of water, it's a vibration pump. We're not gonna be able to plumb this in, but you've got the 2.7 litre water tank at the back here. Once it's full, just pop in your hoses and it'll self prime when you start. With any vibration pump machine, when you first turn them on, if it doesn't quite work, just give the hoses a bit of a squeeze and you'll activate backwards pressure and that pump will kick straight in. So there's a little tip for you when you're dialling in for the first time. On the grinder side, I would just bottom out those burrs. So take out the hopper before you put any beans in, get it to grind by pressing your dosing handle button or activation button down here and then just keep going fine until you hear those burrs just to align. Go back about half a turn on the burr set. Just watch that burr set when you're looking in the top, move back around, then start with your fresh beans and you will be pretty close to nailing that beautiful espresso straight away. The hopper's nice, it's not big, bulky and sitting on the top. It does sit inside the machine, which is pretty cute. It's 130 grammes of beans it can hold in there. So enough for a couple of days for the average family. So I know what you're thinking, how do I now make another coffee? Well, it is pretty simple to go from a steaming back to a brewing. Because we are at a higher temperature, we would pop our pump on. We're going to open up our steam and you'll start to see that the water is filling that boiler again as well. You can do that by running the brew switch. So once water is coming out here and water's coming out the steam wand, essentially you are full. The boiler's full. That is going to bring that steam out of the boiler, pop in fresh cold water, rapidly drop the temperature back down to those 90s as you can see now. So it did drop down to 90 or 89 degrees and it's going to now heat back up to the brew temperature of 94 degrees. And then once you're at 94, you're ready to brew again. So pretty quick and simple to be able to go between espresso extractions and frothing. About 30 seconds for it to heat up to the steam temperature, but really quick to go back and do a second espresso. So if you're going to have a milk coffee and then a black coffee, I would say do the milk first, get that one out of the way. And then because you bring that espresso temperature by the PID back down to the 92, you'll be ready to go for that second brew and you'll get those two coffees out pretty quickly to you and your family. For those keen eyes, you might've noticed I actually had it on the hot water setting. So it was going up to boiling water. So just make sure if you're going to go back to do an extraction, you want to be on the bottom setting for that 94 degrees. You can go in and change those temperatures. So if you hold down the button, you've got T1. Essentially, once you've selected that, you can go up or down to change temperatures. We'll give it a couple of seconds. And there we go. It'll pop back and that means it's set. So T1 is your brew temperature and T2 is the steam pressure, which I wouldn't change. Just leave it at the 127. You're going to have ample steam and that'll be perfect for you. Well, there you have it. The Anita. It's an all-in-one grinder and a single boiler Italian made machine, packing a lot of features and some great value. As I said earlier, maybe just look at getting yourself a nicer tamper and some sort of distributing tool. They're the 57 mils for these Anita's. So just make sure you get that one and you're going to have the complete package to be able to make that great cafe quality coffee at home that you always wanted. Now, if you've got any questions, pop them down below. Look forward to starting that chat for you around the machine. I reckon it's a great package. They're on amazing deals right now. So if you want one in Australia, go to itc.com.au and score yourself a deal. All right. Well, thanks very much for watching everyone. We'll catch you next time. Cheers.