The Ninja Luxe Cafe A 499 Everything Machine

Today, we're gonna take a look at this. It's the new Ninja Cafe Luxe, a $499 all-singing, all-dancing beverage station. It does, it does everything. It does espresso with its built-in grinder. It does quad shots. It does auto-steaming of milk. It does cold foam. It does filter coffee. It does cold brew of a sort. Is there anything it can't do? Oh, yes, but we'll get to that. As always, thanks to the support of my Patreon. We bought this at full price, actually from the US, $500, and shipped it over here to the UK. What I'm gonna start with is the kind of core functionality of the machine in terms of actually making espresso, making drinks, because you could argue, quite convincingly, that something about this machine makes it a bit of a game changer. That's gonna be a word you can see a lot, as well as kind of Swiss army knife of coffee machines. That's what you're gonna see a lot. But there genuinely is some interesting, noteworthy, and I hope quite influential stuff in this that we're gonna get into. Now, one quick thing before we dive into much more important stuff. I just have to comment on how this thing looks. I have to be honest, it's not to my taste. I find this not a beautiful thing that I would particularly want out on show dominating my kitchen. You may feel differently, and that's okay. We just have different tastes. But for me, the look, and actually the feel of it, it is pretty plasticky for the most part. It feels empty, relatively lightweight. It doesn't feel substantial. $499 might seem like both a lot of money, because it's $500, and also not that much money if you think about all the stuff you're getting for the money. But either way, it's a substantial investment. I would have hoped to have liked how it looked more. The coffee's more important. Let's talk about the coffee. And to do so, I need to kind of get to the core philosophy of this machine. I don't know about you, when I went bowling, when I was really little, really little, sometimes they would put the little lanes up at the side, the little guardrails, so that you couldn't bowl a gutter ball. That's what this machine is trying to do. It's trying to put up guardrails to stop you making terrible espresso. It has what it calls barista assist technology. And if you look at the front panel here, you have a digital display showing you where your grinder's currently set, and where it recommends your grinder currently be set. And that will change based on how your shots pull. That's really interesting. Now I reset this back to factory before starting today. First thing, hopper, removable, little trap at the bottom of it. Nice, well done. This feels solid, substantial. It holds about 350 grams, or 12 of your American ounces of coffee, which I think is a good size of coffee. In making and designing this machine, the engineers have made a bunch of really interesting and sometimes strange choices. And as I take the portafilter out, you'll see the first one. It's completely custom in terms of its size, its shape. So, you know, not much in the way of accessories out there yet for this. Inside looks actually a normal double basket. So it's only about that deep on this thing. It's not all the way to the bottom. That's the quad basket that goes all the way to the bottom, which you need to make a quad shot of espresso or to make filter coffee. I have to say, I don't, it feels wrong. If you're used to a normal portafilter, the weighting feels weird and strange. It looks weird and strange, but let's give it a chance. Now to use this in the grinder first, you must get your funnel, which lives here, very conveniently, right on the side of the machine. How nice. See that just goes on top, slide it in here. And this is another fascinating decision. That just zeroed out a weighing scale because this thing grinds by weight. It grinds by weight, which is fascinating. Something you do not see in a lower end, lower price point kind of thing. Now, initially I was like, is it really grinding by weight? Because there's loads of ways it could be using a weighing scale. And to test it, you use this, four grams of Blu-Tack. So you see, when I push go and it starts grinding, it'll produce 17 and a half grams of coffee. And I found that if I put this little bit of white tack on the side of this thing here, it under dosed by about four grams if I put it on during the grinding process. So it genuinely is grinding by weight. So what we will get is about 17 and a half grams, give or take up to half a gram, but often less. So it's reasonably repeatable. Now, another fascinating thing, you might begin to hear this machine start to rumble. When you turn it on, it does not begin to heat it's thermal block. It only does that after you grind. Kind of cool. It's kind of nice. Yeah, it's not wasting energy being on. It's ready to go, but it's beginning now to get ready. Cup warmer's now on. That's good. We need to tamp this. Oh, here's your tamper. How nice. Now this is a little squishy tamper designed to help you get the quote unquote correct pressure. You sort of have to tamp with the funnel still in, but in theory, this should force you to tamp level, force you to tamp at the correct pressure. Should be preventing mistakes, which is kind of key. Then we lock it in. Now it's a bit of a long drop there because I might want a bigger cup. So what I can do, take my little plate and put it at an appropriate height for an espresso cup. Now I don't anticipate this brew going very well because this is the first time this grinder setup has seen this coffee. What should happen is it should brew and then make a recommendation for a grind setting based on how that brew went. There is a little bit of a heat up time going on now. Like it takes a while to get going. It does also pre-infuse, which is interesting. Little quick. I need to say, well, probably the grind's too coarse and this thing would agree. It says, okay, that was grind setting 12. Take us down to grind setting eight. And there's another nice little touch here. Bit of view. I have to put my funnel back on in order to get into this. And I have to put this in again for this sort of feature to work. It will very quickly, very briefly run the motor each time I go finer to prevent a kind of jamming happening. So if I go like that, and it will have dosed out just a little tiny bit of coffee in it, which is good and bad. One, it's clearing the burrs and that's a good thing, but it's not grinding enough to really purge between grind settings, which is one of my first flaws here. One of the things that can easily happen with humans dialing in coffee is that they forget to purge any sort of retained coffee that is still the previous grind setting that's in the unit. If I just grind now, I'll get some of grind setting 12, but mostly grind setting eight. And that portion of 12 might be quite small, a gram or two or three or four, but it might be enough for the overall flow still to be too fast. And even if eight was correct, it would look like the flow was too fast and it might say, oh, go to seven. But then you go to seven, and eventually that's too fine because you need it to be at eight. And so without purging, it's quite easy to sort of chase the grind setting around. And as a small complaint, it took me forever to find the purge function in this. It's quite obvious once you know it. If you push and hold the grind button, just hold it down, it will purge. What you can't do is what people used to do, which is take a dose out, like a full dose, throw that away, get wasteful. Because when you go and ask for another dose, it just won't give you one because it thinks it's giving you a dose of coffee. Get on with the brewing process. I'm not giving you more coffee. Don't be ridiculous. So slightly frustrating. You can override that if you turn the machine on and off again. Now that should be enough. You don't need to purge a lot of coffee out of this thing, but you do need to purge some. So let's repeat the whole process and see what the recommendations are in terms of grind setting. Did it guess well? Still a little quick, I would say. Still a little quick. The machine agrees. So we need to go four finer. I did say I had that nice feature where it runs the motor. If I just go four finer now, it won't run the motor. It'll only do that if the portafilter is in place to catch the ground coffee coming out, which to me seems like a bit of a mistake. If I've gone from the coarsest setting down to the finest and just forgotten to have the portafilter in there, theoretically that seems like a bad potential thing to have happen. This does collect ground coffee anyway. Bits that are retained kind of fall out here. You are gonna get some mess. I feel like it just needs to lean into that and accept there's gonna be mess and run the motor whether there's a portafilter in there or not. And if it annoys me, it'll teach me to do it right and get something in the way. One thing that is also nice is this generally does knock out clean because they're controlling the dose and how cleanly a puck knocks out is related to how much space it has to expand, so therefore the dose. So it's never gonna theoretically underdose and give you the kind of sloppy, loose, messy puck that you don't want. So that's a bit nice. I would still wanna give it a little wipe though because there's, you know, still stuff you don't want in there. Get it, it's even telling me to tamp. It's a guided experience. What do you think, machine? Machine is happy. Machine does not request any more changes. I might've wanted to go maybe one more step finer. I feel like it's important to understand that I think the goal of barista assist is not optimization. It's gonna prevent you pulling really bad shots. How is the espresso? Like, fine. Yeah, it's a touch sour. It's a little bit too acidic. It's not balanced. It doesn't have a ton of texture. To be fair to it, I will go where I would go now and try and pull what I would think is the best shot it can. What I will say, listen to this grind and you'll hear one of my kind of points of concern. That motor is clearly struggling a little bit at these finer grind settings with sort of the lighter end of medium. That is a point of failure and a point of concern in any kind of product like this. And so listening to that does not fill me with confidence about longevity of this part of the whole thing. Not bad. Don't feel like I'm kind of maxing out on extraction here. It's a conical burr grinder. It's decent texture. It can be a little bit harsh in the acid sometimes. It's set up for probably a darker, though not substantially darker roast than this, but it doesn't do a bad job. For a kind of point of comparison, I dialed in this machine using the Fellow Opus grinder, which is about a $200 grinder. It's a conical burr grinder. The Opus made a better tasting espresso, but not by much. And actually we threw, you know, coffee into a particle size analyzer and compared the two. Not very much in it. Not enough really to sort of put the charts up and sort of obsess over them. This thing does produce some coarser pieces. Could be better, but not that bad. Before I get into the quad shot, I just need to talk about something that drives me up the wall with this thing. It makes me irate. This portafilter, this weird little portafilter, has two spouts at the bottom of it here. It's not a naked, you can't have it. Maybe you can get a naked portable version, but this is a two spouted version. Two spouts. Why would you have two spouts? Why would you do that? Well, you might want to put the coffee into two cups. You might be putting two single shots of espresso. You might want an espresso and a single shot cappuccino. That might be what you're thinking you could do here. They've given me two spouts. Let's make two single espressos. There we have one espresso cup for me, one for my friend. Go. Oh, wait, sorry. No, gotta get the jug out of the way. That's, that's not right. I can't take two espresso cups and have the coffee go where I want it to go. Why have you given me two spouts? Just give me one spout. Don't lie to me. Just give me one spout. If I can only put one cup underneath, give me one spout. These are two small espresso cups. What if I wanted an espresso cup and a cappuccino cup? I don't get it. Interesting to note that the coffee machine has come to agree with my ground setting being correct. So it's moved its opinion to three. Now, obviously it was a choice to make the machine narrower and taller. Taller so you can get bigger cups underneath, narrower to not take up too much space on your counter. But they've also made a couple of other decisions around space on the counter that I think impact this. They've said, we need to put some stuff on the side of the machine here, right? So actually, if you wanna keep your tamper here and access it, you can't have another appliance any closer than say that without getting the tamper stuck in the machine. So it demands an extra, what, like 10 centimeters on this side. Also, it's got a little cute door on this side. It's where my quad basket is. Look at that, look at that. But again, it means I have to have this much space on the side of this machine too. So in terms of counter space that it occupies, it actually demands quite a bit more width. Could they not have hidden these things, or sorry, these things somewhere on the top and given me a bit of width because I'm gonna have the width anyway. So at least I can use the two spout thing to make two drinks. Look, we're into a nitpicking space. Just let me go. These baskets come out relatively easily, and that's good. But you'll see on the size of them here, they've got these different sort of sized tabs, which means you can only put the baskets in one way round. The good thing is, I guess, this one says double here on it. And so when you put it in correctly, the double is facing you. You'd think this would say quad, wouldn't you? Because it's the quad, no, it's the lux. This is the lux. With this little wheel, we can start to work out what we wanna do. We could say, let's do a quad. Now it's gonna say, wait a minute. You can't pull a quad with the same grind setting that you would do for like a normal shot. Let's get this up to number 18. I will say that the tamping experience for the quad has been less nice. Feels like I can't actually press down hard enough before I hit the kind of top of the filter. Look at all that creamy, creamy crema. So it does this at the end of the shot. It kind of faffs around. It discharges some water. It seems to take a long time to kind of complete. You can see it still thinks it's brewing even though nothing's happening. I don't really know what's going on. It pumped a little water through something. That water ends up in the drip tray, actually. I don't know. I guess it's clearing the lines or resetting the temperature inside the machine. I don't really know what's going on there. Again, it felt the shot was too fast. It was too fast. It's made a grind recommendation. The process begins again. And then once you're dialed in for a coffee, it will remember as you jump between the different settings. I'm not going to drink this one, but in terms of other quad shots, they're kind of, again, very okay. I don't think you're going to get the best espresso possible brewing through a very tall column. It will be convenient, but it won't be the best tasting experience compared to the properly pulled double in this particular machine. Now, last but not least, there's a float popping up, which is useful. There's a float in the drip tray to tell you when it's full. But this thing started empty. So we've made, what, like six, seven drinks, steamed once, and the drip tray's full. This is a gripe for me. This is a bit of a problem. The drip tray is reasonably large, but actually this machine just dumps loads of water into the drip tray. Every time you finish a shot, it seems to purge water through the system. It means that if you're sort of filling this thing up with filtered water, it's kind of burning through your nice water at a relatively high rate compared to how many drinks it's producing. So let's make a milk drink here. Gonna need my jug for that. Now, they've gone with a slightly different approach to, say, the Breville Bambino, the Sage Bambino. This has a little whisking attachment at the bottom of the pitcher. This can come out for cleaning. It also means you can only use this pitcher with this machine. Now, what it's gonna do is basically spin that with a little magnet underneath to create a vortex when the milk is steaming. Usually you do that with the steam wand. This doesn't, and it wants a little extra help. It's quite simple to use, but it is pretty slow. We'll set it up for, let's say, let's go a little bit foamy. Dairy milk. Temperature is set in a sort of hidden menu where we set ours to low. The steam seems to be relatively dry, though, which is good, so it's not kind of diluting the milk much. Let's get on with it. Look at the quad pucks. Be right back. Making coffee sandcastles. Let's give it a little purge. Into the purge hole. And away we go. You done. Milk texture, I would say pretty good. Not the best milk I've ever had from an auto steam frother, but significantly better milk than you might get from a cafe where someone hasn't been properly trained or your first few goes on a normal machine. We have to talk about the cold brew. You've got a couple of options here. You've got cold pressed, which is a kind of espresso type thing, and you've got cold brew, which will brew more liquid, a kind of more traditional quote unquote cold brew. It's not cold brew. I guess they couldn't call it hot brew because it's not hot, but you can't really call it cold brew when it's lukewarm. What appears to come out is about body temperature, so it's not cold, it's not cool. It's kind of warm. Heating up allows for a reasonable extraction and a similar-ish profile, and they presume you're going to drink it over ice rather than just like a straight shot. Let's drink a straight shot of it, dammit. We'll put that total brew time from sort of go till beep on screen, just so you know how long that process took. How does it taste? Tepid, lukewarm. Texture is one of those things that seems to be kind of temperature proof to some extent, and lower temp shots can have nice textures. I don't get it. I don't really get it. You could do this yourself with a normal espresso machine by just making espresso before your machine is ready. I know that I should be putting it over ice and having a nice cold experience because it does have slightly lower acidity, which is the kind of target for a lot of cold brew drinkers. And my experience with the kind of cold brew function is similar. Pretty long, pretty slow, and kind of underwhelming, to be honest. Important caveat. Personally, I'm not a huge cold brew enjoyer. I like cold coffee, but I like it to be brewed hot and then iced to be cold. Now we need to talk about the filter coffee options. So on a menu, we can jump across from cold pressed to classic, and at the bottom we have our size selector, eight, 10, 12, whatever you want, up to, oh, 18. We'll go on eight. Now, the recommended grind setting jumps all the way up to 25, and it also says I need to use the Luxe basket, the quadshot basket. That was quick, wasn't it? Because what it produced was very, very coarsely ground coffee. There are substantial pieces of bean in here. This is shockingly coarse to me to brew, what, like eight ounces of liquid with? Should we put some of this into the particle size analyzer? And shockingly, 60% by volume of the coffee was above 1500 microns, above one and a half millimeters across. That's just very big pieces when, let's say we're brewing a two cup V60, most of the pieces might be around, say, 600 microns. So what we'll do just for comparison is I'll show you the grind size that we would use for a two cup V60, and I'll put this next to it just so you can see on a macro lens just how coarse this is. Now, one of the things we can do with coffee is we can measure the strength of the liquid to calculate how much of the ground coffee we extracted down into the cup. And that's really useful in a bunch of scenarios. We did that a lot with this. Now, people who complain about extraction testing say, it's just testing the quantity of extraction, not the quality of extraction. And this is the kind of machine that kind of proves them right. Typically, we're looking for, say, 18 to 22% of the ground coffee to be dissolved in the brew, right, by weight. If you've got 20 grams of coffee in here, then you want 3.6 to, say, 4.4 grams of coffee dissolved in the water, drinkable. This brew, these kind of brews, this grind size has actually been around 19% extraction, 18 and a half to 19%, which is technically correct. The taste, however, tells a different story. It's not very nice. It tastes like a bunch of that extraction has come from very fine particles that are kind of over-extracted, and a bunch of that has come from the very, very, very large pieces that haven't properly extracted. And so you get the sour-bitter combo. And so on average, the extraction is good, but actually the extraction is quite bad. And what I've also seen, you get these little uneven pockets where it looks like channeling or uneven extraction physically may have occurred quite obviously in these pucks. I mean, just look at how coarse that is. Your first thought might be the same as mine, which is, okay, okay, let's correct this a little bit. We know that if we grind fine from espresso, it's not a total car crash of grind quality. What if we take it from, say, 25? Or what if we take it down to, say, 20? And it was at this point that I noticed something that was just, I've changed the grind on this grind-by-weight grinder. The reason that grind-by-weight is useful is because if you grind by time, the finer the grind for a fixed time, the less coffee you'll get. And what I noticed is that when I ground at 20 instead of 25, I got less coffee. This kind of implies that it's almost like two separate engineering teams worked on the same product and the team doing filter coffee were like, hey, let's just grind by time. Grinding by weight will be really difficult because at coarser grind settings, the flow will be really fast and so we'll probably miss a load of times anyway. So let's just use time. The problem is that, yeah, like I've now got a substantial reduction in dose because I've changed my grind and yet you built this with a scale in the grinder. It doesn't look well-brewed. As for the taste, way over-extracted now. Like even just going to 20, it's pushed it way too far. It's still unbalanced and unevenly extracted but the ones I did in testing at this grind setting came out like 23.5% extraction, which for a grinder of this quality is too high a number for good taste. Let's just keep it simple like that. It's a super bitter cup. It's not particularly enjoyable. Ultimately, whatever I did with the filter coffee, dialing it in correctly or not, it just never tasted good. Oh, and also this does not knock out as easily and actually kind of needs a rinse afterwards rather than just a towel cleaning, which is again, kind of annoying. For me, the filter coffee from this is extremely flawed and if I were to compare it to filter coffee from the cheapest bottom-end like drip coffee maker that you can buy on the internet, I'd probably choose the drip coffee maker. It's paper filter, which will help and actually probably just as a brewer, better suited to brewing filter coffee. I've seen a lot of reviews for this thing talk about the target audience for it and so I want to talk about the target audience a bit more explicitly. First thing, target audience has $500 to spend on a coffee setup, which is not an insignificant amount of money. It's a decent spend. There is a caveat that you're spending it on a kind of consumer device that has a two-year warranty. You know, these days for products with two-year warranties, you may be lucky to get more out of it, but the concern is you won't. And to be blunt, Ninja have not a flawless reputation on build quality and longevity of some of their products. This is their first coffee machine. I have no idea how it's going to perform in terms of its own longevity, but it would be part of my mind. Like, will I be happy if this only lasts two years? Now you can do the calculation and say, if I make two drinks a day, every day with this thing and don't buy them from a cafe, am I in in terms of budget? Am I winning? And yeah, you probably are, but the idea that it is part of the growing e-waste of the world, that that kind of thinking, I just, I'm not very comfortable with it. I think if you're going to spend that much money, you want something with some longevity to it. Two, I think that the requirement is that you like coffee and you like the idea of making coffee. You don't want a push and go experience. You want to get involved a little bit. The tech in this is exciting for me. That's the root of this being, I hope, kind of a game changer. Sage Breville have the kind of grind assist technology in one of their machines, but it's three times the price of this one, I think. Or it's certainly a lot more expensive. To have the barista assist at $500 is great. The idea that you're not going to make terrible drinks is great. You're going to get pretty good milk. You're going to get pretty good espresso as long as you follow the guidance and put pretty good coffee into it. You know, making espresso and that kind of guidance of like, did it flow too fast? Well, then just grind finer. That's not complicated. And I like that it's available now. I like that it's out there. I want to see more companies doing this and helping people make good drinks at home. And nothing but praise for this tech at this price point, even if the window of good is maybe too wide. I don't mind. The idea that this has to do everything bothers me. The decision to cram so much in has created a crammed and cramped machine to work on. I think the ergonomics of it are quite flawed. I hope it has longevity, but I kind of want there to be most of this, but not all of this with a bit better build. And if that was a slightly higher price point, but it lasted longer, that would be a very compelling option for me. It's a product that I want to succeed so that it progresses and evolves. And I hope that people do get it, really like it. Because I think you could, you know, if you're just making espresso milk drinks, you can have a pretty good time with this and find life pretty easy, coffee making to be pretty fun. That for me is great. This is maddeningly close. But now I want to hear from you down in the comments below, because by now a bunch of these will be in people's homes. If you have one of these, how is it going? Have your frustrations matched mine? Have you found different stuff than I have? Have you had better experiences than me? Do you, if you're a cold brew drinker, really like the cold pressed functionality? I do genuinely want to know your experiences, your impressions. Please share them with all of us down in the comments below. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day.