High-Tech Espresso Makers For Your Home
It’s never been easier to brew your own coffee.
It’s never been easier to brew your own coffee.
For some, coffee isn’t just an essential morning elixir—it’s a way of life.
For the bean-obsessed, it makes sense to invest in a machine befitting their beloved beverage, and, fortunately, technology has reached a point where coffee lovers can create cafe-quality coffee drinks—without barista training—in their own home.
Miele
Offering 20 drink specialities at the tap of a button, including single and double-shot espressos and espresso macchiatos, the Miele CM 7750 CoffeeSelect is a masterpiece of modern coffee-making technology that sits on your countertop.
In addition to offering on-demand espressos (and cappuccinos and americanos, etc.), the CM 7750 puts a premium on quality with three separate bean containers (ensuring that whatever you order will be prepared with the proper bean); an innovative grinder system that grinds the beans fresh for each order; and a descaling process that automatically prevents the build of limescale in your machine. All that and Miele’s WiFiConn@ct technology that allows owners to operate and monitor their machine remotely from their smartphone.
The Miele CM 7750 CoffeeSelect is available for approx. $7400.
JURA
This Swiss-made wonder is a tale of twos. Equipped with two heating systems, two pumps and two electronically adjustable, precision ceramic disc grinders, the JURA GIGA 6 is capable of producing two separate coffee drinks at the same time. But the real magic with the GIG6 happens when these dual systems work in conjunction—heating and frothing your milk perfectly while simultaneously brewing your coffee—for an optimally prepared cafe-quality drink, of which you’ll have many choices. The GIGA 6 can create 28 specialty drinks, using three different brewing processes. But its ample brains don’t stop there. The GIGA 6’s artificial intelligence system uses a self-learning algorithm to discover a user’s preferences and then tailors the touchscreen to highlight preferred drinks and brewing methods.
The JURA GIGA 6 is available for $6490
Breville
Espresso lovers who want to focus solely on their drink of choice would do well to invest in the Oracle Touch Espresso Machine from Breville. The Oracle only brews five types of specialty drinks (espresso, americano, latte, flat white and cappuccino), but it handles every step of the process. Oracle owners need only tap a button and the machine will grind, dose and tamp coffee, extract at the ideal water temperature and pressure, and texture milk to your taste, to prepare your ideal bean-based beverage. The Breville’s awesome automation doesn’t prevent users from having input, however. Oracle owners can easily adjust coffee strength, milk texture and temperature, shot size and choose from 45 different grind settings.
The Breville Oracle Touch Espresso Machine is available for $3299
Philips
For coffee fans who want to play the part of barista—but, you know, without all the hard work—the Philips Saeco Xelsis is a solid choice. The Xelsis is capable of preparing 15 different espresso and coffee drinks, but here’s the beauty—users can exercise complete control over the process (easily) thanks to the Coffee Equalizer system. Providing total personalization, the Coffee Equalizer system is a touchscreen that allows users to adjust every aspect of the beverage until they find the mix that is ideal specifically for them. The Xelsis will even save up to six user profiles so that everyone in the home can have their drink preferences preserved. And in keeping with Xelsis’ “be the barista without the work” philosophy, the device will automatically clean and descale itself.
The Philips Saeco Xelsis is available for approx. $2642
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
At the World Plogging Championship, contestants have lugged in tires, TVs and at least one Neapolitan coffee maker
GENOA, Italy—Renato Zanelli crossed the finish line with a rusty iron hanging from his neck while pulling 140 pounds of trash on an improvised sled fashioned from a slab of plastic waste.
Zanelli, a retired IT specialist, flashed a tired smile, but he suspected his garbage haul wouldn’t be enough to defend his title as world champion of plogging—a sport that combines running with trash collecting.
A rival had just finished the race with a chair around his neck and dragging three tires, a television and four sacks of trash. Another crossed the line with muscles bulging, towing a large refrigerator. But the strongest challenger was Manuel Jesus Ortega Garcia, a Spanish plumber who arrived at the finish pulling a fridge, a dishwasher, a propane gas tank, a fire extinguisher and a host of other odds and ends.
“The competition is intense this year,” said Zanelli. Now 71, he used his fitness and knack for finding trash to compete against athletes half his age. “I’m here to help the environment, but I also want to win.”
Italy, a land of beauty, is also a land of uncollected trash. The country struggles with chronic littering, inefficient garbage collection in many cities, and illegal dumping in the countryside of everything from washing machines to construction waste. Rome has become an emblem of Italy’s inability to fix its trash problem.
So it was fitting that at the recent World Plogging Championship more than 70 athletes from 16 countries tested their talents in this northern Italian city. During the six hours of the race, contestants collect points by racking up miles and vertical distance, and by carrying as much trash across the finish line as they can. Trash gets scored based on its weight and environmental impact. Batteries and electronic equipment earn the most points.
A mobile app ensures runners stay within the race’s permitted area, approximately 12 square miles. Athletes have to pass through checkpoints in the rugged, hilly park. They are issued gloves and four plastic bags to fill with garbage, and are also allowed to carry up to three bulky finds, such as tires or TVs.
Genoa, a gritty industrial port city in the country’s mountainous northwest, has a trash problem that gets worse the further one gets away from its relatively clean historic core. The park that hosted the plogging championship has long been plagued by garbage big and small.
“It’s ironic to have the World Plogging Championship in a country that’s not always as clean as it could be. But maybe it will help bring awareness and things will improve,” said Francesco Carcioffo, chief executive of Acea Pinerolese Industriale, an energy and recycling company that’s been involved in sponsoring and organizing the race since its first edition in 2021. All three world championships so far have been held in Italy.
Events that combine running and trash-collecting go back to at least 2010. The sport gained traction about seven years ago when a Swede, Erik Ahlström, coined the name plogging, a mashup of plocka upp, Swedish for “pick up,” and jogging.
“If you don’t have a catchy name you might as well not exist,” said Roberto Cavallo, an Italian environmental consultant and longtime plogger, who is on the world championship organizing committee together with Ahlström.
Saturday’s event brought together a mix of wiry trail runners and environmental activists, some of whom looked less like elite athletes.
“We like plogging because it makes us feel a little less guilty about the way things are going with the environment,” said Elena Canuto, 29, as she warmed up before the start. She came in first in the women’s ranking two years ago. “This year I’m taking it a bit easier because I’m three months pregnant.”
Around two-thirds of the contestants were Italians. The rest came from other European countries, as well as Japan, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Algeria, Ghana and Senegal.
“I hope to win so people in Senegal get enthusiastic about plogging,” said Issa Ba, a 30-year-old Senegalese-born factory worker who has lived in Italy for eight years.
“Three, two, one, go,” Cavallo shouted over a loudspeaker, and the athletes sprinted off in different directions. Some stopped 20 yards from the starting line to collect their first trash. Others took off to be the first to exploit richer pickings on wooded hilltops, where batteries and home appliances lay waiting.
As the hours went by, the athletes crisscrossed trails and roads, their bags became heavier. They tagged their bulky items and left them at roadsides for later collection. Contestants gathered at refreshment points, discussing what they had found as they fueled up on cookies and juice. Some contestants had brought their own reusable cups.
With 30 minutes left in the race, athletes were gathering so much trash that the organisers decided to tweak the rules: in addition to their four plastic bags, contestants could carry six bulky objects over the finish line rather than three.
“I know it’s like changing the rules halfway through a game of Monopoly, but I know I can rely on your comprehension,” Cavallo announced over the PA as the athletes braced for their final push to the finish line.
The rule change meant some contestants could almost double the weight of their trash, but others smelled a rat.
“That’s fantastic that people found so much stuff, but it’s not really fair to change the rules at the last minute,” said Paul Waye, a Dutch plogging evangelist who had passed up on some bulky trash because of the three-item rule.
Senegal will have to wait at least a year to have a plogging champion. Two hours after the end of Saturday’s race, Ba still hadn’t arrived at the finish line.
“My phone ran out of battery and I got lost,” Ba said later at the awards ceremony. “I’ll be back next year, but with a better phone.”
The race went better for Canuto. She used an abandoned shopping cart to wheel in her loot. It included a baby stroller, which the mother-to-be took as a good omen. Her total haul weighed a relatively modest 100 pounds, but was heavy on electronic equipment, which was enough for her to score her second triumph.
“I don’t know if I’ll be back next year to defend my title. The baby will be six or seven months old,” she said.
In the men’s ranking, Ortega, the Spanish plumber, brought in 310 pounds of waste, racked up more than 16 miles and climbed 7,300 feet to run away with the title.
Zanelli, the defending champion, didn’t make it onto the podium. He said he would take solace from the nearly new Neapolitan coffee maker he found during the first championship two years ago. “I’ll always have my victory and the coffee maker, which I polished and now display in my home,” he said.
Contestants collected more than 6,600 pounds of trash. The haul included fridges, bikes, dozens of tires, baby seats, mattresses, lead pipes, stoves, chairs, TVs, 1980s-era boomboxes with cassettes still inside, motorcycle helmets, electric fans, traffic cones, air rifles, a toilet and a soccer goal.
“This park hasn’t been this clean since the 15 century,” said Genoa’s ambassador for sport, Roberto Giordano.
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual