If your daily latte habit is burning a hole in your wallet, preparing your own coffee at home is a sensible idea. With a good quality coffee machine, preparing perfectly extracted espresso and silky milk foam is as simple as pressing a button — and you don’t have to wait in line, either.
I test over a dozen coffee makers every year here at TechRadar, and I’ve picked out my top three recommendations for preparing delicious lattes in the comfort of your kitchen. One of them can prepare chilled lattes with cold milk foam as well, giving you even more options.
All three coffee makers in this list are fully automatic, but if you’re looking for something cheaper and don’t mind doing some of the work yourself, there are some excellent compact espresso machines with quality steam wands, such as the De’Longhi Dedica Duo and Breville Bambino. Want an easier option? There are also excellent standalone milk frothers like the Dreo Baristamaker and Smeg Mini Milk Frother, which handle the hard work for you.
Philips LatteGo 5500 Series
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If you’re the only latte-lover in your household, this compact coffee maker is the perfect option. It’s small enough to tuck into even the smallest kitchen, and holds just the right amount of water, beans, and milk for one person.
Espresso is consistently well-extracted, and I’m a particularly big fan of its excellent ceramic grinder, which offers extra-fine grind settings to make it easier to find exactly the right grind size for your preferred coffee.
The LatteGo milk system is unlike anything I’ve used before, but it’s ingenious. You attach the milk carafe to the front of the machine, then fill it with milk while it’s in situ. Measuring lines on the side help you add just the right amount of milk for your drink so there’s nothing left over at the end, reducing potential waste. Then, when you’ve finished, you can disassemble the carafe into just a few pieces of dishwasher-safe plastic. Milk never enters the body of the machine, and there are no awkward pipes and tubes to keep clean.
For me, the only downside was that the milk dispenser isn’t height-adjustable, so you need to position your cup just right to avoid missing it. That’s a minor quibble, though, and this is otherwise a superb little coffee maker that’ll let you make café-quality lattes at home, without the café prices.
Read my full Philips LatteGo 5500 Series review
Siemens EQ900 Plus
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The Siemens EQ900 Plus isn’t cheap, but it makes the best latte macchiato I’ve had from a home coffee maker — and I’ve tried a lot. This version is the EQ900 Plus, which has a chamber that holds a cleaning tablet ready for use when the machine needs maintenance. If that’s not something you need, then you can pick up the standard EQ900 for considerably less.
Like all the coffee makers in this guide, the EQ900 Plus brews exceptional espresso, but for me, the standout feature is its ability to turn any type of milk into silky, creamy foam just as well as a professional barista. Just make your selection using the sharp 6.8-inch color touchscreen, customize the beverage to suit your preferences, then let the machine handle the rest.
Another of my favorite features here is the dual hopper, which lets you load up two different types of coffee at the same time, and switch between them on the fly. For me, that means switching to decaf in the afternoon is now a piece of cake, and each hopper has its own grinder so you don’t need to worry about resetting the grind size for the different beans. You could also fill one with a fruity coffee for espressos and americanos, and one with more chocolatey, caramel-like notes for lattes and cappuccinos.
Maintaining bean-to-cup coffee machines can be a chore, but the EQ900 Plus has an excellent set of automatic cleaning programs to make life easier. Highly recommended.
Read my full Siemens EQ900 Plus review
Jura J10
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If your usual latte order brings baristas out in a cold sweat, the Jura J10 is the coffee maker for you. It carries a premium price tag, but you’re getting a machine that brews a stellar espresso (with crema so good, my colleagues couldn’t stop commenting on it), foams hot or cold milk to perfection, and even infuses that foam with your choice of syrup. It’s a very impressive package, and during my tests I found it refreshingly simple to use.
The J10 can brew hot or cold, and has a huge menu array of drinks to choose from. You can filter the options by temperature, and there’s even a feature called Coffee Eye that detects which of the machine’s two dispensers your cup is underneath (the one that only dispenses coffee, or the one that also froths milk), and tailors the menu accordingly.
I’m not usually a great fan of syrup in coffee, because it tends to sink to the bottom of the cup, meaning you can barely taste it at first, and your drink gets sweeter and sweeter towards the bottom. The Jura J10 has a system called ‘Sweetfoam’ that adds syrup to foamed milk as it’s dispensed into your cup, meaning it’s evenly spread throughout every sip and you don’t need to use as much.
Sweetfoam works with any type of coffee syrup, and I found that it actually stabilizes the foam so it lasts to the final sip. The J10 works with any plant-based or dairy milk too, so the pumpkin spice oat latte of your dreams is only a button-press away.
Read my full Jura J10 review
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catherine.ellis@futurenet.com (Cat Ellis)
