The new De’Longhi Rivelia Start is a super-compact coffee maker with a 10-drink menu — including the cold brew we desperately need for sweltering summer days

• The Rivelia Start is De’Longhi’s smallest automatic coffee maker
• It has a menu of 10 coffee drinks, including cold brew
• It’s on sale now in the UK for £599.99 (about $800 / AU$1,160)

De’Longhi makes some of the best espresso machines I’ve tested here at TechRadar, and as the owner of a small kitchen, its latest model has particularly piqued my interest. The De’Longhi Rivelia Start is the company’s smallest fully automatic coffee maker.

The Rivelia Start is a successor to the 2024 De’Longhi Rivelia, which our tester Josephine Watson gave a full five stars thanks to its consistently well-extracted espresso, clever Bean Adapt technology that optimizes brew settings to suit your preferred beans, and LatteCrema Hot system, which creates thick and creamy foam for milky drinks.

The Rivelia Start offers all that in an even smaller package, and adds the ability to prepare authentic-tasting cold brew. De’Longhi promises that your cold brew will be “ready in under five minutes”, which tells me that it’s not just pouring a shot of hot coffee over ice, like some other machines I’ve tested recently. Instead, the coffee is extracted using ambient temperature water, which results in fewer bitter compounds being dissolved for a more mellow flavor.

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The Rivelia Start’s standard menu contains 10 drinks, but if you like the idea of an iced latte or cappuccino to help you stay cool in the summer months, you can upgrade your Rivelia Start with the optional LatteCrema Cool set, which lets you create chilled milk foam for six further drinks.

Personally, the feature I’m most excited about is the pair of swappable bean hoppers. My job sometimes involves drinking a lot of lattes, and I always prefer to switch to decaf in the afternoon so I can still sleep after a day testing drip and espresso machines. With the Rivelia Start, there’s no need to purge one type of coffee from the hopper before refilling with another; just unscrew the whole thing and swap it for one filled with a different type of bean.

It’s simple to operate too, with an interface of clearly-labelled buttons rather than a touchscreen, making it extra accessible for new users.