A lot of people have a lot of things to say about good coffee and good coffee machines. I wanted to make good coffee at home, but I didn’t want to spend thousands or even hundreds of dollars on a ‘good’ coffee machine. I did a one-day coffee making course where you are taught to make proper coffee on a proper café quality machine. I quizzed the instructor and was told that, really, if you know what you’re doing, you can make great coffee on ANY coffee machine. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.
The Sunbeam coffee machine EM3600 was the smallest and cheapest coffee machine
I could find that didn’t look like a kid’s toy made of cheap plastic. It cost AU $159, though I now see Appliances Online has it on sale for only AU $123.
The machine is good-looking in silver and brown. It’s also compact, taking up the smallest amount of space possible for making real coffee. For me it’s important not to have a monster occupying my entire kitchen countertop.
The machine also comes with a few accessories, including a stainless steel milk jug, two espresso cups and saucers, a plastic tamper and a DVD showing you how to make coffee. The DVD was quite good, but I think if
I hadn’t had a hands-on coffee making lesson already, I would have been lost with this machine and would have given up.
The first few coffees I made with the machine were awful – pale, weak, burnt. Really bad. But I don’t blame the machine. Like my instructor said, you need to get to know the machine. I packed the coffee into the basket with less force and let the water drip through for longer and the quality of the coffee improved. Now I’m making café quality lattes every weekend.
The downside is how fiddly the whole process is. The machine requires you to fill the removable water reservoir,
