You know how you like your morning caffeine fix, but the problem is, at most coffee shops you are not sure what you are going to get. You might encounter a different employee using different ratios of coffee, water or milk, the beans might be less fresh, the machines not clean, the grinder recently used for different strongly flavored beans, and so on. In short, there are variables you can’t control. But Miele can.
The venerable German appliance maker, known for its high-end kitchen and home appliances and still family-owned - ever since rolling out cream separators and butter churns in the 19th century - has tackled the coffee conundrum using its typical obsession with precision.
I’ve been test driving a loaner of the company’s top of the line CM6310 (also known simply as the CM6). I’ve written extensively about high-end coffee makers before, for both Forbes.com and print magazines, and have tested several in the rarefied category to which the CM6310 belongs, known as “super-automatic” machines. These are not your Mr. Coffee devices with paper filters, or even the more upscale streamlined coffee-capsule versions now in vogue. These are digital home baristas, which do the entire coffee drink production from start to finish, from grinding fresh beans to using the specific amount of pressure and water for your desired beverage and even topping a cappuccino with perfectly frothed steamed milk, all at the touch of a single button. Or as one member of Amazon.com’s Vine program (which enlists elite power users to test products for review) put it in his glowing 5-star analysis, “Quite literally, this is a robotic café that makes your perfect cup to order every time.” Fittingly, his review was titled “Coffee Connoisseur’s Dream Machine.”
The super-automatic niche is dominated by high-end European kitchenware makers, including Miele, Krups, Franke and especially Jura, the Swiss leader in this space and the machine I use daily at home. The CM6310 (also made in Switzerland) does very similar things to its peers’ top models with a few notable differences - especially the price, which is significantly less than my Jura and most comparable devices. It’s hard to say that two thousand dollars is a bargain for a coffee maker, but for what it does, that is the case with Miele’s latest and greatest.
First, here’s a quick overview of what the CM6310 does that your coffee maker almost certainly does not do:
It stores whole beans of your choice in a hopper, sealed to maintain freshness (you can also use ground coffee). Every time you “make” a coffee drink by pushing a button, it grinds the beans to order as appropriate for your selected beverage, one (or two) cups at a time, using a high-quality adjustable conical grinder; it shoots water through the ground coffee at the optimum temperature and pressure for your drink, capable of up to 15 bars pressure, much greater than most espresso machines; it automatically adds steamed/frothed milk if appropriate. It can make everything from a simple cup of coffee or perfect espresso (single or double) to a parfait-like multi layered café latte, cappuccino or latte macchiato, all at the press the touch screen. After each coffee making session it cleans itself, running hot water through its pipes and nozzles.
There’s more: like a memory driver’s seat in a luxury car, the CM6 lets members of your household create individual custom profiles, like “Larry’s morning coffee,” to precisely replicate whatever specific coffee making particulars float your boat. Customizable and adjustable variances from factory settings include the coarseness or fineness of the grind, water temperature, milk temperature, and volume of water and milk, with ten different portion sizes. A husband and wife could each make a fairly straightforward café Americano one after another, but have the results be different sizes, strengths and temperatures, exactly as they prefer them. For those less choosy, one of the Miele’s strengths is that its dual spouts excel at making drinks side by side, two at a time.
Once you get your preferred beans and setting on any of the top super-automatic machines dialed in, they make ultra-consistent great tasting coffee the way you like it, and the Miele does just that. That being said, there are a few key differentiators from most competitors. As I mentioned above, there’s price: it sells for just under two grand, and that’s at official distributor Williams-Sonoma, not known for bargain shopping. The top of the line Jura is three thousand, while other machines I’ve written about can run into five figures. Two thousand dollars sounds pricey for a coffee machine, but it is at the low end of its spectrum, and actually less than many high-end manual espresso machines that can’t do half these functions and require a separate expensive grinder. Start skipping Starbucks and a daily fancy coffee drink and making it at home and many of the super-automatic machines can pay themselves off surprisingly quickly. Plus you get to choose the beans, and to me, the coffee tastes much better. Going super-automatic also means generating much less plastic/foil/cardboard/paper waste then machines using capsules or K-cups.
Other key differences/benefits of this model include a heated top shelf 6-cup warming rack, a feature my machine lacks; a separate dedicated nozzle just for hot water, handy for anyone making tea or hot cocoa or just in need of hot water; and it disassembles more than many of its peers for more thorough cleaning with mostly dishwasher safe parts, which is very handy because frankly, these super-automatic machines, despite cleaning themselves regularly, require a bit of TLC. In this vein, all the models I’ve encountered use a separate metal milk container you keep in the fridge, and connect via a hose to the main unit when using, but the Miele ha a nifty way of then running the milk hose into the drip tray and cleaning it automatically, something I’m used to doing by hand in the sink. Less fuss, less muss. It is also more efficiently designed in this regards, with a built in door to house the milk tube, which might otherwise end up in a kitchen drawer. In all ways but one, it makes cleanup easier than many of its peers.
Which brings us to the biggest difference, pro or con, depending how you look at it. The Miele does not have a filter, while many models like my Jura use a sort of Britta-like replaceable filter in the water reservoir. If like many people, you already have filtered water at your tap, or fill it with water from a filtering pitcher, this is actually an advantage that saves you money, ordering - and stocking - extra filters that cost more than twenty bucks a pop. On the other hand, it adds an extra step of periodically descaling the machine, an automatic process accomplished by popping in a descaling tablet and putting it in a self-clean mode. This is in addition to the normal cleaning tablets most machines require periodically. I live in a rural area and have a well with hard unfiltered water, which makes the Miele require more frequent descaling, whereas the filter avoids this, though at an additional cost. But for most urban households, the no filter tradeoff is likely to be more an advantage than a liability.
Finally, for a machine that does all these things, the Miele CM6310 is one of the smallest on the market, and countertop real estate can be a big issue, especially in an apartment, as these machines are fairly substantial. If you happen to already have a current version of Miele’s built-in kitchen appliances, you will be immediately familiar with the operation of the CM6, because it shares the DirectSensor touchscreen control design with the company’s other top of the line products.
The bottom line is that for its combination of taste, quality, size, price, well thought out user-friendly design, and laundry list of excellent features, it is a hard to beat the CM6 in the world of super-automatic machines. (Note, my testing was done in a concise time period to evaluate features and taste and does not reflect durability or long term use).
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