De’Longhi La Specialista Maestro brings out your inner barista

If you’d like to make coffee a bit like the professionals do, use a portafilter and frothing jug, La Specialista Maestro may be for you.

De'Longhi La Specialista Maestro coffee machine. Click on the image to view in full screen.

There is magic around making a perfect coffee step-by-step, and there’s lots of steps involved: selecting the beans, filling the hopper, selecting the dose, grinding, tamping the grinds, brewing, and in the case of latte and cappuccino, frothing the milk to the right consistency and temperature.

Then there’s latte art, the barista’s signature added to their coffee canvas. You make coffee with passion and love.

If this idea leaves you cold, have an instant coffee or buy a push-button machine like the $6490 Jura GIGA 6 that we reviewed a fortnight ago. The GIGA 6 aims to deliver your favourite coffee at good quality with the touch of a button.

If you’d like to make coffee something like the way the professionals do, use a portafilter and frothing jug, then read on.

I’ve been trying the De’Longhi La Specialista Maestro over the past week, and I admit I’ve found it harder to sleep given the caffeine I’ve ingested testing coffee types. You create coffee the manual way, although there are automatic features that markedly reduce the effort.

Before I used La Specialista Maestro, I thought I’d quickly get sick of the preparation process and revert to instant coffee. On the contrary, I surprised myself. I got hooked on making espresso, latte and cappuccinos and, before long, I could produce a decent hot cappuccino with fine froth reasonably quickly.

La Specialista Maestro sort of replicates the steps in making coffee including separate grinding and brewing station. It is compact, about only 35cm wide and 46cm high. Do check the height is okay for your home before buying. If you have cupboards above your kitchen bench, you’ll need some clearance.

The machine is stylish with its stainless steel housing, grill, pressure gauge, control panel and beans hopper. The water tank slides into the back of the machine. It might annoy some that you have to walk around the machine to install it, but I didn’t do this that often.

You also get a stylish portafilter, stainless steel milk jug and a LatteCrema system which automates the milk preparation system if you don’t want to froth the milk yourself.

De’Longhi provides you with single wall baskets for the portafilter, for one or two cup extraction. For purists, this is a step up from the previous La Specialista which came with two pressurised, dual-walled baskets.

I’d call La Specialista Maestro an automated manual machine, because while you feel in control of the coffee making process, the automation makes life easier. You cheat a bit.

The LatteCrema” unit, portafilter and throthing jug.

Take the grinding/tamping process at the left-hand side, the first stage of coffee making. You normally use a manual tamper to compact and level the grindings so that water flows through the coffee evenly during brewing.

With this unit, with the portafilter still loaded, you press a lever which compresses the grindings at a regulated pressure. Easy – one of the fiddly bits of coffee making is taken care of. You then move the portafilter to the brewing station at the centre.

At right there’s the steam nozzle for frothing milk. I had to practice to get the right amount of air in the milk for cappuccino (more aerated) as opposed to latte. I went through quite a lot of milk practising. I sought to get the milk really hot by removing the jug just before the milk got to the burnt stage. After a while, getting decently aerated milk that’s hot seemed second nature.

Some online tutorials recommend putting a drop of detergent in water and practice making froth with that.

If milk frothing is too much, De’Longhi provides a “LatteCrema” system that plugs into the front right hand side of the machine and does the hard work automatically. The menu selections for milk-based coffee drinks triggers the LatteCrema system automatically so you end up with a complete coffee in your cup at the brewing station. It’s great, but for me, this takes away the sense of achievement from handling the milk yourself.

Brewing for two

At the grinding stage, De’Longhi offers you eight grinding levels from coarse to very fine, and you can adjust the coffee dose with the rotary dial at left. At brewing, you can select between a range of water temperatures, and there is a X2 button for doubling the recipe for making coffee for two.

There are instructions on how to change the settings. You can tweak coffee recipe aspects such as the water temperature and water levels, and make them permanent.

The machine is configurable but you need to consult the manual when changing settings. For example, to adjust the water hardness, you press the “X2” and “My” buttons, turn the coffee selection knob to “long black” and press the On/Standby button to confirm the menu change. You can’t remember this and there’s no digital screen to aid you.

That’s probably a good thing if you want to retain the retro feel of the La Specialista Maestro as I do. Maybe De’Longhi one day will provide an app that makes changing coffee recipes and settings easier.

The three dials on the dash show the coffee dosage, the water pressure and your choice of coffee: espresso, coffee, long black, cappuccino, flat white and latte, as on Australian models.

De'Longhi La Specialista Maestro coffee machine

Overall the La Specialista Maestro is a beautiful looking, compact coffee making machine that lets you feel like you’re a barista although there is a fair bit of cheating involved that simplifies the process.

If operation looks hard, De’Longhi has a good range of online videos that teach the requisite skills. It’s how I learned to use it.

Lastly there’s cost and there’s a big price hike between La Specialista Maestro and last year’s model. At $1,999, it’s almost double the cost of the previous model. De’Longhi argues that much of the inner workings of this machine has been rebuilt, and you get the benefits of new features such as the LatteCrema system. It’s still within the price range of other decent coffee makers and you might judge it worth the price given the skills and knowledge you can pick up, and sheer fun.

I had a ball using this machine and I could impress the neighbours and friends with my newly acquired barista skills.