KitchenAid Fully Automatic Espresso Machine KF7 with Milk Attachment, KES8557SX, Stainless Steel

Does it all!
This machine is the ultimate for home coffee connoisseurs with budget constraints. There’s pretty much nothing this machine won’t do. I’m a latte girl, and I love that I get to set the milk to coffee ratio and also determine whether it’s mil first or coffee first. All I’ve had to do is load the beans, plug in the milk container and push a couple of buttons. The machine rinses before making the first cup of coffee. It grinds the appropriate amount of beans for your individual recipe, tamps the beans, brews, then cleans the milk system with only one push of the button. I highly recommend.

Complex
Got this for my wife as she is an avid coffee drinker including espresso, cappuccino, and cafe americano. In fact she has a Keurig and a Nespresso machine, if that tells you anything. As such, my review is basically a second-hand accounting of the pros and cons.First off, and most importantly, it makes a great cup of coffee. The touch screen interface provides endless flexibility and variety to match your exact preferences. It also handles the whole milk steaming process which is a huge plus. And it grinds the beans too. The resulting output is a high-quality cup of cappuccino.. or whatever you like.. with just a few button presses.Now for the gotchas:it is, obviously, quite expensive. Although If you’re paying Starbucks or another drive-thru coffee shop $5 or more for a cup of coffee every day then it might only take a year or so to pay for itself …assuming you religiously use this instead of going to Starbucks, rather than ‘in addition’ to your daily run.Secondly, by my wife’s telling, all of it’s flexibility and variety adds a bit of a learning curve. It’s not necessarily the easiest, most intuitive, way to make a cup of coffee when you’re half asleep in the morning. For this reason she is hanging on to her old Nespresso for its one button ease of use. Given the quality of the coffee output though, I imagine she will eventually learn to use this with the same level of ease as her old coffee maker and/or maybe she’ll get everything all setup before she goes to bed the night before so that it’s a thoughtless process in the pre-caffienated morning hours.I have noticed that this machine does a lot of self-maintenance. Which is to say, it may start cleaning itself and draining water of various colors through the dispensing spigots. It does have a large-ish catch basin for this reason. I imagine if you live in a humid climate where the liquids are unlikely to evaporate between uses, you might eventually encounter a situation where it overflows and creates a mess on your countertop. You can, of course, fairly easily remove and dump the catch basin out into your sink.. if you think of it. The device does also instruct you occasionally to place a cup or other liquid catching device under the spigots to catch the stuff so there’s also that. If you have it sitting on your countertop near a sink, it *might* be convenient if they allowed for the attachment of an external drain line. Maybe in a future model? In any case, the frequent self-cleaning cycles are something to be aware of.It also takes up quite a bit of counter space. This isn’t your normal compact single cup coffee maker. It’s a big device. It’s also a little taller than those simpler coffee makers so it probably won’t fit underneath your upper cabinets.. at least not with the clearance needed to allow you to access the coffee bean hopper (top rear) and to refill the water compartment.All in all this is a great machine. But it’s a big ticket item for most homeowners so I wouldn’t buy it without some research to decide if it’s worthwhile for you.

Disappointing Product
We trusted that coming from a top product line and at a high price we were getting an outstanding coffee maker. Sadly, it failed to perform asadvertised. Following the instructions and using high quality coffee beans, we could not produce a good cup of coffee.