The Morning Machine is something I’d like to wake up to every day. Brewing specialty espresso drinks with the ease of use you’ve come to expect from your home capsule coffee maker, Morning delivers a sleek product with the attention to detail and breadth of recipe customization you’d expect from the sort of gear you’d find in an award-winning 3rd-wave cafe.
Specs:
— Dimensions: 15.8 inches L x 4 inches W x 10 inches H
— Tank Capacity: .85 liter
— Max Pressure: 20 bars
— Scale: .1g tolerance
— Temp Range: 149 - 208 degrees Fahrenheit
Pros:
— Recipes can be easily downloaded and programmed from the web
— Pre-infusion blooms coffee before it starts brewing for nuanced flavor
— Compatible with boutique blends from some internationally known roasters
— Excellent temperature control that heats
— Dishes out truly powerful bars of pressure
— Included .1g scale allows for precise coffee and tea formulas
Cons:
— Comes with similar environmental issues as other pod or capsule coffee machines
— Pricey
What is the Morning Machine?
Pod coffee makers have proliferated across the home goods market. These machines enable you to brew cups of joe that are ready in minutes. They use ground coffee which is generally pre-packaged in capsules made of aluminum, plastic, and occasionally in biodegradable materials.
At its core, the Morning Machine is versatile. Morning is a capsule coffee maker that marries ease of use with control — brewing specialty cups that reliably taste great.
Design
At about 16 inches long and 10 inches high, Morning won’t demand too much more of your counter space than your Dad’s old Mr. Coffee. That’s by design. This small imprint pod coffee maker with a lot of power earned a Red Dot Product Design Award in 2021. Like many other pod coffee makers, the machine uses a small refillable water tank. An attractive cylinder runs along the top of a square body. A small removable drip tray below the spout completes the picture.
The device’s exterior is unmarred by lots of buttons. An OLED screen gives you touch control, while an interactive dial that runs around the circumference of the screen allows you to intuitively scroll through recipes. However, most of the control happens in a mobile app. Once you hook it up with your smartphone, you can download recipes for various coffee roasts, where you can customize them to your tastes.
For those who don’t want to tinker, Morning hooks into the internet of things for easy access to great coffee recipes, including “Kyoto Style Slow Drip.” These roaster-designed recipes automatically program your machine to deliver a tasty brew that’s perfectly optimized for whatever specialty pod you’re working with.
Partnering with award-winning coffee companies the world over, including April Coffee Roasters in Denmark and South Korea’s Center Coffee, Morning offers some truly excellent roasts. These come packaged in classic coffee capsules that fit the Nespresso OriginalLine profile. For those looking for easy enjoyment, the stock recipe delivers a great shot.
However, the Morning app truly shines for those looking for more from their roasts. With multiple customizable factors programmable with sliders and digital buttons on the app, Morning allows you to tweak any recipe you use, so that you can get the shot you want every time, right from the comfort of your kitchen. The main adjustable factors are pressure, weight, and heat.
Customization
Morning delivers an astonishing customizable 20 bars of pressure (which means some excellent crema). To put that into perspective, some Marzocco espresso machines designed for cafes deliver only 12 bars of pressure. That means this is truly one powerful machine, capable of yielding cafe espresso with the body you’d expect to get from a machine that weighs 100 pounds.
Speaking of weight, Morning hooks you up with a scale with .1g sensitivity. Rather than measuring shots using a less precise volume metric, this scale yields highly tuned espresso shots that come out smooth and consistent shot after shot.
What’s more, Morning’s heat delivery is as highly tuned as that scale. Temperature is the most important factor in how acidic or sweet a cup of coffee will be. With a range of temperatures between a low of 149 degrees F to a nearly scorching 208 degrees F, Morning can provide both a steamy espresso that will still be piping hot when you take a sip, as well as subtler tea brews, such as genmaichas, that do better without scalding. A Nespresso machine only goes up to about 180 degrees F, so you’ll notice the temp difference on your first espresso shot if you’re switching over.
Pre-infusion
If you believe in blooming (we hope you do), you’ll be excited to hear that this machine can also pre-infuse shots, letting a small amount of hot water into the pod before applying the rest of the calibrated water and shot pressure. This translates to more flavor in every shot. The pre-infusion capabilities of this machine are especially exciting for making drip coffees. Blooming is particularly important in the pour over methods that the Morning drip brew might be replacing.
Sustainability
While coffee capsules are convenient, they do come with major issues. The overwhelming majority of the billions of coffee pods that are consumed every year become trash. These spent single-use pods will continue to exist for hundreds to thousands of years before breaking down. That means that every cup of coffee you make with a coffee pod machine will result in hundreds of years of trash. In comparison, traditional coffee methods such as pour overs result in simple biodegradable paper refuse and coffee grounds that easily break down within weeks to months.
Most capsules are theoretically recyclable, and this can offset some of the pod issues. For example, some capsules are made with 100 percent aluminum. These can easily be rinsed out and dropped into your home recycling. PBT capsules use plastic bodies with aluminum lids. For these to be recycled, the lid must be removed from the plastic body. Morning does offer a separate capsule recycler to help with this process. Whether these pods will actually be recycled depends on the recycling plants within your local area, and or the facility they are shipped to.
Biodegradable capsules are also occasionally available. While these are generally the most environmentally friendly option, they may or may not be truly biodegradable in a natural composting bin.
Final Thoughts on the Morning Machine
If you’re a coffee nerd in love with the simplicity and ease of use of coffee pod machines, then the Morning Machine is just for you. With levels of control that sprint past the competition, this coffee maker allows you to control all aspects of your home espresso brew. It’s for folks who want to try novel blends that are easily accessible with downloaded pre-programmed recipes.
Simultaneously, it’s for those who want to tweak all aspects of their brew to bring out unexpected nuances and specific flavor notes that will impress their guests. Pairing with forward-thinking specialty roasters the world over, Morning is a tech-forward coffee brewer that’s truly world class.
This post was created by a non-news editorial team at Recurrent Media, Futurism’s owner. Futurism may receive a portion of sales on products linked within this post.
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