From their headquarters in Treviso, Italy – a stone’s throw away from one of the country’s many cultural epicentres, Venice – the design team at the family-owned brand De’Longhi embarked on a mission to create a coffee machine that its users could fall in love with. And not just because Brad Pitt is the current face.
Up until the introduction of the Rivelia, which just officially launched in the UK, fully automatic bean-to-cup coffee machines were one of the least accessible kitchen accessories on the market.
For instance, the De’Longhi PrimaDonna Soul, one of the brand’s most popular fully automatic bean-to-cup machines, would set you back an eye-watering £1379.99. Meanwhile, their competitors over at Sage are charging £1,838.99 for their classic, often sold-out, fully automatic machine known as the Oracle.
Cumbersome, bulky and frankly beyond the realms of affordability for the vast majority of coffee lovers across the globe – we forewent our dreams of owning automatic bean-to-cup machines for budget-friendly options beloved by many, including pod machines, aero presses and simple cafetières.
While most of us are capable of producing brilliant coffee with these simple contraptions, the increasingly fast-paced nature of modern life can often prevent us from engaging fully in the ritual of coffee making. This results in us buying expensive brews from local shops more often than we should, especially when we’ve already invested in enough beans and grounds to last a fair few months.
Monetary qualms aside, the more we begin to enjoy the ritual of drinking an espresso, cappuccino or flat white at home or in cafés, the more refined our coffee-tasting palette becomes.
At a certain point, we must graduate to the next stage of coffee-loving. For some, this might be relinquishing the desire to buy from Starbucks and instead buying coffee from an artisan roaster in your local area. For others, this looks more like donating your old pod machine and replacing it with a spanking new, manual or fully automatic machine instead.
Yet as we’ve already discussed, fully automatic bean-to-cups aren’t the most affordable, and manual machines – while fantastic – often don’t suit our fast-paced lives and sit unused and uncared for after just a few weeks of ownership.
Enter: the Rivelia.
The most compact fully automatic bean-to-cup machine we’ve ever come across and priced at just £749.99, we were keen as freshly roasted coffee beans to brew some coffee using this innovative piece of tech. Without further ado, let’s get into the gears of this review.
Buy now: De’Longhi Rivelia – £749.99, De’Longhi
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Key specifications
Dimensions: 245 x 430 x 385mm
Weight: 9.7kg
Pump pressure: 19 bar
Beans container capacity: 250g
Water container capacity: 1.4L
Energy class: A
Max cup height: 140mm
Input power: 1450W
Rated voltage/Frequency: 220-240 V / 50-60 Hz
Controls/ Display: Touch display / 3.5" TFT colour
Milk System: LatteCrema Technology
User-friendliness
I’m going to start with one of the main reasons that this coffee machine is so brilliant. The user-friendliness is perhaps the best I’ve ever come across in the world of fully automatic coffee machines. This all harks back to De’Longhi’s desire to create a machine that users could fall in love with, which they’ve certainly achieved with this reviewer.
From the moment you switch on the Rivelia, you’re guided through an incredibly simple set-up process, which is pleasantly surprising for such a hi-tech machine. With the help of the fantastically responsive touch-screen interface, the product will help you run a first test of the system to make sure everything is running smoothly – a process which includes testing your water hardness with the included test strip to ensure the perfect extraction – before helping you to set-up personal profiles for all the machine’s users.
Though it may seem frivolous to some, the colour-coded and wonderfully customisable profiles help to bring this state-of-the-art machine back down to earth. While many coffee lovers who invest in high-end machines often become scared of using their wonderful devices for fear of breaking or damaging them, the Rivelia has been designed to form an immediate personal bond with its users.
The Rivelia will greet you in the morning, afternoon or evening depending on which profile you’re using and when. Once it’s made your coffee, it’ll deliver a cheery message, telling you that this is probably its “best coffee yet!”, or that it’s been made “just the way you like it!”
I don’t mean to extoll the personal connection aspect in a scary, robots-are-taking-over-the-planet way, but rather as a means to illustrate the brilliance of design which will ensure this compact piece of kit is simultaneously the most prized, and most used possession in your kitchen.
Design
I was immediately floored by the fact that the Rivelia does not contain a single, sharp 90-degree angle. With all smooth, curved surfaces and polished finishes, the Rivelia has so clearly been designed with everyday use in mind. Unlike most automatic bean-to-cup machines, it’s also available in four different colourways: white, black, pebble grey and even beige (which so happens to be my personal favourite).
The interchangeable hoppers designed with adventurous coffee lovers in mind are a marvel, and I thought it was a brilliant touch that the caps match your chosen colourway.
Functionality
When it comes to making your coffee, you simply scroll through an easy-to-use list of coffee combinations: cappuccino, flat white, long black and many more. Fill either of the two included hoppers with your beans of choice and the Rivelia will grind, tamp and brew your coffee to utter perfection. Whether you’re an expert in bean-to-cup machines or not, changing the coarseness of the grind is incredibly easy with a simple dial found just underneath where the hopper locks in on the machine.
While you may not get a choice when it comes to extraction pressure, as this is all figured out by the brilliant computer hidden within the compact frame of the Rivelia, I’m yet to have a coffee that doesn’t taste as good – if not better – than shop-bought brews.
This is also because you can easily choose the level of intensity and size of your coffee, as well as whether you’d like an extra shot included (something the brand came up with after conducting market research over in the UK, as the Italians, of course, would never pervert their coffees with extra shots).
The Bean Adapt technology is equally brilliant, and by following a series of short prompts based on your knowledge of the variety you’ve purchased, the Rivelia will adapt its brewing process to ensure you get the most out of your artisan beans.
Milk frothing
You can choose to froth your milk manually, but I preferred allowing the Rivelia to instruct me when it came to making flat whites and cappuccinos. Once your coffee is brewed, the Rivelia will tell you which setting to turn the dial on the milk frother to for the perfect frothy finish. I found that whether I used plant-based or cow’s milk, the resulting froth was light, airy, and not too bubbly. Perfection.
Buy now £749.99, Amazon
Verdict
The first affordable, compact and beautifully crafted fully automatic bean-to-cup machine of its kind, the Rivelia has been designed with coffee lovers looking to take the next step when it comes to their morning brew in mind. This next step is not an overcomplicated one, but rather one that allows users to explore a variety of beans and coffee types at the tap of a button. An absolute marvel of a machine, you couldn’t pay me to go back to manual tamping. The Rivelia is a revelation.
