What I look for when buying a coffee machine, as an expert reviewer who’s spent hundreds of hours testing different coffee makers

Smeg Cold Brew Espresso Coffee Machine cappuccino.

Malcolm Gladwell once claimed that it takes ten thousand hours to master something. I’m not sure that ‘practice helps’ is that insightful, and I don’t know that I’ve spent the equivalent of four hundred days testing coffee machines, but I do know that I've tried many of them.

So many in fact that I can’t even remember the exact number I’ve tried, but my editor, Molly, can confirm that as a team we’ve spent hundreds of hours in the test kitchen examining dozens of coffee machines.