My husband is a big coffee drinker so last year I decided to get him an espresso machine for his birthday! Luckily for us, I received the De’Longhi La Specialista Arte Evo Espresso Machine thanks to a collaboration. We’ve had our machine for 6 months now so I wanted to share my thoughts on this machine and just a general review.
DISCLAIMER: I received this product as part of a collaboration with the brand but all thoughts are my own. Some links in the article may be affiliate links. If you purchase a product with the links below, I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you! Thank you for your support!
Let me preface this by saying I don’t know anything about coffee and knew even less before getting our espresso machine so I had to learn everything from scratch. It’s semi automatic so it does have a lot of manual aspects you can control when making your shots of espresso. I had never made an espresso in my life and I was able to figure it out after only a couple of tries so I do think it’s a good beginner friendly machine.
Because it is manual, you do have to play around with the grind settings every time you swap out your coffee beans since each coffee will be slightly different. If you’re the type to stick to one coffee, this isn’t a big issue but my husband loves trying new coffees so we have to frequently tweak our settings to get the espresso shot just right. This may seem annoying but I think this is fun and makes you feel like a real barista!
Now on to my favorite features:
The built-in burr grinder - nothing beats the smell of freshly ground coffee every morning. Before we got this machine, we would manually grind coffee beans which was so much work and the coffee didn't stay as fresh. Now it’s easy to get the perfect amount of ground coffee for each shot in just a couple of seconds. I don’t have a comparison, but I’ve heard that this machine's grinder is one of the more quiet grinders on the market though it still sounds pretty loud to me. The only downside to this built-in grinder is that there isn’t an easy way to clean it.
The steam wand - we mostly use the steam wand for lattes but I also love to use it to make some fancy hot chocolates at home. It heats up very fast and gives a smooth finish to your milk. Getting the milk right for latte art is definitely a learning curve but this wand definitely makes it as simple as possible to learn.
The hot water feature - another feature a lot of people rarely mention that I love is the hot water feature. With just a click of a button, hot water is dispensed so I use it to make teas without having to get my electric kettle out and setting it up.
