I’ve been using Ninja’s Luxe Café coffee machine for months now – whichever model you choose, it’s a semi-automatic experience available for under $500/£500 for the entry-level Premier model.
Both the Premier and bigger brother Pro model involve you interacting with a portafilter to grind the beans and then move it across to the group head for brewing. Milk is heated/frothed in a jug, meaning it’s also up to you to combine the coffee and milk if desired to create your drink.
Ninja clearly feels there’s a market for an even more automated experience, and the result of this is the $1000/£899 AutoBarista Pro, which has many of the same skills but presents them in a slightly different way, with a narrower selection of 13 drinks including Americano, Cappuccino, Cold Brew, Flat White, Latte and Espresso; plenty for most.
Yet while the grinding and brewing is all automatic, the milk preparation is still in a separate jug, leaving you to manually combine the coffee and milk. That’s not a problem of course but as such this machine is not quite producing hot and cold drinks ‘at the touch of a button’ as Ninja claims. Therefore, while it’s perfectly possible to produce an easy Americano, it’s not quite the same automatic end-to-end experience with a Flat White.
And while there is plenty of information on options you can choose, there’s not quite enough guidance about the amount of milk (or plant-based milk) you need for each drink, though there are lines inside the jug to help. This side of the process is left to you to sort out rather than the machine just taking milk from a reservoir as with many fully automatic machines.
The amount of froth is preset to the appropriate level for each of your favourite drinks and as with all options, the recommended setting is underlined.
The key mitigation is that this is an $1000/£899 machine in a market with many fully automatic machines that often cost several hundred dollars more. And as such the AutoBarista Pro is incredible value for money. Because of course, there is a LOT on offer here.
It’s a heavy machine at just under 19kg, and as such Ninja has provided tear-off tabs to remove the top part of the box for easier unpacking, which is great (although not so great if, like me, you need to re-pack it). It’s a surprisingly narrow machine at around 27cm – so it should be happy in most kitchens.
My review unit was black and stainless steel, though I notice from Ninja’s site that a couple of colour options will be available – midnight blue, oat mik, mocha and vista green. The unit and milk jug are colour-coded to suit.
The grind unit is removable at the side of the machine for regular cleaning (so you do need side access to the machine), while grounds are collected in a neat drawer. There is little mess, which you can get with the Luxe Café when moving the portafilter about.
Like the Luxe Café series, the AutoBarista Pro comes up with automatic grind settings, but unlike the Luxe Café Pro you aren’t encouraged to easily override them – everything is intended to be left to the machine. So-called Grind iQ Technology automatically calibrates the grinder to your beans from 50 different settings, while a built-in scale means that you always get the best grind and extraction possible.
While the drink selection takes place on a touch screen – and during the preparation phase you get a lot more options for customisation should you wish – the practical functions of the machine use physical buttons, the key one of which is used for starting the grinding and brewing process.
Part of the display is also used for a hard-to-read dot matrix display – seemingly telling you when there’s an issue you need to resolve.
Some additional features that I really liked – you can use two user profiles to save your preferred drink settings. So if one of you likes a Flat White with higher strength, you can set these preferences really easily. You can also brew two espresso shots simultaneously if you have a guest.
The best feature, though, is that the large 340g bean hopper has a number on it… because two separate hoppers are included. Finally, you can have a hopper for caffeinated and decaff beans. Or just two different types of beans. A really great touch.
Select models also come with a ‘thermal carafe’ which enables you to keep coffee hot – essentially replacing the old-school coffee pot. My review model didn’t include this, though, so I can’t vouch for its effectiveness.
Should you only have ground coffee hanging about you can also use this through a special shute – there’s even a removable scoop to help. It’s nice to have the option but ground coffee is obviously messy and I don’t recommend using this generally. It’s nice to have the correct measurements listed on the machine though and there’s a special Pre-Ground button to select if you want the machine to use this. It’s a one-time thing, not a hopper for storing ground coffee.
Cleaning is designed to be easy, with many dishwasher-safe parts, the self-purging steam wand ported from the Luxe Cafe Pro and an auto-rinse cycle which helps keep things nice and fresh. If there is a pain point with automatic coffee machines, generally, it’s that they use plenty of water and so the drip tray fills quickly and regularly needs emptying.
When you pull out the tray, the grind drawer also comes with it – quite handy for clearing everything out at the same time. A small float indicates when the drip tray is full.
Confusingly, there also appears to be an $900/£800 AutoBarista machine without the ‘Pro’ name available from Ninja that gives you a smaller, single hopper and a reduced number of preset options, but I don’t think this is as appealing as the Pro model. It’s wonderful to give different purchasing options for customers, but I do feel it makes the machines hard to compare for customers, even if they clearly hit different price points.
So is the AutoBarista Pro worth it? If you want a fully automated experience I’d look elesewhere, such as to the excellent De’Longhi PrimaDonna Aromatic or Jura J10 (though both are significantly more costly). More comparable options on price are the more similarly-priced Siemens EQ700 or KitchenAid KF8.
And if you’re not fussed about a bit of manual labour in terms of getting involved with the grinding, then the Ninja Luxe Cafe Pro Premier or Pro are significantly cheaper.
As such I think the AutoBarista Pro is for a specific set of users – one who regularly makes drinks such as Espresso, Cortado and Americano and less regularly makes milk-based drinks and cold brew. Or if there are two people in a household with different tastes – the profile setting is really useful for that.
So the AutoBarista Pro is a really great all-rounder, but since Ninja itself already produces cheaper machines, you’ve got to be sure you want that second hopper for decaff (or different beans) and that you don’t want to get involved with the grinding and brewing process at all.
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