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Even while there are an unbelievable—and ever expanding—number of coffee making apparatuses on the market (I own eight), the basics of brewing remain fundamentally simple. Making coffee usually involves water moving through coffee grounds with the help of a pump (as in espresso) or gravity. Whether a coffee maker is manual or automatic—and even with a growing number of “smart” machines that automatically adjust water temperature and extraction time—the majority of coffee makers run off that same basic premise. Not so with the Spinn coffee maker.
DEAL: SPINN Espresso & Coffee Machine
From the outside it doesn’t look like much of a departure from other fully automatic coffee makers. But the Spinn machine, which first showed up at a TechCrunch event in 2016 and arrived at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in 2020, is as novel as appearances at those tech showcases would suggest. Instead of extracting flavor by simply forcing water down, it uses a centrifuge that spins at 4500 rpm as its brewing chamber. This rapid rotation forces the ground coffee up against the wall of the chamber, which is a mesh filter. Spinning water shoots from the center of the brew chamber through the coffee grounds, out of the filter, and into a catch. That catch drops the newly brewed coffee into your cup. The rest of the brew process—the grind size and dose that comes from the built-in burr grinder, the water temperature, the water volume—is all customizable depending on what type of drink you’re trying to make.
The centrifuge method allows Spinn to, in the words of the company’s VP of business development, L. Scott Callender, “mimic” many different styles of coffee brewing. For example, on the espresso setting, the centrifuge spins dry to push finely ground coffee up against the filter. That mimics the action doing a tamp, says Callender. The “espresso shot” the Spinn produces, while not meeting a more technical definition that goes something like, two ounces of coffee brewed under nine bars of pressure in 30 seconds, was still recognizable as a nice, complex shot.
The Spinn also offers a cold-brew setting, which, again, can’t actually be called cold brew by technical standards because it’s ready to drink in 60 seconds rather than 12 hours. The machine attempts to cut the brewing time down by aggressively agitating the coffee grounds with the cold water through that previously described spinning process. The result is something enjoyably mellow, if not as chocolaty smooth as real cold brew.
For me the real winner was the pour-over setting, which intermittently shoots water through the grounds to come as close to the act of pouring, letting the water work its way through, and then pouring again that you do with a Chemex. This produced the single most flavorful cup of coffee I’ve ever had from a single-serve machine.
Because it can change so many parameters—grind size, coffee dose, water temperature, water quantity, centrifuge speed, number of centrifuge spins—the Spinn can brew something that will at least approximate any kind of coffee you want, including nitro brews. All those options also make it more versatile than any pod machine you’ll encounter. You can brew with a handful of programmable preset buttons that you can assign different drinks to, however the Spinn is easiest to use with its app. The buttons on the actual machine are not super clear in terms of what they do. The app, however, details drink type, strength, and size, and walks you through multistep drinks like a flat white.
I’ve used a lot of smart kitchen apps, and the only ones I’ve found as pleasant and easy to operate as Spinn’s are the ones from Chefsteps of Joule sous vide circulator and Joule oven fame. Drinks are easy to change to your liking, but the default settings produce very tasty coffee. The app also allows you to brew from anywhere (Callender said he has made his wife coffee while on business trips thousands miles away from home).
The app also contains a marketplace where you can buy coffee beans from roasters all over the country, some of which you may have heard of, like Equator or Go Get ’Em Tiger. Any roaster in the marketplace can choose to identify how they think a specific bag of coffee should be brewed—how much water, what temperature, etc. You’re free to change those parameters, but the default is that you drink it as the roaster intended. Callender says the plan is to include 20,000 different bags of coffee in the roaster database so that users can scan whatever bag they have, whether they bought from the Spinn app or not, and have the machine recognize what kind of beans it’s working with.
The Spinn, with the milk frother, which is a necessary accessory to make most of the espresso drinks, costs $900 (at the time of writing). That is a lot of money. It costs more than twice as much as our top-rated pod machines from Nespresso and Bruvi. Heck, it’s as much as our top-rated espresso maker, which, like the Spinn, comes with a built-in burr grinder. And what the Spinn does is not going to appeal to everyone. There are people who don’t want an espresso they don’t tamp themselves. There are people who find the process of making pour-over coffee every morning meditative. The Spinn isn’t for them.
But there is another group, probably a large one, who wishes getting good coffee at home didn’t require multiple steps, attention to detail, or waiting more than a minute or two. For them, the Spinn will deliver everything they want in their morning cup—fresh beans and nuanced flavor with no effort on their part.
If someone were deciding between the Spinn and a super-automatic machine like a Jura (which, from a user standpoint is what the Spinn comes closest to), I’d point them toward the Spinn. It can do a bit more, and with the exception of straight-up espresso, which Juras and machines like the Delonghi Eletta Explore do pretty well, it makes coffee that tastes a bit better.
I am one of those meditative pour-over makers and pressure-monitoring espresso drinkers, but the Spinn wooed me. I sent it back after I’d tested it for a while, and for as much as I value my coffee rituals, man, there are mornings when I miss pushing a button and walking away. If that’s the kind of coffee drinker you are, you won’t find a better machine.
DEAL: SPINN Espresso & Coffee Machine
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