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Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2: two-minute review
The Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 is a manual coffee machine that sits more at the prosumer end of the market. Its whole raison d’être is around helping you make barista-quality coffee by hand and, it achieves this thanks to the assistance of some smart features that help streamline the process, while leaving control fully in your hands.
As a complete package, the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 is an undeniably polished product. It has a silhouette just sleek enough to fulfil its prosumer aspirations and its tiltable touchscreen is super easy to use. It also comes with almost every accessory you could want and each is engineered to such a high standard that they’re a real pleasure to use, especially the hefty tamper and coffee distributor.
Beneath the hood, it has hardware as impressive as any of the best coffee makers we’ve tested. Its rotary pump maintains pressure better than the vibration pump many mass market machines rock, while its dual boilers ensure the steam wand won’t start to sputter out part way through foaming your milk.
It’s the Meraki’s smart features that really set it apart from other machines though — rather than automating every part of your coffee making routine, it augments them. For example, its built-in scale allows you to grind coffee to a specific weight every time, while a second scale lets you brew your coffee by weight, making it far easier to dial in a very specific grind to extraction ratio. Meanwhile, an integrated temperature sensor in the steam wand means you can set it to cut out when your milk hits your target heat, which is easier than relying on temperature alone.
So what’s it like in use? Honestly, pretty slick. Dialing in your perfect grind and dose feels far more granular than usual, thanks to the integrated scales. Those solidly built accessories make transferring, evening out and tamping your coffee far easier, then you can easily set to extract a ristretto or long black depending on your preference. Frothing milk is rarely my favorite part of making a coffee, yet that temperature sensor allowed me to concentrate more on honing my technique.
As a result, the whole manual process felt as rewarding as ever, while producing delicious and exceedingly consistent coffee. I was able to extract just the right flavor profile out of even cheaper beans over and over, while the one brew I produced with a more premium batch really let its exquisite mango tasting notes shine through. Despite the fact I’m not a major fan of milk in coffee, even the macchiato I whipped up using its steaming wand tasted great, with just the right amount of foam to add texture without overpowering the flavor of the coffee.
Really my only substantial criticism of the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 is its cost. Coming in at $1,799 / £1,599 / AU$2,799, it resides firmly at the premium end of the market and I imagine there will be quite a few people who balk at the idea of dropping that much on a manual coffee maker. However, cost is not the same as value: the experience of using this machine and the quality results you’ll get out of it totally warrant that price for those that can stretch to it.
Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 review: price & availability
- Available now
- List price of $1,799 / £1,599 / AU$2,799
- Available in white and black colorways
Having first been available for pre-order in March 2026, the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 is available now. It comes in two colorways: black or white. And barring a knock box, it comes with pretty much every accessory you could need, whether that’s a tamper, coffee distributor, cleaning brush, or blind portafilter basket for backflushing.
You’ll pay a premium for this premium device though. At a list price of $1,799 / £1,599 / AU$2,799, this is an undeniably prosumer device that comes in at the top price range of the best bean-to-cup makers we’ve featured. While it’s not quite as spendy as something like the $2,799.95 / £1,915 (around AU$3,865) Breville Oracle Touch (known under the brand name Sage in the UK) or the £2,199 (around $2,970 / AU$4,100) Siemens EQ900 Plus, it’s an expensive machine and doesn’t come with as many automated features as some machines. I’d argue it’s well worth the price you’ll pay but such a premium manual machine won’t be for everyone.
Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 review: specs
|
Category |
Specification |
|---|---|
|
Type |
Manual espresso machine |
|
Dimensions |
14.57 x 14.57 x 16.34 inches / 370 x 370 x 415mm |
|
Weight |
32 lbs / 14.5kg |
|
Water tank capacity |
2.1 quarts / 2 liters |
|
Steam wand |
360-degree articulating with temperature sensor |
|
Max pressure |
9 bar extraction |
Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 review: design
- Attractive, suitably professional-looking design
- Well-made accessories
- CoffeeSense only useful for Meraki beans
I’ll be upfront here: I flat out love the way the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 looks. At 14.57 x 14.57 x 16.34 inches / 370 x 370 x 415mm, it’s hardly the sveltest machine I’ve ever tested. But the fact its water tank, bean hopper and boilers are all separate towers prevents it from looking too hulking on my countertop, while the combo of its chrome fixtures and pivotable touch screen give it just enough flair to stand out from your average coffee machine.
But it’s not just the Meraki’s aesthetics that are finished to a high standard. All the accessories packaged with it feel seriously premium, and there weren’t any glaring omissions. Everything has a reassuring solidity to it: the portafilter has a wonderfully tactile wooden handle, while the solid metal of both the coffee distributor and tamp has sufficient heft to give you real confidence when producing the perfect puck of grounds. Extra little touches like the wooden box for storing the accessories on just add that final polish to the experience.
Don’t be fooled by this focus on looks though. Underneath the Meraki’s sleek exterior beats the ferocious industrial heart of a prosumer espresso machine. Discrete boilers for the brew system and steam wand should mean that you don’t have to worry about the wand’s pressure giving out part way through steaming, while its rotary pump maintains nine bars of pressure more consistently than the vibration pump used by many home machines.
The Meraki also has a decent amount of capacity. The water tank itself has a volume of 2.1qt / 2,000ml, which I’d say is pretty average for a coffee maker — you’ll get plenty of brews out of that, even if it’s not as colossal as something like the huge 2.6qt / 2.5L Breville Oracle Touch. Meanwhile, the Meraki’s bean hopper measures 2.36 inches high by 4.06 inches diameter / 60 x 103mm. Generally I found that was sufficient to fuel around four double espressos but, naturally, your mileage will vary depending on how you like to dose your grounds.
One of the things I love about the Meraki is that it sits firmly in the camp of a manual espresso machine — there’s no bean-to-cup function here — but it comes crammed with features to make you better at pulling shots and foaming milks.
Perhaps the most explicitly ‘smart’ function is its CoffeeSense feature. This allows you to scan a tag on compatible Meraki coffee bags and it will suggest the recommended grind size, dosing weight and extraction temperature for those beans to help you get the best result out of those beans. I can definitely see how that would be a neat feature for someone who’s happy to stick with one brand of beans but part of the joy of coffee for me is trying different varieties and growers, so I’m not sure I’d get as much use out of this as some.
But it also offers other ways to make dialing in your perfect brew easier. Built-in scales beneath both the grinder and grouphead allow you to grind your beans and express your coffee by weight, giving you really precise control over each. Meanwhile, Auto mode calculates the right brew weight based on how much coffee you’ve ground, making it easy to manually fix yourself a coffee without needing too much trial and error balancing brew time and grind. These are fantastic as a guide, allowing you to really build confidence before you start improvising like a true manual maestro.
Another impressive element of the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2’s design is its steam wand. It has a cool-touch design — although the head still gets hot so careful not to brush against it — and it’s super flexible, making it easy to get it at a perfect angle for frothing your milk. More innovatively, it has a built-in temperature sensor that allows you to stop steaming milk at the perfect temperature, rather than having to rely on touch alone.
None of these features are forced on you and they’re suitably light touch that it’s really easy to start trusting your own instincts once you’re ready. But I’ve never used an espresso machine that’s helped guide me so well between amateur and prosumer coffee making before — it’s just the right amount of support without making you dependent on its help.
Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 review: performance
- Great automated features that don’t take away your control
- Steams milk with constant pressure and to your chosen temperature
- Produces wonderfully well-extracted, consistent coffee
So how easy is it to make coffee using the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2? Well, honestly, at first I found it a little unpredictable. Tiny variations in tamping pressure seemed to produce wildly different results — the first brew ran through the puck incontinently despite the fine grind I’d used, while the second over-extracted to such an extreme it made my mouth pucker like I’d licked an ibuprofen. Then I realized my mistake.
Turns out I’d slightly underestimated the Meraki’s grinder — as it’s calibrated for espresso, my default instinct to whack the grinder on one of the lowest settings was producing a silt that easily channeled or clogged the portafilter basket depending on how firmly it was tamped. After a bit of experimentation, I was able to dial in on my perfect results though, settling on a grind of 10.
Fortunately, the Meraki’s grinder perfectly suits this kind of tinkering. Not only do you have very granular control over the fineness of your grind, but the fact that you can dose using the built-in scale beneath the grinder makes tweaking the exact quantity of coffee you want super-repeatable. In automatic mode, I could simply dial in 18g for a double shot and it would stop grinding once it hit my desired dose, or I could go off-piste and simply grind it up manually using my best judgement.
Preparing the puck always felt like a breeze — all I had to do was place the portafilter on top of the dosing cup, flip it and then give it a few taps to transfer my grounds. A few twists of the coffee distributor and the grounds would be nicely distributed, meaning all I had to do was tamp it down with that wonderfully sturdy tamper. Each tool is so well put together that it’s a really satisfying process and it feels easy to get professional results.
And with that, I was ready to go — or at least once the water was heated up. While the two minutes and 10 seconds it took the dual boiler to heat up the first time is slower than some consumer coffee machines, it’s actually pretty fast compared to many prosumer units, which can sometimes take upwards of 15 minutes. Additionally, another neat feature of the Meraki is your ability to set the boiler to come on at a specific time of day, meaning it can be all warmed up and ready to go for your first coffee of the day.
Once I’d actually properly calibrated my grind and dosing, extracting properly was a breeze. In Automatic mode, I simply had to set the weight of my drink — for example, 36g for an espresso — and set it to run, whereas in Manual mode I could simply run it until I was happy with the quantity. Thanks to that rotary pump, it produced a steady stream of espresso, neither hemorrhaging coffee too fast nor letting it dribble out in fits and starts. It’s also pretty quiet, hitting just 65dB and making more of a whir than the juddering noise I’m used to from vibration-pumped machines.
Steaming milk has never really been my forte. As a black coffee drinker, I’ve never had much need to develop the knack. But the Meraki also makes this a lot easier. Not only does its dual boiler mean that it maintained constant pressure throughout steaming but, thanks to its built-in thermostat, the steam wand clicked off when my milk had reached my target temperature, meaning I could just focus on creating the right level of foam and getting it swirling. Not only did this help me whip up a passable macchiato but, when I’d gained a bit more confidence, I was able to make a decent manual latte using touch alone.
So what were the results like? Pretty sensational. Even trying with some relatively affordable decaf beans, the coffee the Meraki produced had a stable, beautifully caramel crema, just the right velvety texture and not straying too far into bitterness or acidity. Each shot I poured remained consistent, showing how easy it is to keep getting these great results. And when I tested it out with a premium bag of Dahwe beans from Ritual Coffee Roasters, the results genuinely blew me away: the flavor was flat out gorgeous, maintaining a pitch perfect balance of not being aggressively floral but confidently communicating its mango overtones.
I’ll admit that I much prefer making coffee than scrubbing up the mess I’ve made but cleaning up here is pretty straightforward. Everyday use really only requires you to purge the steam wand, then give it, the portafilter and the grouphead a wipedown with a damp cloth. Even doing the deep clean at the end of my review wasn’t particularly arduous. Cleaning the steam wand involves running it for bursts of 10 seconds multiple times while submerged in cold water. Making sure the machine’s innards stay squeaky clean is even easier — just pop in the blind portafilter basket, pop it in the machine and then select the cleaning option and a tutorial will walk you through the rest.
There’s always something deeply satisfying about making coffee yourself and that’s why I’ve always been a big fan of manual machines. But what I like most about the Meraki Espresso Machine is that it makes it much easier to take your hand-crafted coffee to the next level. Automated features don’t remove your agency — they instead support it, allowing you to freestyle more and more as your skills grow. And the end result is wonderfully extracted and thoroughly consistent coffee. So ultimately, if you like getting hands on with your coffee and money’s not an object, you’re going to get great results out of the Meraki.
Should I buy the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2?
|
Attribute |
Notes |
Score |
|---|---|---|
|
Value |
This is undeniably a premium espresso machine. But given its quality and the consistent results it achieves, I’d argue it’s worth every cent. |
4.5/5 |
|
Design |
Sleekly designed with really well engineered accessories. Dual boiler and rotary pump help maintain consistent temperature and pressure. Smart features really streamline your coffee-making without taking you out of the driving seat. However, the CoffeeSense feature only works with Meraki beans. |
4.5/5 |
|
Performance |
Warms up quickly, easy to dial in your perfect quantity of grounds and coffee size, temperature sensor in steam wand makes steaming milk easier, produces excellently well-extracted coffee that tastes consistent time after time, easy enough to clean. |
5/5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2 review: also consider
|
Category |
Meraki Espresso Gen 2 |
Breville Barista Touch Impress (Cold Extraction) |
La Pavoni Europiccola (Millennium) |
|
Type |
Dual Boiler / Integrated Grinder |
Single Boiler (ThermoJet) / Integrated Grinder |
Manual Lever / Single Boiler |
|
Dimensions |
14.57 x 14.57 x 16.34 inches / 370 x 370 x 415 mm |
16.42 x 13.11 x 13.50 inches / 417 x 333 x 343 mm |
12.6 x 7.87 x 11.42 inches / 320 x 200 x 290 mm |
|
Weight |
32 lbs / 14.5kg |
24.2 lbs / 11kg |
12.1 lbs / 5.5kg |
|
Water tank capacity |
2.1 quarts / 2 litres |
2.1 quarts / 2 litres |
0.8 quarts / 0.8 litres |
|
Steam wand |
Professional 360° articulating cool-touch |
Auto MilQ |
Manual |
|
Max pressure |
9 bar |
9 bar |
Manual |
How I tested the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2
- Tested it over two weeks
- Tried a variety of drinks, beans and milks
- Measured how long it took to warm up and how loud the pump is
When testing the Meraki Espresso Machine Gen 2, I used it over the course of several weeks. I experimented with different grind levels, used different varieties of beans and tamped at a range of pressures to see how consistent its results were. I also tried to make a variety of drinks and steamed several different varieties of milk to see how the steam wand performed.
To understand how well the Meraki worked as a manual machine, I made sure to extract several coffees without using the automatic dosing and steamed milk using touch alone, rather than relying purely on the steam wand’s temperature sensor. When assessing the performance of the boiler and pump, I not only timed how long it took to heat up in the morning but I also used a sound level meter to record how much noise it made during extraction.
When it comes to my own experience, I’ve been making and drinking coffee on a daily basis for well over two decades. I’ve also gotten hands on with a wide range of machines, whether they’re De’longhi, Breville or Gaggia. My preferred tipple to make with a machine is a double espresso or long black, although any time the weather is not positively arctic, cold brew is my go-to.
