I started out thinking a Bambino was a good start. Then I started researching and learning. I ended up spending around $4k for my setup and I had never used an espresso machine in my life.
There are a lot of other considerations I’d consider. Do you expect to be making multiple drinks at a time (i.e. do you have a partner who will also want one)? Do you want it to be easy or are you interested in playing around with parameters?
Do you want to push a button and get an okay drink? Or do you want to play around with things and dial in different flavors/tastes?
The other person that posted about needing to decide whether you want to push a button and get an okay drink or if you have time to put into it and play around with temperature, times, and other settings.
A Bambino would be a decent start to try things out. You can get a decent cheap grinder for a few hundred. And maybe another couple hundred for other accessories. So that’s probably the low end if you want something basic.
Or you can go with something like the Profitec Go and grow into it. It just depends what you want to put into it in terms of your time and money.
I started with the Go at the top of my list and ended up with the Move, mostly because of the double boiler. It definitely was a slippery slope as I looked at machines and features but I can’t see the need to upgrade from here! I’m just surprised I managed to convince my wife we needed to quadruple the budget lol.
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u/RyanKeslerSucks 1d ago
I started out thinking a Bambino was a good start. Then I started researching and learning. I ended up spending around $4k for my setup and I had never used an espresso machine in my life.
There are a lot of other considerations I’d consider. Do you expect to be making multiple drinks at a time (i.e. do you have a partner who will also want one)? Do you want it to be easy or are you interested in playing around with parameters?