De’Longhi has updated its all-in-one Magnifica Evo coffee maker with a new Next model to make grabbing your morning espresso (or cappuccino, but not latte, alas) even more straightforward.
At first glance, the Magnifica Evo Next looks almost identical to the Magnifica Evo, with the addition of a bright 2.4-inch TFT display in the middle of the control panel. But this display makes maintaining the machine, and – even more importantly – selecting additional drink options, less of a fiddle.
The Magnifica Evo did rely on combination button presses to do things like change brewing temperature, but now everything you can do with the machine is shown on the screen. The language is chatty (“I’ll use some hot water to heat things up!”) but it’s just so much easier to select Low / Medium / High for water temp, instead of having to remember that if this button is flashing that means high, that button means low, and so on.
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De’Longhi has also done some more subtle refining, like the milk carafe and various things under the hood, and there’s now a Profile button so you can store tweaked coffee recipes for three different people.
Table of contents
- First impressions
- Specifications and price
- Design and ergonomics
- Setup
- Espresso making performance
- Milky coffee making performance
- Who is it for?
First impressions
The De’Longhi Magnifica Evo Next sits at the upper-middle of De’Longhi’s bean-to-cup range (De’Longhi calls them “fully automatic” machines). It’s aimed squarely at coffee drinkers who are serious about their morning shot, have evolved beyond capsule machines, and don’t want to have to fuss with a semi-manual model like De’Longhi’s La Specialista range.
Compared to a capsule machine, the Magnifica Evo Next is much weightier and more substantial, but it does have an (almost) fully plastic construction. At 9.6kg, it’s hardly portable, but that’s less than half the weight of my Lelit Mara-X espresso machine, which is made of brass and aluminium.
Of course, the Mara-X takes 15-20 minutes to warm up thanks to its boiler-based hot water system. The Magnifica Evo Next uses a thermoblock which heats water in mere seconds.
The start up process (from pushing the power button to being able to choose a drink) takes about 45 seconds. Then it’s as few as two button pushes to start a coffee brewing, if you choose one of the six basic drink types.
De’Longhi Magnifica Evo Next specifications and price
| Dimensions | 240 x 440 x 360mm (W x D x H) 9.6kg |
| Capacity | Beans: 250g Water: 1.8L |
| Drink types | Espresso Coffee Long Doppio+ Americano Cappuccino Latte Macchiato Cappuccino + Cappuccino Mix Hot Milk Espresso Macchiato |
| Price (RRP) | $1,149 |
| Warranty | Two years |
| Official website | De’Longhi Australia |
Design and ergonomics
With a semi-manual machine like the afore-mentioned La Specialista or Breville’s Barista Express, you need to detach a portafilter from the brew head, then push it in under the built-in coffee grinder, get a dose of ground beans, then tamp the ground coffee into the filter (various lights tell you when this is done), then you have to lock it back into the brew head and push go on your coffee.
The Magnifica Evo Next handles all of this internally. You pour beans in the hopper in the back of the machine, then fill the water tank. The Magnifica Evo Next tells you when the water tank is nearly empty, and it also has sensors to alert you when the grounds bin is full, or the drip tray is about to overflow. These appear in cheerful messages on the screen: “It’s time to fill the water tank!” and so on.
Speaking of the water tank, it’s designed to slot in the front of the machine, which saves the traditional scrabble at the back. You can only see the water level from the right side of the machine, but that doesn’t really matter because the Magnifica Evo Next will tell you it’s nearly out of water before you need to check.
Getting into customising your drink or choosing from one of the other options (such as Doppio+ and Cappuccino Mix) is as simple as tapping the More Drinks button and using the arrow keys under the screen to make your selection. If you change a drink’s settings, the machine offers to save it to the current profile.
Finally, there’s a My button which lets you manually set the size of drinks. The coffee will pour until you press OK, and the machine will save that dose for next time.
Setup
The Magnifica Evo Next comes ready to go out of the box. Remove some shipping tape around the drip tray, peel the protective film off the buttons and screen (this product really commits to plastic, I must say), and plug in.
Fill the water tank, fill the bean hopper, and then let the machine guide you through a few early steps. It chats away at you via the screen, saying it’s heating this or rinsing that, and eventually you’re invited to choose a drink.
As with any espresso machine, the first couple of shots out of the box should be deposited in the sink, just until the all-in-one brewing unit inside the machine gets thoroughly coated with coffee oils and whatnot.
As well as setting the “intensity” of each drink via the screen, you can adjust the fineness of the grind via a dial in the hopper. I found that even though there’s a marker for “1”, anything under “3” positioned the burrs too close for any of the beans to fit through, and the Magnifica Evo Next kept telling me to refill the hopper.
Set to “3”, the grind was duly performed and the Magnifica Evo Next used its membrane pump to force water through freshly ground coffee at – De’Longhi claims and it’s pretty much impossible to verify – up to 15 bar.
Espresso making performance
For testing purposes in the Magnifica Evo Next, I used the same Seven Miles Cat’s Pyjamas blend of Aussie-roasted beans that I’m currently drinking daily using my Lelit Mara-X. The Mara-X is a manual espresso machine with an E-61 grouphead – a very standard traditional coffee maker. I generally drink a double espresso made with 18g of beans.
The Magnifica Evo Next’s first couple of espressos were a bit watery but once I reduced the “size” of the drink from L down to M, and used the Doppio+ setting instead of Dual Espresso, I started tasting the familiar profile of the Seven Miles beans.
Sure, the Magnifica Evo Next doesn’t bring the full texture or the more subtle flavours that the Mara-X can, and the crema is less dense, but considering it takes less than two minutes from fully off to hot coffee… this is a more than decent shot, much better than anything from a capsule machine. It also seems well-tuned to avoid the over-extraction (bitterness) I’ve commonly experienced with cheaper semi-automatic machines.
Milky coffee making performance
Making a cappuccino on a manual machine is, of course, a fully two-stage process. Make the shot, then use the steam wand to froth the milk. Put too much milk in the jug and shoot it around the kitchen. Scald it. Don’t forget to purge the wand and so on.
About all you can do wrong with milk on the Magnifica Evo Next is forget to angle the milk carafe spout into your cup, and watch it dribble into the drip tray.
The froth is very consistent but doesn’t quite have that velvety quality of milk frothed by someone who knows what they’re doing with a steam wand. That said, it takes a fraction of the time and it mixes in with the coffee shot automatically.
The Magnifica Evo Next can create a macchiato latte (which layers down milk, then a shot, then milk), a traditional cappuccino, and what it calls a “cappuccino mix” where the milk and coffee are added simultaneously – this is about as close as the machine can come to a proper latte. Latte lovers will find the top layer of milk too frothy, but the coffee itself nicely mixed in.
One note about the carafe. The instructions show you how to disassemble it to go in the dishwasher. There are a bunch of bits and I can’t imagine having to wash them out by hand. Dishwasher… only? That’s new to me!
Who is the De’Longhi Magnifica Evo Next for?
The last fully automatic bean-to-cup machine I drank heavily from was a Jura ENA Micro 90, now discontinued. This little machine (it was actually slightly larger than the Magnifica Evo Next) had only a single spout and a separate milk jug. The Magnifica Evo Next really shows how this tech has progressed in the last decade or so. It’s faster and quieter, and has a wider variety of drinks, and more settings for tweaking.
The limitations of that Jura were what provoked me to take the plunge and invest in a traditional espresso maker. I’m not sure I would have done the same, if the Magnifica Evo Next had been around back then. There are higher-end fully-automatic machines than this, but the quality of the shot from the Magnifica Evo Next makes me wonder why you’d ever want anything more… unless you want to take control back, and make your coffee yourself.
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