The Future Of Home Espresso, again? | Meraki Gen 2

Barack took the home barista scene by storm a year ago with the Gen 1. So many technological advancements for a really affordable price. Um, they raised over $2 million on Kickstarter and they got some incredible reviews. I personally loved this machine, but there was a few constructive criticisms. So, less than a year later, we now have the Gen 2. Now, these machines might look identical, and that's because they pretty much are. The core machine is pretty much the same, but this new model has three or four upgrades that we're going to look into today. Let's dive in and run through all the features and make some coffee. And thank you Maro for sending this out to demo test. These guys do not skimp on the accessories. You get everything that you need out of the box to start making coffee. You get this little wood mount that you can kind of place your porter filter in as a little station. You get a tamp, you get a distribution tool. I mean, a WDT would probably be better, but that, you know, still something. You get a blind basket, a milk jug, a cloth, and all of this stuff kind of feels like, you know, pretty wellmade and like you don't really need to upgrade it. Like this tamp has some weight to it. Now, let's quickly look at the interface. This runs everything. We don't need to spend much time cuz it's pretty simple. Click on the grinder and you pick the grind amount that you want. You pick 18 grams and it will weigh out 18 g. When you go back, you go to brew again. You can pick your yield here. So, 36 g we have it set as well as your brew temperature going all the way from 85 up to 96. We'll set it at 92. And then you have your steam. There's a thermometer in the steam one, so you can even pick the exact temperature you want and it will stop steaming once it hits that. Then when you pull down, you've got all of your settings and everything you need in there. You've got the uh temperature of the group head. You can change the water temperature for your hot water. You can even just pull up the scale and just use it as a scale. So now you have a scale inside your kitchen. So through the review, we're going to work from left to right across the three different towers. Um starting with the grinder cuz that's how you'll make your coffee. Moving this way across the machine. Now a cool little feature here that the grinder is standalone. So it's apart from the two elements, the two boilers which are here for the extraction and here for steaming. You're not heating up your beans with any of those components cuz it stands alone by itself. Now, this is one of the upgrades that they've got. They've now got 45 grind adjustments instead of 30 on the original Gen 1, giving you uh the ability to dial in your coffee um with a few more parameters in there. Um I will note it only goes from 0 to 30, but then there's five extra steps on either side here where you can keep going. So, I mean, interesting design choice. Um, it's a 38mm conicleberg grinder partnered with Time. Now, when the first one came out, there was a few kind of complaints about the grinder. Lance was kind of talking about how you can't put a really light roasted coffee through this grinder. It's just not going to do that well. Um, although I will say that is true. I've had no issues when using just regular kind of medium roasted coffees, medium to dark. All of those have been fine. And normally for espresso, that's kind of what I'm using. So for those out there, if you're maybe wanting to go super light, you might need a different grinder. Um, but I think this one does a fine job when you're just looking at medium roasted coffee to dark roasted coffee. And as I said, it's got the scale inbuilt here. So the little cup magnetizes to the bottom and just pops in across there, which is always fun. Um, so you go up to grinding, you pick your amount, 18. It says we're on grind size 14, which changes as you move the little dial here. And let's press grind. Now, one of my pieces of feedback on the original Gen One was that I would just love this machine as a dual boiler without the grinder so I can buy my own. Like, that would be amazing. I will say at the price, like the grinder does just feel like a freebie anyway because it's so affordable for a dual boiler with a rotary pump inside it. So once your coffee is grinded, you can just simply pop it in your porter filter, put it in your little station, give it one of these if you want, and then bibbidity bob, you got the tap and you're ready to go. So the best feature of this machine which I can't say enough is just such a game changer is having the scale for grind and for your yield here. It is so good. So as we just said you can grind straight into your little cup here 18 g. Um there's also anti-static in the grinder as well. So the grinds are nice and fluffy. And then for the scale here you just pop in your porter filter. Make sure to put your cup in so it tears out. And then we can pick our yield up

here. So for instance, I've got like a medium dark roasted coffee in there. So I might want it just under a 1:2 ratio. So I can go kind of instead of what 36, we can go down to maybe like 32 or 34. Okay. And then we press go. So we then see the time of extraction on the screen as well as how many grams have come out. Something I really like here is as it moves up, it tells you when it moves into reststredo range and then espresso range. So if you just wanted to stop the shot at restto, you can just go pop, stop it off and you're ready to go. So we've just hit restretto range and then 33 g of coffee and that took 33 seconds. So that's pretty dialed in already. it. The amazing thing about these two scales and everything coming up on the screen is it makes it so easy to dial in. I know I put in 18. I know the exact yield I got out and it was in 33 seconds. So that's what just a little bit slower maybe than what we want. If we want to get down to around 30 or 28. So then just on the grinder I can just know that it's a minor adjustment I need to make. I'm at 15. Let's go to 16. And then we can just grind again. 18 grams. Give it a little shake to level it out. Doing all this in reverse, so you should be impressed. Now, this machine, something people talked about was the stiffness of getting that in. It's still pretty stiff in there. It's maybe not as metally when you go in there, but it's still a little stiff. Pop it in. Go to brew. 32 g. So, it should be at around 18 to 20 grams. We move into reststredo because that's where our um There you go. Restredo. Our dose was 18 g. Now, we're aiming for 32. And look at how easy that was to dial in. 27 seconds. 33 g. Come out. I mean, let's do a little sideby-side testing. This was a 33 second extraction. This was 27. I mean, that's good. And the temperature adjustment on that is great as well, knowing that I've got a medium to dark roasted coffee going down to 92 instead of like 96. It just removes so much of that bitterness. I've got a really sweet, syrupy shot. And then that one's even better. More syrupy, sweeter. That's really, really good. That's really good. The scales game changer for beginners and for pros. Makes the whole workflow in the morning so much easier. Oh, and little tidbit. I didn't mention it before for the grinder. This little hopper is quite small, but I actually love that because it kind of forces you to keep your coffee fresh. You're only ever working with enough coffee for, you know, a day or two. You're not just filling up a whole hopper and it's sitting there oxidizing, getting stale. Um, I know some people want a single dose, but if you want the convenience of a hopper, this is a great size. So, I've just brewed a coffee, but let's quickly just talk about why this machine is such a standout for some of the other kind of machines in the home market. Beforehand, there's kind of like the consumer grade and then there's like in that $1,000 mark, then there's these like $4,000 kind of commercial grade machines. And there was nothing really in between. This machine has a dual boiler, one here for extraction, one for steam, which is unheard of for the price point that we're kind of looking at. It's also got a rotary pump inside it. So, it's got a full pump like a commercial machine pushing the water through, keeping a really consistent pressure. The way some of those consumer grade machines uh save money is with these two things. They have these little coils that heat up the water rather than a full boiler and they have little vibration pumps that just vibrate really quickly to pump water through. So, it's those kind of elements that are going to really start pushing the cost of a machine up. So, at the price point, this is really great and it's going to make you that cafe level quality that you're after at home. Then underneath for the new gen 2, a few of the upgrades we had, there's not too much to say on it, but the porter filter is now E61. So, that means you can put in other porter filter. get aftermarket things and you can kind of experiment more. So definitely for more of the coffee enthusiast, coffee nerd, this feature. Um the other group head on the other machine works fine and if you never want to touch it and just make coffee, that's all you need. Um this machine like in the other one also has this great feature with the it's a spouted porter filter, but then it just pops off and you've got a naked porter filter there. So you don't need to buy multiple. It does it all there for you in the E61. And the other feature that they've added, which is really nice, is this dual layered shower screen at the bottom, which is going to disperse your water more evenly. It's going to wet your puck more evenly. Sometimes with bad water dispersion, you

get under and over extracted coffee at the same time, giving you a really muddy cup. Even dispersion is going to give you a much cleaner cup and more clarity from your coffee. You can see here on the side by side, we have the water running on the new Gen 2 model, and that's what it looks like comparatively. And now I don't know how much a naked porter filter shot is really going to show us about um the shot, but it'll show you the rotary pump in action and it will show you how even the extraction is on this coffee. And everyone just wants to see a naked porter filter shot. Really, I'm just trying to find a way to bring in a naked shot here so we can all be impressed. And finally, you don't have to go into all the automatic machines. You can just use this little paddle on the front here to turn your extraction on or off. And finally, over to the last tower for steaming. Again, we have an individual boiler just for steaming. And look at how dry that steam is. That is powerful. And that is dry. Now, it sounds weird. I'm saying dry steam. Obviously, steam is wet. But when you see some of those other consumer grade machines, they're like dripping little bits of water. It's like an old man with prostate issues trying to go to the bathroom. was like just kind of spluttering. But this machine is just consistent and powerful, which is great. Not only that, this moves full 360. Not that you can move it 360 cuz there's a thing in the way, but moves the whole way around. So, really easy to use. And there's even a thermometer inside the steam one. So, you set your temperature and you can steam it to however you want. You can even adjust the pressure of how you do it. If you're a beginner, you want a little less powerful, you want a bit more time to kind of craft your milk, you can do that. Or you can just go full tilt and steam your milk. I got an idea. So, you can see here, steam 55. We've got it set at strong. Look at this 360 steam wand. I don't even need to come around to the front of the machine. I can justip I don't know how convenient this feature is for anyone else, but for me as I create content, this is bloody good. And I don't even need to look at this screen because I know that it's going to turn off once it hits 55, I think. Yeah. How good's that? This is where this like machine shines. If you're like a milk coffee drinker and you get this machine at home, this is cafe level espresso and milk. It is so glossy. It is unbelievable. Look at that. with an old shot from 10 minutes ago from filming. Still good. I don't know if this is a feature, but it does it. So, we'll look at it. You can also just put your steam wand in straight down like that. Just fill up just below the steam wand. Let's see if this works. I think you can just auto steam. Just press play. Just being above the milk. It allows air in for 2 seconds. Then the foam level rises and the steam one goes below and then it's just steaming it by itself. Turned off by itself. But imagine you have no skill in steaming milk. You just put it underneath and then you get milk that looks like that. Camab wap. Also really good. And that's the machine. In summary, this thing is a joy to use. One of my favorites. I haven't enjoyed a coffee machine as much as when I got my first dual boiler brevel dual boiler like 15 years ago, which still great machine, but now coming into this with the technology, the scales, if you're making coffees every day and you're not trying to like dial in different beans with a single dose grinder and doing that kind of thing, this thing is amazing. And if your partner isn't as good as making coffee, they'll still be able to use this machine really well. The best features, the dual boiler and the scales that are built in. Amazing. As we talked about with the Gen 2, the new features that they have more grind adjustments, but they haven't changed the actual components of the grinder. If you're into lighter roast coffee, maybe a bit of an issue there. They've got the new E61 group head, so you can get aftermarket stuff. You can experiment more. If you're a bit of a coffee nerd, you can dive into that. Otherwise, it's naked and spouted. It does a really good job of what you already need there. And finally, the dual laid shower screen there that gives you more dispersion. Really nice touch. But the question is coming into this Gen 2, guys, it's pretty much the same machine. The amazing part is they saw a few complaints online and within a year they've got a model out of the machine that answers some of those complaints, which is crazy to think that. But you do not need to upgrade your machine if you already have this. This is only if you want these finer little details and you want to experiment a bit more with your coffee with the porter filter with slightly better water dispersion, but pretty much the same machine and both are really, really good. Probably my favorite coffee machine at the moment that's allin-one for the price point.

That's it. Let us know if you want to see any other reviews or if you want a bit of a deep dive onto this machine and any features. I could teach you how to dial in. steam milk. Just let me know below in the comments and we'll see you next time on Golden Brown Coffee. Yep. — This is a 6-minute old coffee and it's still silky and delicious. M.