Review: De'Longhi TrueBrew Drip Coffee Maker

I always hold my breath in a funny combination of anticipation and dread when celebrities not usually associated with food get roped into pitching coffee machines. George Clooney did it for Nespresso, Roger Federer for Jura, and Brad Pitt has been appearing in short clips for De'Longhi for the past few years. Federer's print and online ads had a slightly stilted catchphrase: “Freshly ground, not capsuled.” But in Pitt's recent ad for the new TrueBrew coffee maker, he gets only a single word, which he speaks off-camera: perfetto.

Well, it's certainly interesting.

The TrueBrew is part of a relatively new club of hard-to-define coffee makers. As I used it over the course of a month, I noted characteristics reminiscent of the Spinn, an AeroPress, a regular-old drip coffee machine, and a superautomatic espresso machine like Federer's Jura. Maybe you could call the TrueBrew a superdrip?

The Spinn, for example, grinds coffee then uses a centrifuge to brew a mean cup with little cleanup. Paired with a nice coffee grinder, the Oxo 8-Cup and Braun MultiServe both make excellent single cups and carafes of drip. AeroPress makes only single fantastic cups just by pouring hot water into its brewing chamber and using your muscles to press the coffee through a tiny paper filter.

It's a motley but high-functioning crew.

Photograph: De'Longhi

The clear emphasis with the TrueBrew is convenient, fresh-ground coffee, with minimum user input. After making just a batch or two, I could tell how much better it was than capsule machines like a Keurig or Nespresso. That is great, and up to a couple years ago that would've been enough to make me do cartwheels, as I can't stand the additional environmental toll those capsules take. However, carafe coffee makers that also produce excellent single cups exist now. The bar has been raised, and some testing was in order to see if the TrueBrew could clear it.

The De’Longhi machine comes in three varieties, starting with a matte black base model for $400 and the same thing in stainless steel for $500. These two can make three-ounce “espresso style” drinks, followed by eight-, 12-, 16-, 20-, and 24-ounce options. It can also brew iced coffee where you add the ice. Fork over $600 and you get an additional 40-ounce option and a thermal carafe. It's pretty much all the same machine, making it feel a little petty and hair-splitty to subdivide so finely.

That “espresso style” drink is best thought of as a short, strong cup, nice before you do your morning calisthenics or run out the door to work. All the sizes larger than that are what the company refers to as drip coffee, and that's a good way to think about it.

To make a cup, you hit the power button, select the size and strength—light, gold, bold—then hit the brew button. Beans stored in a hopper on top are ground and funneled into an AeroPress-style brewing chamber, which dispenses a thin stream of coffee. Nicely, like the MultiServe, there's a little shelf for your mug that holds it close to the spout to keep splatter down.

For larger quantities like the carafe, the TrueBrew runs consecutive brewing cycles, which slows things down a bit but allows the machine to make consistent coffee at different sizes, something that traditional drip machines struggle with.

Photograph: De'Longhi

As convenient as that sounds, there's some confusing setup and a bit of maintenance involved. Setting the clock or the timer is surprisingly obtuse; the machine forces you through a host of button presses buried in the settings menu. Maintenance-wise, you've got to keep the water tank full, of course, then occasionally dump the pucks of coffee that accumulate inside of the machine, and pour out the water in both the drip tray and an interior water container that's part of the self-cleaning process.

My coffee-mate Sam Schroeder, co-owner of Olympia Coffee Roasters, zeroed right in on this when I brought the machine over to his Seattle lab for him to check out.

"These kind of machines tend to be messy," he said, clearly not having read the marketing material that states how clean it is. As he said this, he bent over and pulled off the front of the machine like some sci-fi movie genius removing the faceplate of a humanoid he’d created.

Out spilled its guts. Kidding! Out spilled some watery grounds that had accumulated inside, something that, with regular coffee-making, would happen every time I opened the machine. Sam then pinched two red buttons together and pulled out the “infuser,” the box where the brewing happens. We noted with interest how the infuser actually travels around inside the machine depending on where the TrueBrew is in the brewing cycle. You're supposed to wipe down the top of the infuser once a month and let it soak in warm water, something I doubt many convenient-coffee seekers will bother doing.

Sam poured Olympia's Big Truck Blend beans into the hopper and started testing with a three-ounce “espresso style” drink on the gold setting.

"Wow, that's a huge pour," he said, as it continued to pour.

"Wow! That crema looks terrible," he said, pointing at the vaguely sudsy rim around its edges where a real espresso machine would have created a velvety blanket of chestnut-colored micro-bubbles.

Photograph: De'Longhi

Sam noted how since it would be extremely difficult to determine the weight of the beans the TrueBrew uses nor the original volume of water nor the temperature in the brewing chamber, it's a bit of a black box in terms of figuring out what's happening while it makes coffee.

He could, however, measure the total dissolved solids (TDS), the amount of coffee grounds that actually dissolve into your coffee and denote a sense of the drink’s strength. At 3.99 TDS, it was like a half-strength espresso.

From there, we made two consecutive 12-ounce cups, which both poured a little under 10 ounces, which Sam found acceptable.

"Room for cream," he declared cheerily.

(Note: Some online sources have found the consistency of the TrueBrew’s pour sizes to fluctuate. We didn't have this problem, but keep an eye on user reviews as more people buy the machine.)

The TDS for both cups was around 1.40, which Sam called “kinda ideal,” but it didn't taste right.

“Big Truck has a lot of acidity. This is weak and bitter. I want it out of my mouth,” Sam said. “It could be any coffee. You know that workplace coffee that nobody likes? It’s like that.”

Ouch!

We switched from the gold to the bold brew setting, and things got a little better, but it still didn't taste right. Looking for a culprit, Sam's mind returned to the machine's messiness.

“I wonder if we’re getting flavors of over- and under-extraction. It's dirty in there, so you're essentially getting a bit of grounds that are going through the brewing cycle twice or more, which can make it taste over-extracted and bitter,” he hypothesized. Then he went further. “It might also be not extracting enough, which could have to do with grind size, water, temperature, and the amount of time water is in contact with the grounds.”

It felt like we were zeroing in on the worst of both worlds, so we switched coffees to Olympia's William Rojas Pink Bourbon Micro Lot from Columbia to see if we could learn more. We did, but it was not good news.

“This took a really good coffee and brewed a mediocre cup,” Sam said. “It brews what it brews, and I'm confused. This is essentially a one-touch machine, but it doesn't default to the good stuff. You're kind of stuck with what it can do. This coffee should be exciting, and it isn't.”

We had tried espresso-style, regular-coffee-style, light, gold, and bold and even switched the coffee itself, with little effect. We'd run out of ways to tweak our way to a good cup.

A little less than two weeks later, I pulled out the infuser to see how it was looking. A gumdrop-sized mound of wet grounds had accumulated behind the arm that sweeps spent pucks of coffee off of the infuser and into the used-grounds container, along with a scattering everywhere else on top of it. That was enough unexciting coffee for me. I packed up the TrueBrew and sent it back.

Freshly ground and not capsuled? Yes. Convenient? Sure! Perfetto? Sorry, Brad. It should be more exciting, but it isn't.