Review: xBloom Studio Coffee Machine

I’ve seen the Eiffel, I’ve seen an eyeful, and now I’ve seen a robot do a pour-over.

The single-cup pour-over is, of course, craft coffee’s most romantic art—a showcase for patience and artistry and maybe even reverence.

The famously slow brewing technique—essentially a precise and protracted pouring of hot water over fresh-ground coffee, to coax the most delicate flavors from a bean—is also maybe the last space reserved for humans in a coffee world increasingly filled with expensive machines. The pour-over is a coffee nerd’s version of a priestly rite. The effort is half the point.

And so the xBloom Studio looked almost like a gimmick when it began to appear on social media ads this year. At its heart, the machine is an infinitely programmable robot that’ll do a pour-over for you—a machine that precisely mimics the all-too-human actions of pouring a thin stream of scalding water in a circle above a filtered coffee receptacle, frowning for a while, and then pouring again.

The xBloom is a premium coffee brewer reimagined by and maybe for the San Francisco tech set: a slick and multitiered iPhone of a thing founded by veterans of Apple’s project design team. But it’s no gimmick, it turns out. It is an innovative, often impressive, and just as often maddening device whose promise is no less than infinite optimization, the perfect cup for every bean.

Of course, it requires a phone app.

Countless Customizations

Last year's first-generation device from xBloom felt like more of a novelty. The new Studio both costs less and is far more ambitious than the Original. The Studio is an all-in-one coffee brewer with a built-in scale and a high-end, 120-rpm burr grinder that would likely cost about $200 on its own.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Pair xBloom's phone app to the device—or swipe an RFID recipe card that might arrive with your bag of beans—and you can program or upload a dizzying array of preferences, personalized perhaps to each single-estate Colombian or Indonesian bean.

The xBloom will grind your beans to comically specific fineness or coarseness. It will pour flash-heated and lightly agitated water in circles or spirals or right down the middle according to your narrowest specifications, in a process as Rube Goldberg–transparent and tangible as those see-through orange juicers one sometimes finds at supermarkets.

“I’m shocked. This is a solid cup of coffee,” said longtime coffee pro Adam Gery, co-owner of esteemed South Philly shop Two Persons Coffee, after drinking a cup made by the device.

Gery had been more than a little skeptical about the xBloom, after watching many others try to “improve” the pour-over with wacky devices. But when we brought the Studio by his cafe for a demo, Gery was pleasantly surprised.

“The way this pours, it pours like a person,” he said, staring at the device’s underbelly while it brewed a cup. “It seems like the right amount of agitation in the water, which I was worried about. Even the water hitting the bed, it did a good job.”

The xBloom’s bean grinder was also a respectable entrant for a home device, Gery said, performing as well as a midlevel machine from Seattle maker Baratza.

That said, Garry Kasparov still smoked Deep Blue. In a head-to-head matchup using the same beans from Portland’s Scandinavian-style Heart Coffee, Gery’s pour-over blew the xBloom’s version out of the water. Bigger, better, more delicate, and complex. When we told him so, Gery laughed.

“Oh good, I still have a job,” he said.

Coffee Curiosity

But while it’s unlikely to put baristas out of work, the xBloom is an excellent substitute for a somewhat improvisational home pour-over artist—the sort who might freehand a couple tablespoons into a Chemex.

Casual coffee fans will nonetheless have a steep learning curve to get the xBloom working on their behalf. The xBloom can take you down deep rabbit holes of fine-tuning and coffee nerdery, and introduce you to a new world of second-guessery. It took weeks for us to hone our recipes into consistently good cups.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage via xBloom app

The xBloom’s phone app can be daunting for the uninitiated. It offers a multipour, swipe-toggled menagerie of options for each cup of coffee: grind, wait times, temperature, coffee-to-water ratio, pouring technique, agitation before or after the pour.

Would you like to make your Brandywine Coffee Roasters' blueberry coferment on a five-pour schedule, with agitation on the first and fifth pours? Using water heated to 203 degrees Fahrenheit on the first three pours but 193 on the next two, over coffee that’s been ground to a fineness of exactly 52 out of 80? Here you are, on a phone app that looks a bit like a video game for hydrologists, making it all happen.

On light roast coffees in particular, our early xBloom efforts came out a bit acidic and thin when we used the default recipes that came with the app—a sign the coffee was not being extracted well enough.

Was our initial underextracted coffee the result of Philadelphia’s semihard tap water? Perhaps.

Either way, we slowed down the pour by swapping out xBloom’s house filters to thick-papered Kalita filters, and also deviated sharply from the app’s suggested recipes. We increased the pause times on each pour, and ground our beans much finer. Once we finally got it figured out, the results were admirable.

But let’s say you don’t want to try for days or weeks to figure out your ideal formula. The xBloom offers a shortcut in the form of roast-to-order xPods ($13 to $24 for eight) available by mail order, often from some of the hypiest third-wave roasters in coffee. Your compostable pods will arrive with an RFID recipe card, preprogrammed and theoretically optimized to each bean. Just swipe the card, then push the button.

Results will differ by roaster, as in life. A recipe for a single-origin bean from Indian-American coffee roaster Kaveri was dialed in beautifully, leading to a cup brimming with chocolate and citrus. Not so with NBA player Jimmy Butler III’s Bigface coffee brand. That recipe, seemingly left at the machine’s default coarse grind, led to tart and woefully underextracted coffee.

Still Brewing

The pods are also costly, about $1.60 to $3 apiece. This makes this option most attractive to people with less time than money, or companies who’d like an impressive pour-over device in their break room.

The people we expect to be most excited about the xBloom are those who love technology itself. The xBloom Studio is, quite simply, cool. It's new and interesting, and fun to play with. And once you figure it out, the machine rewards you with delicious coffee.

Photograph: xBloom

For gamers or obsessive optimizers, the xBloom Studio offers endless variables to toggle in the quest for the precisely dialed and repeatable pour-over. It is a robot that will do almost all of the work for you at the push of a button, and never get distracted while crusty-eyed and bleary from the struggle of facing yet another day.

As with any new technology, expect some kinks: The same inputs don’t always lead to the same results. Sometimes the grinder piles up most of the beans on one side of the dripper, and the machine blithely pours water as if this didn’t happen. Other confounding variables include altitude, water hardness, and the freshness of the coffee.

The machine also saw some early glitches after its release in June 2024, including a “waiting” error caused by the device’s overflow protection algorithm; this has mostly been resolved by successive firmware updates. A dripper arm also cracked during brewing and was quickly replaced with an updated version.

Which is all to say, the dream of the always-perfect cup is not yet here. But it’s close enough to be tantalizing.