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As a beverage, coffee is woven into our culture. You can find it on every street corner from utilitarian to ultraluxe, with a price tag to match. Third-wave coffee shops can be found in pretty much any town with a medium-sized community college.
As a hobby, coffee—and espresso especially—offers a bottomless rabbit hole of gear acquisition and skill chasing: grinder upgrades, puck prep, the latest cold drink hack from an obscure competition that you saw on social media. And even if you’re preternaturally aligned with doing the research and tweaking settings, you may just want a nice cappuccino at home without getting a master’s degree in fluid dynamics. That’s where the Ninja Luxe Café Premier Series comes in to take the guesswork out of the brewing process—no matter your skill level.
Human-Machine Coffee Interface
An intelligent espresso and coffee system designed to produce espresso, drip coffee, and rapid cold brew, the Ninja Luxe Café and its Barista Assist Technology™ automate the complex aspects of espresso—like grind size and brew time based on your beans—while still giving users control and customization over their drinks. “We designed this machine for all the folks who want to get into this world but feel intimidated by it,” says Sean Robbins, VP of marketing for coffee & espresso at SharkNinja. “But what surprised us was all the existing espresso aficionados who embraced the Luxe Café. Because they didn’t always want to spend the time it took to get it just right with their other machines, and maybe were a little frustrated with that constant trial and error,” he says.
To some, that trial and error is an inherent part of the espresso experience. In fact, though you may not realize it as a customer, it even goes on behind the counter of your favorite cafe.
After the quality of your beans, the next most important part of pulling a consistent shot of espresso is the correct grind size and dose of those beans in the proper ratio with the volume of water for your beverage. For a double espresso, that traditionally amounts to 18 to 20 grams of coffee per 36 grams of water for a standard 1:2 ratio. World-class cafes ensure consistency by weighing every dose of coffee as it hits the portafilter from the grinder. They then dial in their shots several times over the course of a service, adjusting the amount of coffee and water that flows through it by stopping shots early or letting them go a few seconds longer.
While home baristas may not be serving hundreds of coffees a day, owners of traditional manual or semi-automated espresso machines need to go through this same dialing-in procedure whenever they open a new bag of beans.
The Ninja Luxe Café streamlines this procedure to enable a “no guesswork” experience with its integrated grinder and scale—and Barista Assist Technology™. When loaded with a fresh bag of beans, all the user has to do is insert the portafilter outfitted with the appropriate basket size and select the drink they’d like. The automated Grind IQ system recommends an initial grind setting, and loads the freshly ground coffee into the portafilter by weight. Over the course of the first two to three dial-in shots, the machine correlates grind size, flow rates, and extraction to predict the optimal settings to achieve a programmed schematic of “the perfect shot.” This only has to happen when you swap beans, then you can just get on with making your coffee.
This “no guesswork” experience was an integral part of the development of the Ninja Luxe Café. While some owners relish the tinkering aspect of espresso, constantly redialing their grind and brew ratio isn’t necessarily part of everyone’s lifestyle. According to Robbins, “The problem we set out to solve right from the beginning was this frustration with the learning curve and the tinkering—how do we make that easier for [the end user]?”
That same user-friendly approach extends to preparing foam for cappuccinos, macchiatos, flat whites, et al. While getting the perfect foam texture and bubble size can be daunting (and require what some would consider unreasonable quantities of dairy or alt milk to perfect), the Luxe Café’s automated frother can produce the dense microfoam that makes latte art possible—that airy head on a cappuccino, or the cold, whipped texture for iced drinks.
The Power Is in Your Hands
But unlike superautomatic machines that grind, brew, and steam milk all with the touch of a button, the Ninja Luxe Café keeps the control in your hands. That comes to life in the UI on the machine’s front panel. “You can tweak strength, you can tweak your grind size, you can select different drinks, you can select what temperature you want to brew at, and you have all the control with that frother that you could ever want,” says Robbins. Users can even forego the built-in steam settings by keeping the wand tilted out, holding the jug, and long-pressing the Start Froth button. “We didn't want to take control away in the mission of making things easier or dumbing it down. So that was a requirement from the beginning,” he says.
The flexibility to tweak settings welcomes the person who comes to the Luxe Café with some espresso knowledge (first-hand or after hours of online research) or someone that starts to want more control as they go. “This machine evolves and grows with them because they can tweak all of those things. They're not handcuffed into this one computer-driven learn-and-adjust model,” Robbins says.
Riding the Fourth Wave
As riffs on classic espresso drinks, high-quality beans, and elevated at-home brewing come to define the next era of coffee culture, a versatile all-in-one café-quality coffee solution becomes critical. “We want the flavors that a café delivers and we want to do it at home,” says Robbins. “Yet, people are stretched so thin for time and everyone’s got their own individual flavors and tastes.” And coffee drinkers aren’t monolithic—even in the same household. One person may need to start their day with a cup of hot drip coffee and move on to iced in the afternoon or on the go, while another prefers a cappuccino in the morning and a macchiato after lunch. By providing a flexible, tweakable, aesthetically elevated solution for discerning coffee drinkers, Ninja has developed a platform that can guide even the most hesitant home brewers down a delicious rabbit hole.
Visit Ninja’s website to shop the Ninja Luxe Café.
