Ninja Luxe Café Premier coffee machine review: A must-have for budding baristas

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the coffee machine scene, you’ll know that the Ninja Luxe Café Premier coffee machine isn’t a totally new drop from Ninja. It first launched last year in the US and, due to its success, is now available here in the UK. This is Ninja’s first-ever coffee machine and despite the brand’s reputation for high-ticket prices, the Luxe Café is surprisingly well priced for a semi-automatic coffee machine.

Ninja has designed this machine for those who care about making good coffee at home but – maybe – can’t be bothered with all the faff. It allows you to play barista without having to worry about measuring doses and buying a separate grinder for your beans and Ninja claims it can nail the perfect espresso after just a couple of calibration shots. And it isn’t all about espresso, either: it can also be used to make filter, cold brew and milk-based drinks with automatic steaming.

It is by no means perfect, but I was seriously impressed by the features and performance of this machine given its price.

Ninja Luxe Café Premier coffee machine review: What do you get for the money?

The Ninja Luxe Café Premier costs £550 at the time of writing. This is not a small amount of money by any stretch of the imagination but when compared to similar semi-automatic coffee machines with comparable accessories and features, it’s impressively good value.

In the box you get the machine, three baskets for single, double and quad shots and a hefty 53mm portafilter to accommodate them. There’s also a spring-loaded tamper and a jug for milk steaming, which interestingly also has a small, removable whisk at the bottom. This addition is designed to ensure you get just the right texture when using the automatic steam function.

There are cleaning accessories included and a really good quick start guide, as well as more detailed instructions on how to dig deep into the settings if you need to change the brew temperature among other things.

Design-wise, there’s also a lot to like. It’s well built for the most part and is surprisingly compact at 336 x 344 x 372mm (WDH). The single 350g bean hopper and a grinder with conical steel burrs are built into the top of the machine, so there’s not much bulk on top. You will need to leave some room either side of the machine, since there is some accessory storage on each side for your tamper, funnel and extra baskets, but it’s generally all very neat and tidy.

There are various digital displays spanning the front of the machine at the top, and these are easy to navigate, operated by a mixture of dials and buttons. Grind settings sit on the left, your coffee drink selection is in the middle and milk types on the right.

As this machine is so highly automated, you’ll be prompted as to which buttons to press and where to go pretty much every step of the way, so you don’t need to worry much about remembering which control does what straight away. This goes as far as being locked out of anything on the screen you shouldn’t be pressing in order to avoid mistakes.

And with those settings you can make espresso, double espresso, filter coffee, cold brew and milk drinks. Handily, the milk jug has clear markings in millilitres to guide you on how much milk to use for your preferred drink and you also have the option auto-steam both dairy and plant-based, which lowers the temperature to ensure you get a good foam for things like oat and soy milks. Though it doesn’t have specific settings for individual plant milks.

Ninja Luxe Café Premier coffee machine review: What’s it like to use?

The Luxe Café might look like a regular semi-automatic coffee machine, but it works a little differently than most. Instead of leaving the user to work out how to “dial” in the grind size, dose and brew time themselves – the hardest thing about making “proper” espresso – the Ninja will do all that work for you.

Ninja calls this system “Barista Assist”, and it works by recommending a grind size (how finely its grinder grinds your coffee beans) based on the drink you’re making and a couple of calibration shots. First, it recognises the basket you’re using (single, double or quad) and it will suggest an initial grind size based on this and the drink you have selected.

There’s a set of digital scales built into the grinder that automatically weighs the amount of coffee ground into the portafilter – usually around 18g for a double shot. And once you’ve removed the portafilter, tamped it and locked it into the group head, the machine then pulls your espresso for you before giving you the okay on your grind size or recalculating and asking you to alter the setting based on its findings.

If the shot comes out too quickly, it will suggest you reduce the grind size. Too low and it will reverse this suggestion. Ninja also claims that the Luxe adjusts the temperature, pressure and water distribution for each shot but I couldn’t confirm this.

In fact, it’s almost fully automated. The only manual stage is the tamping and transfer of the portafilter from grinder to group head – the machine provides instructions on everything else, leaving nothing whatsoever to chance.

This level of automation should be well received by those taking their first steps into whole bean coffee making but it’s not really made for experienced home brewers. That’s ok though: there are more than enough good manual espresso machines to cater for that crowd.

Even the milk frothing is super-simple. Steaming stops automatically when the milk has reached 65ºC for cows milk (or 60ºC for plant milks) but it can be used manually, too. In my tests I found this temperature to be fairly accurate and consistent and the additional whisk in the bottom helps the milk texturing along.

In general, I found it worked pretty well, steaming dairy and Barista-style oat milk successfully very well. However, I found that it struggled with some other milks, such as almond and soya, where it could be a bit on the thin side.

READ NEXT: Best milk frother

Ninja Luxe Café Premier coffee machine review: What does the coffee taste like?

I found the extraction to be fairly consistent when brewing the same espresso over and over, with only some variation in the weight of ground coffee the Luxe was spitting out. This only really changed when making big adjustments, such as changing the grind size by more than a couple of numbers. This machine does offer the option to adjust ratios to 1:2, 1:2.5 or 1:3, with 1:2.5 being the standard for espresso, and you can also adjust water temperature and milk steaming temperature too.

As far as the actual quality of the shots pulled? For a £550 machine, they are pretty good. I’ve been testing the Ninja Cafe Luxe alongside Sage’s latest machine, the Oracle Jet and Kitchenid’s KF8 fully automatic. While the espresso doesn’t come out quite as well rounded and flavourful as the more expensive Sage, I’d argue for my personal tastes they were better than the KF8, which, for reference, costs up to £1,899.

The cold brew was also pretty good. Of course, it isn’t going to be the same as painstakingly making it yourself, but this method is a lot quicker and does the trick if you can’t be bothered with traditional methods.

I was fairly impressed with the all-knowing Luxe’s grind-size suggestions, too. It decided on setting four for my double espresso (changing to three as I ground a couple more shots with older beans) and after pulling a shot either side of this, I was inclined to agree. If anything, I’d have preferred the grinder to offer finer adjustments – I’d argue a 3.5 would have been preferable. Double shots took around 27-29 seconds to come through and came out at a fairly consistent temperature, averaging 73ºC in the cup.

While I had consistently good results with the double espresso basket, I struggled to get quite as good a shot from the single one. The perforated area of the single basket is quite small and the machine seemed a little confused as to how large the grind size should be at first. After some small tweaks, it seemed to err on the side of caution and settled on a slightly larger grind size of six for a single. This produced a fairly good espresso but the consistency and flavour wasn’t quite as good as with the double basket.

The Ninja Luxe Cafe can also make hot quad shots, americano and filter coffee using its quad basket, as well as cold brew and coffee over ice. If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure why the average person would need a quad shot but I was definitely won over with the cold brew on this machine. It’s not quite up there with the Delonghi Eletta Explore’s setting but it comes pretty close. The filter coffee is okay, but I’ve had better.

Ninja Luxe Café Premier coffee machine review: Should you buy it?

If you’re looking to buy your first coffee machine, don’t want to spend £1,000 and don’t want to go straight to a manual espresso and grinder, you’ll be hard pushed to find anything better than this. The double espresso is relatively tasty and it makes a really nice milk foam with its automatic wand and whisk steaming system.

It has its flaws. The single shots and filter coffee could be better and there are a fair few semi automatic and bean-to-cup coffee machines that can produce a tastier espresso. But none offer the level of self-calibration and espresso automation that this machine does and for that it should be praised. If you’re someone who likes to switch between espresso, cold brew and milk based drinks regularly, this machine will serve you well.