Krups EA8258 review

The EA8258 is a good-looking bean-to-cup coffee machine. In contrast to the retro-plastic Philips Saeco Xsmall, the EA8258 is understated and smart. Its plastic finish isn’t up there in terms of style with the mainly-metal Gaggia Brera, but it wouldn’t look out of place next to some high-end kitchen appliances.

A good-looking machine made of high-quality plastic

It also feels high-tech. You control the machine with a rotary knob and an LCD display. When you first turn the EA8258 on you’re prompted to rinse it through, which requires you to put a cereal bowl-sized container underneath the coffee nozzles and steam wand to avoid making a mess.

ou can control how fine you want your grind to be, and therefore how strong your coffee, with a rotary knob in the coffee bean compartment. This is easier than using a tool, as is necessary with some beans-to-cup coffee machines.

The EA8258 also has two espresso settings, normal and strong, to help you get your shot just right. You can also adjust the size of the espresso you want using the rotary control knob, but you have do this while it’s pouring.

As with other beans-to-cup machines we’ve seen, we found we had by far the best results by selecting the finest grind and the strongest espresso strength. When producing a 50ml shot of espresso, the shot just wasn’t dark enough, with a slightly watery brown colour.

The espresso has flavour, but is a bit watery

The espresso was far better once we reduced the quantity to 30ml, but was still not quite as dark as we would have liked. We were impressed with the shot’s flavour, as it had plenty of taste and punch, but were disappointed by the texture. Instead of the oily texture of the best espresso, the EA8258’s shot was rather watery, with a thin, pale crema.

And the crema is paler than we’d like

Unfortunately, things didn’t improve when we used the steam wand to froth milk for a latte. The default setting is to froth milk for 60 seconds, but this wasn’t enough to bring the milk up to the requisite 70 degrees (fresh from the fridge). 90 seconds was enough to bring it up to temperature, but the steam wand hardly managed to froth the milk at all. In the end, our latte was made with something more akin to hot milk.

The frothing wand mainly produced hot milk rather than froth, so our latte was disappointingly flat

The Krups EA8258 looks good and feels well made, but its espresso shots are only reasonable and its steam wand is poor. The Gaggia Brera may be almost £100 more, but we feel it’s worth the extra if you want a beans-to-cup machine.