Todays’ review is all about De’Longhi’s Clessidra Brewer, a coffee machine made to create perfect pour-overs and precise filter coffee! It’s approved by the European Coffee Brewing Centre (ECBC) and has a great list of features such as it’s infusion time control and an anti-drip system. Let’s see how it goes!
Clessidra Drip Coffee Machine ICM17210
Initial Thoughts
The packaging has no polyester – only recyclable cardboard. We love environmentally-friendly practices, so this is a great way to start off!
In appearance, the Clessidra is ticking all the right boxes. It’s simplistic yet sleek and has an elegant design. Its no eye-sore and you won’t need to hurry to hide it when guests pop over. It’s a reasonable, medium size, not taking up too much room. In short – it’s smart and functional, which fits the De’Longhi Company’s brand.
How It Worked
To give the machine a fair-all round go, we decided to try it with two different types of coffees, our Il Caramello & Yirgacheffe. Il Caramello was used as it’s a great ‘All-Rounder’ coffee, meaning it’s great in everything, but especially so with milk. Many people have their coffee with milk, so this was important for us to try. The other coffee we used was Yirgacheffe, which is a specialty filter roast specific coffee, designed for black coffees. Yirgacheffe is a region in Ethiopia, where it’s famous for its amazing quality coffees. The single-origin coffee that comes from Yirgacheffe are wonderful peach flavours and have subtle notes of dark chocolate.
Il Caramello
For the Il Caramello, we used the scoop cup (which is about 7.5 grams/125ml) and measured two level scoops of coffee. In the machine we placed 250ml of water. Then we had two great options to choose from depending on what coffee we were after. One was for precision brewing and the other is for your general batch brew. We went ahead with the batch brew option.
Then we waited 4 minutes for the coffee to brew, time you could easily fill by making some toast for breakfast if it’s the morning or reaching for a snack if it’s the afternoon.
The results: Without milk, we found it to be really nice and balanced, and for a milk-based drink, it was simply delicious!
Yirgacheffe
For our Yirgacheffe, we decided to use 8 scoops of coffee to get 8 cups of coffee. You can actually make up to 10 cups of coffee with this machine and, if you don’t have it all at once, that’s ok, because the machine has a keep-warm hot plate! We think this is great because there’s nothing worse than having to waste perfectly good coffee just because it went cold.
This time round, we used the pourover button, which made the coffee a precise 92 degrees, which is so very close to the quality that you get from pourovers in a cafe.
The results: We found it to taste very good and lovely and so easy to make!
Features we liked
- Some features we really enjoyed that’s included with this machine is that it has an auto turn-off switch. For busy bee’s this is great, because if you forget to turn it off – there’s no harm done, it will just do it itself.
- It auto-detects when it’s time to chemical it. Cleaning and machine maintenance can be so easily overlooked by both the consumer and manufacturers. This is a great feature to see included in the machine because it means that De’Longhi actually cares about coffee and their machines!
- It has a super simple cleaning method where you only have to clean the glass jug and the filter holder.
- Instruction manuals are easy to read and are freely available on their product page if you lose your copy!
Who it’s for
The Clessidra costs around $150-$199 and we think it would be a really good upgrade for people who have espresso pod machines and want a little more control over their coffees. With pods, you only have a fixed amount such as 1 shot or 2 shots, and that’s it, whereas, with a machine like the Clessidra, you can adjust how strong or weak you want the coffee or play around with the ratios of water to coffee.
It’s important to note that in making our 8 cups for the Yirgacheffe round, we ended up with only 6 and a quarter cups of coffee. So we added 8 cups of water, but we only ended up with 6 and a quarter. So we’re guessing a lot of it evaporated. It’s something to remember, and obviously, this is the first time we used it, so once we get used to making more coffees with it, understanding the ratios, we can play around with that and come up with the perfect recipe for each coffee.
Final Thoughts
This is the perfect machine for people who just want to make delicious coffee, without a fuss and low level of maintenance. Fantastic if you want to make coffee to have at home or to drink throughout the day – it’s a perfect coffee machine.
