Linea Mini

Most home espresso machines ask you to wait. You pull the shot, then stand there while the same water climbs to steam temperature, and by the time the milk is ready the espresso has cooled. The waiting is not a quirk of cheap machines. It is what one boiler doing two jobs looks like.

La Marzocco's Linea Mini runs two separate boilers, a brew boiler and a three litre steam boiler, so espresso and milk never share a temperature or a queue. A PID holds the brew side steady while the steam side sits hot and ready. The group head is integrated with the brew boiler rather than bolted onto it, which means the metal the water passes through is held at temperature too, and that metal is where most of the drift between one shot and the next actually comes from. The group is worked by a paddle with electronic pre-infusion, an interface La Marzocco lifted from its own commercial machines of the 1970s. The current version adds a two-valve pre-infusion system with a self-cleaning flow restrictor, adjustable pump pressure, a shot timer, rinse mode, automatic backflushing and brew-by-weight with La Marzocco's scales.

The numbers underneath are commercial numbers: 14 amps at 115 volts through a 1620 watt element, fed from a 2.5 litre reservoir, the whole thing 30 kilograms on the counter. The steam wand stays cool to the touch and ends in a PEEK polymer tip, so there is one fewer part of the machine that punishes you for being quick. Each one is assembled by hand in Florence, and it comes with 7, 14, 17 and 21 gram baskets, a cleaning basket, a convex tamper, a convertible portafilter, a spare wand tip, Purocaf cleaning solution and a 12 ounce pitcher.