Even while there are an unbelievableāand ever expandingānumber ofĀ coffee making apparatuses on the market (I own eight), the basics of brewing remain fundamentally simple. Making coffee usually involves water moving through coffee grounds with the help of a pump (as in espresso) or gravity. Whether a coffee maker is manual or automaticāand even with a growing number of āsmartā machines that automatically adjust water temperature and extraction timeāthe majority of coffee makers run off that same basic premise. Not so with the Spinn coffee maker.Ā
How does the Spinn work?
From the outside it doesnāt look like much of a departure from other fully automatic coffee makers. But the Spinn machine, which first showed up at a TechCrunch event in 2016 and arrived at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in 2020, is as novel as appearances at those tech showcases would suggest. Instead of extracting flavor by simply forcing water down, it uses a centrifuge that spins at 4500 rpm as its brewing chamber. This rapid rotation forces the ground coffee up against the wall of the chamber, which is a mesh filter. Spinning water shoots from the center of the brew chamber through the coffee grounds, out of the filter, and into a catch. That catch drops the newly brewed coffee into your cup. The rest of the brew processāthe grind size and dose that comes from the built-in burr grinder, the water temperature, the water volumeāis all customizable depending on what type of drink youāre trying to make.Ā Ā
Does the Spinn make good coffee?Ā
The centrifuge method allows Spinn to, in the words of the companyās VP of business development, L. Scott Callender, āmimicā many different styles of coffee brewing. For example, on the espresso setting, the centrifuge spins dry to push finely ground coffee up against the filter. That mimics the action doing a tamp, says Callender. The āespresso shotā the Spinn produces, while not meeting a more technical definition that goes something like, two ounces of coffee brewed under nine bars of pressure in 30 seconds, was still recognizable as a nice, complex shot.Ā
The Spinn also offers aĀ cold-brew setting, which, again, canāt actually be called cold brew by technical standards because itās ready to drink in 60 seconds rather than 12 hours. The machine attempts to cut the brewing time down by aggressively agitating the coffee grounds with the cold water through that previously described spinning process. The result is something enjoyably mellow, if not as chocolaty smooth as real cold brew.Ā
For me the real winner was theĀ pour-over setting, which intermittently shoots water through the grounds to come as close to the act of pouring, letting the water work its way through, and then pouring again that you do with aĀ Chemex. This produced the single most flavorful cup of coffee Iāve ever had from a single-serve machine.Ā
Versatility
Because it can change so many parametersāgrind size, coffee dose, water temperature, water quantity, centrifuge speed, number of centrifuge spinsāthe Spinn can brew something that will at least approximate any kind of coffee you want, including nitro brews. All those options also make it more versatile than any pod machine youāll encounter. You can brew with a handful of programmable preset buttons that you can assign different drinks to, however the Spinn is easiest to use with its app. The buttons on the actual machine are not super clear in terms of what they do. The app, however, details drink type, strength, and size, and walks you through multistep drinks like a flat white.Ā
Are the smart features useful?
Iāve used a lot of smart kitchen apps, and the only ones Iāve found as pleasant and easy to operate as Spinnās are the ones from Chefsteps ofĀ Joule sous vide circulator andĀ Joule oven fame. Drinks are easy to change to your liking, but the default settings produce very tasty coffee. The app also allows you to brew from anywhere (Callender said he has made his wife coffee while on business trips thousands miles away from home).Ā
The app also contains a marketplace where you can buy coffee beans from roasters all over the country, some of which you may have heard of, like Equator or Go Get āEm Tiger. Any roaster in the marketplace can choose to identify how they think a specific bag of coffee should be brewedāhow much water, what temperature, etc. Youāre free to change those parameters, but the default is that you drink it as the roaster intended. Callender says the plan is to include 20,000 different bags of coffee in the roaster database so that users can scan whatever bag they have, whether they bought from the Spinn app or not, and have the machine recognize what kind of beans itās working with.Ā
Is the Spinn Coffee Maker a good value?
The Spinn, with the milk frother, which is a necessary accessory to make most of the espresso drinks, costs $900 (at the time of writing). That is a lot of money. It costs more than twice as much as our top-rated pod machines from Nespresso and Bruvi. Heck, itās as much as ourĀ top-rated espresso maker, which, like the Spinn, comes with a built-in burr grinder. And what the Spinn does is not going to appeal to everyone. There are people who donāt want an espresso they donāt tamp themselves. There are people who find the process of making pour-over coffee every morning meditative. The Spinn isnāt for them.Ā
But there is another group, probably a large one, who wishes getting good coffee at home didnāt require multiple steps, attention to detail, or waiting more than a minute or two. For them, the Spinn will deliver everything they want in their morning cupāfresh beans and nuanced flavor with no effort on their part.Ā
If someone were deciding between the Spinn and a super-automatic machine like a Jura (which, from a user standpoint is what the Spinn comes closest to), Iād point them toward the Spinn. It can do a bit more, and with the exception of straight-up espresso, which Juras and machines like the Delonghi Eletta Explore do pretty well, it makes coffee that tastes a bit better.
The takeaway
I am one of those meditative pour-over makers and pressure-monitoring espresso drinkers, but the Spinn wooed me. I sent it back after Iād tested it for a while, and for as much as I value my coffee rituals, man, there are mornings when I miss pushing a button and walking away. If thatās the kind of coffee drinker you are, you wonāt find a better machine.
