Sage - The Duo-Temp Pro - Bean to Cup Coffee Machine with Milk Frother - Precise Espresso-Extraction 1600 W - Easy to Use Manual Espresso Machine - Portafilter and Milk Jug - Brushed Stainless Steel

If you just want to press a button and have a drink made for you, this isn't your machine. However, if you're the type of person who wants total controll over your espresso and steamed milk. The type of person who isn't just going to feed the machine supermarket beans. And you're someone enjoys the process of making tasty coffee drinks, then I highly recommend this machine. With help from youtube, I've gone from someone who had never used fresh beans before. Someone who'd never even seen an espresso machine outside of a coffee shop, let alone be in controll of one. To someone who now has a fresh coffee bean subscription and way too many coffee accessories. And I'm also someone who's now used this machine for 5 months, having pulled shots with it almost every day. I can honestly say it's been a great entry into home espresso. It's not perfect, or the best machine out there, but I've really enjoyed using it so far. And I can highly recommened it to anyone on the fence about taking the plunge. It's well worth the effort, and cost wise, it's really good bang for your buck. Especially if you can get one on sale for under £300. I've paired this machine with the Sage dose controll pro and couldn't be happier. There's a bit of a learning curve at first when learning to dial in fresh beans. But even the first drink I made tasted better than any coffee I've had from a coffee chain. You just have to source good quality beans (with a known and recent roasting date) and follow a few guides to get you going. Once you figure everything out, it's a super simple machine to use. You switch it on and turn the dial to the function you want activating. Then turn the dial back to the center to stop. Super simple and you have full controll. If this is your first machine, you'll likely need to buy a few extras with this, as it doesn't grind or dose coffee for you. Along with a decent coffee grinder, I'd recommend getting a good set of coffee scales (I use the Timemore basic 2), as it makes the whole process of making a drink a lot easier. Especially when following a recipe or experimenting with grind size. Being a manual machine, you have a lot of controll over your espresso and you'll need to learn how to controll the things that this machine doesn't (like when to stop the water or what grind setting to use to get the right flow rate). Good coffee scales help with all of that. At the very least, you'll need a scale that goes to 0.1g and a stopwatch. Without those, it's hard to get good results. For me at least, it's really nice to have a machine that doesn't hold your hand. All this really does is push hot water through whatever you put in the portafilter, and shoot hot water/steam from the wand. A whole 2 functions! It does each of them really well, though. If I had to be picky and say something negative, it'd be that the noise is a bit high when steaming. There's a repetative thud from the pump when using the steam wand, and it's a bit annoying. The thudding seems to echo throughout the house when it runs, too. It only lasts a minute while steaming, so it's not that bad. Something to consider if you have thin walls and live next to neighbours that like to complain, or have relatives that you don't want to disturb. Overall, it's been an amazing addition to our kitchen. It's basically a hobby now. Just make sure you source good quality, freshly roasted, beans. And that you refrain from using the pressurised baskets!

Had this for a month now and used it most days so its time to write a review. It is not a cheap machine but you can see where the money has been spent. For example, the porta filter handle is pretty much a professional one you would see being used in a coffee shop. The supplied milk jug is also solid and pours the milk without drips - a minor miracle.The finish of the machine is good and it feels solidly built. It makes good espresso, although as yet no crema but that's because I'm using up some older beans. You can hear the two stage extraction working and the cool down after using the steam wand. A word of caution - the cool down puts a fair bit of water into the drip tray so keep an eye on the indicator at the front of the tray. The steam wand works very well, but as I've found in other machines you don't get steam immediately. I put a sponge under the wand to catch the water then dip the wand quickly into the milk. This way the milk isn't diluted as much and the steam takes immediate effect. I've made latte and cappuccino so far and am working up to a proper flat white. I initially bought a cheaper machine for under £40 mainly to see if I would use it enough to justify a better quality one. I used it most days so decided to buy the Sage machine after a year. The build quality of the Sage is so much better than the cheap machine but I've been able to get similar results from both by using good quality freshly ground beans. The cheaper machine was temperamental needing more work to get consistent results. Temperature control was rubbish and it didn't cool down after steaming milk so kept on getting hotter - too warm for making a good espresso. So the cool down feature in the Sage serves a real purpose. I needed to keep the cheaper machine clean - on average cleaning it every few weeks, whereas the Sage comes with a water filter which will help keep it from furring up. Financially, the Sage doesn't make much sense at all because you can get decent results - albeit with more effort and experimenting - with the cheaper machine (and you can buy 6.5 more as spares in case your first one stops working for the same amount as one Sage....). But it is so much more satisfying to use. The only question is will it last? The 2 year warranty is encouraging, but I intend to help it along by changing the water filter regularly and keeping the machine clean.

I’ve been umming and ahhing about whether or not to get a home espresso machine to replace my ageing Nespresso one. My biggest problem with the Nespresso is the difficulty of cleaning it, simply because of its poor design. Lots of research suggested that enjoyable home espresso is not easy to achieve and takes a barista skillset otherwise it’s not worth bothering with. Also the machines available at the cheap end i.e. this one, are not that great and unless you have a couple of grand to spare it’s cheaper to go to the local coffee shop. Actually however much you spend it’s probably cheaper to go to the local coffee shop. Still with that knowledge, and plenty of youtube videos under my belt I picked out two possible machines – this one and the Bambino plus. The Bambino makes milk texturing easier and was my first choice. But the Duo Temp dropped in price by over £100 here so that really made the decision for me, and after 6 months of not being sure I bought one. It comes really well packed with all the accessories in smart little white boxes a la Apple. You get four coffee baskets that fit into the handle (portafilter). Two are single cup, two are two cup. Two are for home ground coffee with your own grinder, two are for using with coffee bought already ground. The pre-ground coffee baskets are double walled and more forgiving of beginner barista errors, so I started with that. My intention is to eventually add a Sage grinder and grind my own beans if I don’t get bored with the faff by the end of my first bag of coffee. You also get a cleaning tool for the steam wand tip, and some cleaning tablets for the portafilter. I noticed a couple of things I didn’t like. There’s a water filter in the water container. This needs replacing every three months and so is an ongoing additional expense. The handle on the water container is a pain. It concertinas and folds flat, but it doesn’t hang straight down in use and so gets in the way of the tap when filling. This is stupid and annoying. It is also flimsy, uncomfortable, and looks like it would break at the drop of a hat. Functionality seems to go out of the window when looks are concerned because it folds down and looks part of the smooth top of the machine. One thing you might need to be aware of is that the water container lifts vertically for its full height, so if you plan on popping this machine on a worktop under a wall cupboard, you will have to move it every time you want to fill it with water. It also has a cup warming space on the top. Again this is only usable if there’s nothing immediately above the machine. Unfortunately the only space I have is under a wall cupboard so I have to put up with cold cups and inconvenience when I want to fill it. You need to run hot water through both the portafilter and basket, as well as the steam wand, several times before the machine is ready for use. This is useful because it sort of gives you a free go of the controls without wasting any coffee. You have to brew coffee and then steam your milk. You can’t do both simultaneously. The large central dial, which is quite stiff, controls which way the water goes, so twist left for espresso brewing, up to vertical to stop, and then to the right for steaming milk and back to vertical to stop. Nothing is automatic with this machine, so you control the brew time of the coffee and are in total control of the milk heating/frothing. So you really need either a handy timer to time the shot length, or a scale to weigh the brew so you can stop when enough water has passed through the portafilter (twice the weight of coffee is a good place to start with about 19g of ground coffee and 38g of finished drink). A thermometer for the milk jug would also be a good addition so you don’t accidentally cook the milk (aim for around 65C). Too hot to hold in your hand is a good indicator if you don’t have a thermometer and the ‘razor’ tool (supplied) lets you put a consistent amount of coffee in the basket. The coffee needs compressing in the basket with the supplied tamper. This is held in the unit with a magnet. The coffee needs to be a solid barrier so the water cannot find any easy way through. You don’t need anything other than what’s supplied with the machine to start pulling shots, but one or two extras might make coffee making a bit more consistent. I bought some pre-ground coffee from a specialist roaster, and with more than a little trepidation, filled the pressurised two cup basket, tamped it, razored it, pulled a shot, frothed up some soya milk, added it to the brew and took a sip of one of the most delicious cappuccinos I’ve enjoyed in a long while. I think in part it was the coffee blend I’d bought. What it wasn’t was skill on my part because I don’t have any. But I had a cup of delicious coffee with my first attempt. I suspect a single walled basket and my own grinder would not have produced such a positive result but at least I know that that will be down to me and not the machine. So I think the Sage Dup Temp Pro is a good place to start with home espresso as long as you don’t mind the extra time it takes filling the basket, remembering to clean the wand immediately and a fair bit of additional washing up afterwards (portafilter, jug, wand, thermometer if used). Espresso is a slowish business, but I think that’s part of the fun. I have one or two cups of coffee a day, because of that I want it to be the most delicious coffee I can make, where I can choose the part of the world the beans are grown, how they are roasted, and who I buy them from. There are loads of roasters selling freshly roasted coffee online nowadays so there’s a ton of choice that I’m now looking forward to exploring – and it all tastes better than Nespresso pods. Anyway, my first attempt produced a very enjoyable cappuccino. The machine itself has fairly simple controls, but you do need to participate in the process. It’s very different from popping a pod in a Nespresso machine, pressing one button, and picking up a cappuccino moments later. So, and bear in mind this is based on one cup so far, if you fancy upping your game to really fresh and delicious espresso, lattes, cappuccinos, et al, this might be a good machine to start with. It’s basic but you have control over coffee dose, fresh ground or pre-ground coffee, brew time, and milk steaming. For me it seems the perfect place to start without spending silly amounts of money. Mind you, this machine was actually considerably cheaper than my Nespresso machine was when bought new 4 years ago. I like the Sage duo temp pro, and hope to get many years of use out of it, and I’ll certainly update this review if I encounter any problems.

Having had a Gaggia Classic for many years, I’d become used to taking it apart, ordering new parts and swapping them out, constantly cleaning it with various solutions and vinegar to unblock it and patching up leaks. Six years of experience doing this. Perhaps London’s hard water did not help however even after switching to bottled water the fettling continued. Last week it refused to resume work even after fitting a new pump - a job I am now so well versed at I could do it while breast feeding a chimpanzee should I have to. In fact the chimpanzee would perhaps have more luck at getting liquid from my male nipple than I had at getting a coffee last Saturday morning. After an hour online reading reviews on various machines and systems I settled on this Sage unit. I like that it looks good in the same way the unfussy Gaggia does, and I liked the video review by Sage’s owner explaining how they have focused on using technology to help get a better coffee. It is easy to use, it has a filter system built in so less likely to block through calcium or limescale build up (I recommend using bottled water anyway when you think what tap water goes through. Or more accurately ‘who’ it goes through). It is a tidy machine that comes with a holder for the hand held press, a cup warmer on top of the machine, a milk jug, various filter baskets which helping tailor your espresso and some very easy instruct on how to make a cup of your favourite. Also worth noting that on Amazon Prime I had this machine delivers before 10:30am the next day despite it being Sunday. Well worth it.

My first impression of the Sage espresso machine are very good, it is a heavy well constructed stainless steel, it is heavy to lift and does not move on the counter top as you use it. The box had a lot of extras. Extras include a stainless steel milk jug, pressurized and non-pressurized single and double shot baskets, dose trimming tool, two cleaning tablets, descaler and a rubber cleaner basket for lose grounds. All the extras are easily stored in a tray that pulls out of the machine behind the drip tray. The machine is very easy to assemble and use. It has a large 1.8 liter water tank with a replaceable water filter. There is a magnet on the end of the tamper and on the left side of the espresso machine for easy storage of the tamper. The right side of the machine has a single hole steam wand that has full 360 degree rotation which is perfect for finding an easy position to froth milk. The controls for the machine are very simple to use, the machine has two buttons and one dial. The button on the left is simply power on and power off. The button on the right allows you to switch between steam and hot water. The hot water is dispensed through the 360 degree steam wand. In my opinion the hot water function is perfect for Americano or long black coffee at a temperature of 70 degrees Celsius (measure using a milk frothing thermometer). I also use the hot water function to preheat the cup, the cup warmer on top of the machine takes too long to heat up, you have frothed your milk and prepared your espresso before it is even lukewarm on top. Using the hot water function is great for preheating as the water in the machine is heated and ready to use within 20-30 seconds from off position. The steam wand heats the milk very quickly, roughly 20 seconds from milk to froth. The dial in the center of the machine simply tells the machine to activate the steam wand (twist right) or pull a shot of espresso (twist left). The PID temperature control means you can steam your milk first and place the dial back in the center position, once the dial is placed in the center position the PID temperature control purges the steam wand until the temperature of the machine returns to optimal brewing temperature. Then twist the dial to the left to pull your espresso. It is a manual dosing machining, meaning when you pull a shot of espresso the water will continue to flow until you turn the dial back to its center position. There is a lot of cup space between the coffee basket and the drip tray allowing you to use a full sized cup (see pictures below). Pros: Heavy. Stainless steel. Fast warm up time. Professional style steam wand. 1.8 liter water tank. PID temperature control. A lot of accessories included. Cons: Cup warmer isn’t great. Although I admit you are getting a great quality machine, I find the price a bit steep. (£262.20 at the time of this review) I am very pleased with the Sage Duo Temp Pro. The price tag is a bit steep but you are getting a good quality espresso machine. I have no problem recommending it to others, it was only after purchasing this machine that I realize how poor my previous machine budget Russell Hobbs machine was.

I bought this coffee machine back in September 2017, and it has been in daily use since then, without any problems. It's very solidly built with high quality materials. It still looks like new and performs perfectly . It came with a range of bits - different size coffee filters, a thing to aid cleaning, a little prod to clear any obstruction in the steam nozzle, etc.. etc. I really can't fault it. It makes great coffee - which of course depends a lot on the quality of the coffee you choose to put in it. A couple of tips. If you live in a hard water area, be sure to descale the system regularly. When using the steam wand wipe it down to remove any milk before it sets hard on the hot wand. The drip tray can get stained over time, so pop it in the dishwasher now and then - it will come out as new. If you look what I believe is called the 'group head' - the place where you lock in the coffee holder (portafilter), you will see a metal filter, with a hex screw holding it in place. Remove the filter every couple of weeks as grounds can accumulate in the filter and restrict the flow. It only takes a minute to remove, clean and replace.

This machine is of excellent quality and very easy to use. Making a decent cup of coffee is very straightforward. As what I consider to be a premium brand manufacturer and one that Heston Blumental puts his name to, I need to mention the fact that this machine is manufactured in China. Hence 3 stars. Had I known that, I would have researched a little more and tried to find something that was made elsewhere. It's interesting that Breville/Sage has a Modern Slavery Policy but still chooses to manufacture in China. Very sad.

Owned a different brand espresso machine for a few years. Filter basket (double) was too small, the steam wand was awkward to use with a full size milk jug and the whole thing rattled - especially the water tank lid- very noisily. Finally came time to replace it and after some research came down to the Gaggia Classic, Rancilio Silvia or the Sage Duo Temp Pro. For various reasons, I went with the Duo Temp Pro and so far, I am extremely pleased. No more holding down the lid when starting the machine up! Beans Got good quality freshly roasted beans from a recommended internet coffee store. Grinds I freshly grind them before every coffee using my Krupps Burr grinder. Found the right dose and size grind for the Duo Temp Pro with the bean blend I am using at the moment. Took a few tries to get it right. Filter Basket Using the single walled double filter basket. I pour in the grounds, swipe across with my finger to get a flat surface then tamp with moderate pressure. Works for me. Extraction I get a nice steady consistent extraction. Not slowly dripping out our splashing and not too runny, and even extraction on both sides. Steam Love the steam wand. Direct the steam to the side to get a nice round swirling motion in the milk. Hold the jug until it gets a bit too hot to hold and it's ready to use.Far, far better than the one on the old machine. Once I got my routine sorted, we were drinking coffee that my wife (made her a Latte) thought was better than a coffee shop, and being a fussy double espresso drinker, I couldn't be happier. Unboxing, I found the unit itself to be of overall high quality, nicely put together and quite sturdy. I found a few nice extras like a good quality milk jug, dose trimming tool and set of four filter baskets along with a water filter cartridge (don't use pre filtered water as per the instructions) and a few cleaning bits and bobs including de-calcification tablets. I found the presentation and packaging of the items to be quite nice, which is a nice touch considering the asking price. Sweetens the deal a bit to see them having put of bit of care into it. In use, as advertised, the pre-infusion works well to allow water into the grinds for a few seconds before full extraction. I used to do this manually on the old machine so nice to see this done automatically. I make a point of Running some hot water through the empty basket before extraction. Dry the basket off and I'm ready to go. After extraction, I like to run some hot water through the group head (without filter) to help keep it clean for the next time. After steam, I wipe the wand straight away and run some steam though to clean it off before switching it off. All in all I am hoping this will keep my extractions consistent. I don't know about reliability yet, but if a get a few years out of it I'll be a very happy coffee drinker.