Gaggia RI8323/01 Gran Style Coffee Machine, 950 W, 15 Bar, Black

Product Information

The prestige version also has options for an extra large cappuccino and an extra large latte macchiato. It's quite unusual to have a one touch bean to cup coffee machine with a café au lait selection, although whether the café au lait this machine delivers will be what you are expecting, depends on what you're expecting, of course ;-). As with the flat white, if you ask a dozen baristas to describe exactly what this beverage is, you'll get a dozen different answers.

You can pull a double shot with the Besana, but only by pressing the button twice. With the Naviglio, you can set it to pull a double shot. It doesn't do it by grinding double the amount of coffee and then pulling the shot in one, it grinds and pulls a single shot and then does it again, so not really a huge amount of difference to using the Besana really in this regard, it's just that you don't have to press the button twice. There's not a great deal to say here, this is simply the carafe version of the Magenta. The features are the same as the slightly cheaper “milk” version, above, the only difference is that the milk goes in the carafe which slots onto the machine, and the frothing is handled in the carafe, so it looks a bit neater than with the cappuccinatore version, that's about it. Usually, if I'm using a bean to cup machine for review purposes, I'll pull off the Panarello and use the steam pipe underneath as a pro steam wand, which is fine, it's doable with some practice, but it's not quite as good as using a proper steam wand, and you don't usually quite have the length you need to get into the milk jug, so it can be a bit of a faff doing it that way. So, this would be the bean to cup machine I'd go for if I wanted to go down this route. This machine has a lot more going for it than this single feature, but to have a pro wand on a bean to cup coffee machine is almost unheard of, so this is what makes this machine particularly special.

Price comparison

In a nutshell, I'd say that this is a machine which has a similar compact footprint to the Brera and the Naviglio, but while bringing more in terms of features, with more grind settings & more strength settings. It has a bigger water tank than most, and a bigger waste coffee drawer capacity than most of the others too – which means filling the water tank and emptying the waste coffee container less.

This machine actually comes with a milk container, too, so it's not actually a great deal different from the prestige version really, the only real difference is that the milk sits next to the machine and is drawn up via the pipe, rather than this all being done in one self-contained unit. As I said in my best bean to cup coffee machines post, if I were going to use a bean to cup coffee machine, it would probably be the Gaggia Magenta Plus, mainly due to the pro steam wand. Very simple memory option – you're asked every time you make a change if you'd like to save the changes to that coffee Using a ristretto for milkies does change the taste, so having a ristretto option is a great thing, in my opinion, when it comes to allowing people to tune in their perfect milkies. This is actually a really clever feature that Gaggia don't talk that much about in a lot of their blurb. The Gaggia bean to cup machines have an inbuilt mechanism that allows them to detect the pressure required to auto tamp the coffee prior to pulling the shot, and the machines learn from this and apply this to the next shot.Firstly, most bean to cup machine users aren't going to do much with the grind settings anyway, I know from speaking to people who use bean to cup coffee machines that most people just leave it at whatever it was factory set to, and never change it. This is an interesting option, by the way, it's not all that common to find a bean to cup machine with a ristretto option. A ristretto, in case you weren't aware, is a more concentrated shot, with a higher ratio of coffee to water than a standard espresso.