Here we take a look at the Isomac Tea Due espresso machine. It's a machine we love and highly recommend that fits perfectly into a coffee lovers home or office. It's extremely well built and comes with some great features.
Video Transcript:
G’day Luke here from Artisti Coffee Roasters. Today we're doing a review on the Isomac Tea Due coffee machine. It's a very popular model that we sell in store here and it's a really good machine that's an upgrade from your standard sort of coffee machine that you might get from a appliance store. Why would you spend the money on a full stainless steel, style, Italian made coffee machine? Well the build quality on these things is amazing. They allow you to rebuild these machines, they're very easy to service, they're using commercial parts as well and it's going to last you ten or so years. At that point if you need to rebuild the machine you can. The parts are available, they're all interchangeable and it's great for that serviceability. These machines will make
you a much better cup of coffee, the heat stability from the heads, the amount of steam pressure that you're going to get, the bigger water tanks; all of these
combined allowing you a much better coffee experience at home or in the office. The Tea comes with a 1.2 litre boiler and it allows you to use hot water tap for your long blacks or having tea on tap inside your kitchen is always a good advantage and then it allows you to have a really good amount of steam as well. So the steam is delivered with a variable controller so you can have a little bit of steam and increase that up if you want to. We do find some people with this kind of pressure find it a little bit full on when they're trying to froth
milk to start. So a good little hack we do is we put a toothpick in and just
snap that off and then we'll reduce one of the holes and that will allow you to
really control your milk and when you need to get rid of that toothpick, the cool thing is about it is very easy to unscrew the tip and you can just poke it
out backwards and also this now reveals that it is actually a cool touch steam
wand as well. So when you're using the machine you can get the steam out and it's nice and cool you're not going to burn yourself on those. Really easy to
keep it nice and clean as well because you can remove that for when you're
making you know coffees day in and day out.
The Isomac comes with two options for water filters you've got your single handle and your double spout handle as well and these are a standard 58mm so you can get a commercial-grade tamper if you want to upgrade from the plastic ones that they provide you with. I probably recommend looking at a stainless steel back wash basket they give you a little rubber one which is you know okay to get you started but to get a better clean you'd get a blind basket and pop it in and use that for a commercial clean. The Isomac has an E61 group head. The E61 is an industry standard head. It's in a lot of commercial machines. What it actually does is keep a continual flow of hot water through the actual head giving a nice temperature stability. What's been added to this which is really cool is you've actually got a pressure gauge and that's going to show you the pressure of what's actually happening inside this handle when you're extracting coffee. To extract coffee it's really quite easy. We've got three options on the lever on the side. All the way up is going to provide us the actual water pressure from the vibrator pump. We go half way that's going to give us the pressure that's inside the head so you could use that as a bit of a pre-infusion or a soak on your coffee and that'll still show you the pressure on
the gage up here. And then if you go all the way down it is an exhaust so that's
removing the pressure that's left over after you've extracted your coffee and
popping it down into your waste tray. You've got a couple of really easy
gauges to tell you what's happening with the coffee machine while you're using it. The first one over here is for our steam, it should be sitting around the 1.2 bar pressure. As you remove steam this is going to reduce a little bit but you'll see as soon as you've stopped that the elements going to kick back in and build that steam pressure up and you can always hear that tiny little bit of hiss coming from a machine. That is your anti vac valve, that's making sure that the machines are not going to blow up, so it is always continually releasing that
little bit of steam. So don't worry when you're hearing that. On the other
side we've got the pump gauge. So once you've got your handle and you've put
some coffee in there it's going to have resistance and that gauge is going to
ramp up to 9 bar of pressure and that's going to give you a much richer more
solid extraction with your coffee. If you find you're not getting that you'd need
to change your grind essentially to make sure you're getting that pressure. But the machine's going to give you that 9 bar. It's got a 3 litre water tank and it's really easy for you to fill up the Isomac Tea. We've got a cup tray here which will keep your coffee cups nice and hot. It's quite easy just to remove the two hoses there and you can pull the tank out. You can fill it up with your tap. Filtered water is definitely the way to go with any of these. You want to look after the inside of these machines. When it’s filled pop it back in and there's a pressure switch in there as well. Once there's no water that pressure switch will deactivate and stop your machine from over boiling so it's a good safety
feature that we love about the machines. Pop your hoses back in. On goes the top and you're ready again to make more coffee. You've got a couple of lights on the front of the machine. Obviously your main power. There's another red light on the other side and that's going to tell you when the actual water tank is empty so I'll just demonstrate that for you now. You can see the red lights on there's no water in the tank. Fill it back up, pop it on and the pressure switch activates and the light will turn off. Then it’s ready to heat again for another coffee. The boiler in the Isomac is the 1.2 litre boiler and has a heat exchanger for the water that's coming through the head and that simply means we've got one point two liters of boiling water and steam and a tube that allows the water to flow from the pump straight through and come out the head. So that's quite a standard in the industry. The 1.2 litres allows a smaller element to be used which is only 1,400 watts. Some feedback we've had from people that might be on batteries or solar, they love the fact that it's very energy-efficient. One of the other really cool things which gets underrated a little bit in coffee machines is you can make lots of coffee you can make a fair bit of mess. But where are you going to catch all of that waste? The Isomac has an amazing size drip tray. It really can hold a lot of water and just sliding it back in and you're ready to go again. Some of the machines out in the market do have a
very small drip tray and it can be quite challenging to make a couple of coffees
at a time so that's definitely a winner for me.
All in all at a price point this is a great little machine. It's going to last you a long time, make beautiful steam or your cappuccinos, flat whites, lattes if you love your black coffee. When you're looking at your pressure here in the head it's going to give you that flexibility to play with a couple of really cool coffees. We're really happy with it. We love the machines and yeah we hope that you enjoyed the review. So if you've got any questions shoot us a comment hit
the like button and make sure you subscribe to our Channel. Catch you next
time.
