Jalen Sigh Tech

Verdict

Part of a new breed of bean-to-cups that show you a visual drinks menu and step-by-step functions, the Philips Series 5500 LatteGo Bean to Cup Coffee Machine has rightly earned a reputation for being simple to use. In doing so, it brings together the spirit of pricier bean-to-cups with relative affordability, resulting in a machine that should suit a variety of tastes and budgets.

Where it can fall down is coffee customisation. Alongside colour-coded profiles there are plenty of options to modify your favourite drinks but each new combination overwrites the last.

Introduction

Fresh from the school of ‘show, don’t tell’ comes the Philips Series 5500 LatteGo Bean to Cup Coffee Machine.

Even when it’s off, you can browse its menu of the most popular drinks as colour images, so finding a cappuccino on a sleepy morning means you might not even have to pop your specs on first. They’re combined with a removable milk frother – the LatteGo – for fuss-free milky drinks, as well as more drinks in an additional menu.

These include iced versions, frothed milk and a 360ml ‘travel mug’ size: making it great for a busy household and those who like a caffeine boost in the warmer months.

Design and Features

• Named, pictured drink buttons
• 1.8-litre water tank
• Touchscreen buttons

Some coffee machines have chosen to swap multiple buttons and dials for a sleek appearance, especially when off, but Philips’s Series 5500 LatteGo Bean to Cup Coffee Machine bucks that trend. Its control panel is a riot of 17 touchscreen buttons surrounding a display (which isn’t a touchscreen), making it look busy whether on or off.

While the effect is disconcerting, there’s logic to it, with the drinks options at the top (excluding the More Drinks button), and separate buttons for toggling settings, cleaning and profiles. Its profiles are basic: rather than being able to name yours, you’ll need to pick one of four colours.

When that profile is selected, it’ll save whatever combination you pick for a drink when you make it. The downside is that if you switch your espresso between beans and ground coffee, or sometimes prefer more milk in your latte, you’ll always be overwriting what was saved to your profile before.

The machine itself is fairly compact for this style – it’s a mere 24cm tall, so can scoot under wall cabinets, and not especially wide or deep.

For all that, it still manages to tuck in a 275g bean hopper, ground chute, and 1.8-litre water tank – although curiously, the tank has no lid. This means that when you slide it back into the machine, water has a tendency to slosh around.

The tank has an optional filter, which takes up capacity, though I found this didn’t impact refilling too much. Where it could do with more capacity is the LatteGo milk frother: at just 260ml, it’ll do two or three milky drinks but it needs refilling more frequently than many removable milk carafes. As a plus, it’s compatible with plant milk, though there’s no separate setting for them, and its parts are dishwasher safe.

Performance

• Froths plant milks as well as dairy
• Automatic milk cleaning
• Can be noisy

For a coffee machine that appears to be designed with simplicity in mind, the fact that it only comes with illustrated instructions, and a QR code to download the full version, is perplexing. Admittedly, you could probably use the Series 5500 without any instructions, such is the straightforwardness, but instructions can still be handy, particularly for more advanced features.

The other aspect that sticks out is its Quiet Mark certification. According to the manufacturer, the Series 5500 makes 40% less noise than earlier models and has ‘sound shielding’ to minimise noise. However, during testing, while it wasn’t waking up the whole house, I didn’t find it to be especially quiet, particularly when grinding and brewing. My own coffee machine is quieter, whereas with the Series 5500, I would struggle to make a sneaky solo brew.

This isn’t to say there isn’t much to love about the Series 5500 – there is. I liked that there were 20 standard drinks to choose from, which is more than most bean-to-cups, and that each one could be easily altered in strength, volume and milk volume.

It’s also simple to choose ground coffee as it’s an option each time you make a drink, and that the brewing system has been calibrated so that choosing an iced coffee isn’t just a case of it dispensing the same recipe over ice: it’s been tweaked to suit the format.

Another plus, if you care to dig through the settings menu, is that there are several eco options: these include shortening standby time to 15 minutes, turning off the cup lights, dimming the display, lowering the beverage temperature, and choosing not to have start-up rinsing. In an ideal world, the central display would also be a touchscreen – I found scrolling through the various menus using up and down, ok and back buttons more complicated than it needed to be.

The basic profile system has appeal – there’s no fiddling about with settings to save your favourites, it happens automatically each time you make a drink.

At the same time, it’s prone to accidentally saving over your preferences. For example, if you save your favourite combination for a latte to the red profile, and the next person who uses it forgets to change the red profile for the blue profile, your preferences for the same drink are replaced. Being able to name a profile could help prevent that.

Overall, the Series 5500 made good coffee: while the crema on an espresso wasn’t as thick and syrupy as my usual machine, it had plenty of aroma and flavour. One possible reason for the crema being thin is that the spout doesn’t drop low enough to a small cup, so there was more distance to travel.

Longer coffees tended to have a slight bitter edge to them: something that’s possible to resolve by choosing the ‘extra shot’ option, but this wasn’t an issue using the same beans in my machine. In addition, extra shot isn’t an option when brewing with pre-ground coffee, so if you’re using that for a long drink, you’ll have to live with the slight bitterness.

What did impress was the frothing: both dairy and plant-based milks were perfectly foamed for cappuccinos and lattes, plus there’s an option to rinse the LatteGo in-situ.

The carafe is mounted up quite high on the machine, but it didn’t splash, or miss the cup and make mess. I liked that it split apart for cleaning, meaning that it can have a thorough wash when required.

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