Coffee lovers read on.  The Jura Z6 is a powerful little package that is like having a barista in your home or office – it even cleans itself and can take orders from across the room!

Cost: $3790

I am sure you’re reading that price above and thinking “wait what” but let me talk you through it.

To date the home coffee machines I have experienced make anything from below average to okay coffee – some make it okay okay and others are the “hey that’s not bad” kind, but if you are after the really really good stuff you need to get out of the house and get one made by a professional barista (beard and tatts optional) whose probably surrounded by marble or waxed wood bench tops, polished concrete floors and subway tiled walls.  And, probably, you’d be standing in Melbourne enjoying this top brew (because let’s face it Melbourne is where it’s at in the world when it comes to good coffee).

Now I am not promising that the Jura is actually as good as Melbourne’s very best barista – but, with the Jura Z6 you can finesse your coffee making (literally by degrees and millilitres) via an app on your phone (!) until you find your favourite combo – combine that with fresh milk and good beans… and actually this machine can make the best homemade coffee I’ve ever tasted – even better than the local cafe.  And like everything Swiss, it is incredibly consistent (unlike the local cafe) and efficient.

For this review I decided that I needed some help (plus it’s always fun to share) – so I enlisted my colleagues at my day-job for five weeks of taste testing.  The team embraced this review with great enthusiasm.  And when we packed it up after the trial to send back to Jura.. well it was a very sad day (and productivity took a real hit as we suffered some caffeine withdrawals and also had to make a trek to the cafe and join that queue again, with our fingers crossed the good barista was behind the machine).

So what do you need to know:

• The machine cleans itself.  15 minutes after the last use it runs a cleaning cycle and then shuts down (it also runs a 10 second clean when you first turn it on again).  Every day it prompts you to do a milk clean (if you use milk) and this is a matter of hooking up a little container and then hitting start – it takes about 2 minutes total.
• Filling up water and coffee beans is super easy – the beans just get added at the top (and in our case at work we were churning through them at an alarming rate – but it was interesting to experience different beans and just how dramatically different they tasted).  The water sits in a side tank which is easily popped off so you can fill it at the sink.
• The drip tray slides out to also reveal the container that captures the used ground coffee – and the machine actually tells you when it’s full.
• You can download an app which allows you to further program how your coffee is made – and you order it through the app!  (You do need to have the cup in place, but in the early days there was some fun had by a certain “appy” colleague who took orders from his desk – the virtual barista.)
• From the control panel on the machine itself, you can make quite a few different coffees – I stuck with flat whites but the rest of the office quite enjoyed trying a few different styles, the Latte Machiatto looked very cool and was a favourite!

I asked the two biggest coffee snobs (I mean aficionados) in the office for some feedback (it’s probably fair to say that they also got the most joy out of the machine too) and this is what they said:

The Jura Z6 coffee machine is capable of producing high-quality coffee at the push of a button. It was near-perfect for the office setting we used it in, displaying all the class and consistency of Jura’s (fellow) Swiss ambassador Roger Federer.

The coffee is good.  It’s great being able to customise coffees for different people.

I did a quick little estimation of roughly how many coffee’s we consumed during our trial of the machine (and we had it 5 weeks total and I only included weekdays).  Give or take 10-15 coffees would be consumed on any work day, so 25 work days x 12.5 = about 313 coffees… let’s say if we were to buy them at the cafe at $3.80, that’s an expenditure of $1,188… so very quickly this little machine would pay for itself, and (hint hint bosses) whilst it’s great to get out of the office for a walk – the queue at the cafe does use up time we could be doing other things.

The Jura Z6 isn’t just for small offices – it’s also perfect for the home.. when my kids were babies I lived for my daily adventure to the local cafe – but these days the struggle to juggle everyone’s schedules is real and a trip to a cafe is a rare treat… most of my coffee is consumed as I run to the station.  I do have a pod machine at home but it’s gathering dust as I’d rather go without than drink what it makes (it’s okay for a summer iced coffee and that’s about it).

For more specifications and some pretty snappy videos of the machine in action head to Jura’s website here.

Commercial disclaimer: I was provided with the Jura Z6 free of charge for 5 weeks to test – all opinions are my own (or my colleagues).