De’Longhi Latissima+ Nespresso review

While delivering a shot of espresso or a lungo cup of coffee is pretty much par for the course; getting the right combination of milk, coffee and froth for a cappuccino or latte macchiato is a bit more challenging. Ultimately, if you want a variation of coffee with milk, we found the results were far better when we dispensed the coffee and milk separately.

Getting enough steam for decent froth is often a challenge for small, countertop coffee machines, but the system employed by the Latissima+ works very well indeed. On top of the milk container is an analogue dial, which determines how frothy you want the milk, making it equally adept at both lattes and cappuccinos.

Even when doing things manually, there’s still a degree of automation though. The whole machine is designed to deliver your drink in one go, so the milk is pumped straight from the 0.35L container, through a spout and into your cup.

That means that you can’t easily customise your drink – there’s no spooning out just froth if you want a dry cappuccino, for example. The advantage of the Latissima+ system is that you can serve milk-based drinks far quicker than you could with the Aeroccino system on other Nespresso machines, which froths the milk in a separate container for you to add manually to your coffee.

There’s a cleaning button on the milk container, which should be used regularly to ensure that the steam system doesn’t get clogged up with dried milk. In fact, we’ve used a Latissima+ for an extended period and found that the steam system is prone to clogging, and can result in the milk steamer refusing to work at all. So you definitely want to run the cleaning programme every day.

We were disappointed with the coffee delivered by the Latissima+. The volume seemed somewhat short in both espresso and lungo variants, with a dark brown crema that hinted at the bitter taste that awaits.

You can manually increase the volume, which improves the taste slightly, but there’s no getting away from that bitterness, no matter what flavour capsule you use. Put simply, every flavour of coffee tasted infinitely better out of other Nespresso machines that we’ve tested.

Not only is the coffee excessively bitter when it reaches the cup, it’s also not particularly hot. The best that the Latissima+ could manage was 55 degrees, which is a little cold for espresso.

On paper the Latissima+ looks like a great countertop Nespresso machine, but unfortunately it disappoints in some key areas. The coffee it produces simply isn’t as good as other machines like the U&Milk, while the inconsistent volume is also annoying.

Many will find the one-touch operation an attractive feature, but it’s a shame that it comes at the expense of fully manual coffee preparation. If your heart is set on a Nespresso machine that can handle a variety of drinks, we’d recommend that you save yourself £70 and go for the U&Milk instead.