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- Cheap
- Makes good espresso
- Easy to use
- No water filter
- Plasticky build
The accepted coffee wisdom is that you should always spend more on your grinder than your coffee machine – the De’Longhi Stilosa can make doing so more realistic. Start with freshly roasted beans, grind them well and you should get decent coffee out. Thing is, with good quality grinders starting around the £100 mark – and capable espresso machines often costing several times that – keen espresso drinkers can be looking at a hefty outlay.
The De’Longhi Stilosa, then, is something of a breath of fresh air. For your five £20 notes and handful of coins, you get a cute little espresso machine with a traditional stainless steel boiler, simple controls and astonishingly good performance for the money.
What do you get for the money?
Before you even consider buying the Stilosa, it’s essential that you check which model you are buying, as there are three which bear the Stilosa name and – if you’re not looking carefully – will seem identical to the untrained eye.
All three models retail around the £100 mark, but the features, and consequently their ability to brew espresso, vary significantly. Before you buy, you’ll need to check the part codes carefully, and I’ll explain the key differences below:
- Stilosa EC230: This is the model I recommend. It only comes in black, and has more plastic parts than the EC260 – the cup warmer and drip tray are plastic – but it comes with a proper metal steam wand, which is harder to use but creates far silkier milk froth than auto frothers often found on similarly-priced machines. You also get unpressurised single and double shot baskets which – as long as you’re using freshly roasted coffee and a good quality grinder – provide far better potential for great shots of espresso
- Stilosa EC235: This has the same manual steam wand as the EC230, but swaps the baskets for pressurised ones which work with the coarser, pre-ground coffee you’ll get from supermarkets – they also support ESE pods, if that’s your thing. In short, they will attempt to brew espresso out of anything, but the results will be questionable and they definitely won’t eke out the best flavour from good coffee
- Stilosa EC260: This model keeps the pressurised baskets from the EC235 but also swaps the manual steam wand for an auto frother or panarello wand: dunk it in the milk jug and it will froth milk with no technique required. The froth was bubbly and light in my tests, though, a far cry from the silky, creamy froth of EC230’s traditional steam wand. The only other difference is that the EC260 looks a little fancier than the other two thanks to a metal panel on the top of the machine and another shiny metal panel sitting on top of the drip tray
Were you able to see inside the machine, you might be surprised to find that the Stilosa has a proper stainless steel boiler. Where budget machines often opt for quick-heating thermoblocks, here De’Longhi has bucked the trend. Boilers have the advantage of providing better temperature stability and often provide better steaming power for frothing milk.
Flip up the top panel, and the plastic 1 litre water tank slides in and out easily. There’s no option to fit a water filter, however, so you’ll want to fill your tank from a water filter jug if you’re in a hard water area. Just next to the water tank, there’s a tiny storage compartment for keeping whichever basket you’re not currently using.
Like most budget priced machines, one thing the Stilosa lacks is a pressure relief valve – sometimes referred to as a three-way solenoid. This allows any residual pressure and water built-up in the portafilter after brewing to vent directly into the drip tray. Without one, the portafilter tends to drip steadily after you’ve pulled a shot, and if you grind too fine and choke the machine – to the point where the espresso slows to a drip or stops completely – the only way to release the built up pressure is to remove the portafilter. At that point, you will have the pleasure of experiencing ‘portafilter sneeze’, where the built-up pressure sends wet, sticky coffee flying out in every direction. My advice is to have a damp cloth at the ready and potentially wear an apron while dialling in new coffee beans.
What’s it like to use?
The controls on the Stilosa are wonderfully simple. A rocker button on the machine’s right-hand flank switches the machine on and off; a big knurled plastic dial on the front of the machine switches between espresso, steam and hot water; and a little lever on the right-hand side opens the steam wand valve to deliver hot water or steam, depending on which position you have the front dial set to. If you’re even vaguely familiar with espresso machines, you can probably get brewing without spending any time reading the manual.
Despite the proper boiler, and the awful instructions (which I’ll complain about shortly), it’s easy to get to grips with the Stilosa. It takes around a minute to heat up from cold, with a little green OK light pinging on when it’s up to temperature. Leave it for another 5 minutes or so, and the top panel on top does warm up enough to take the chill off your espresso cups. They will, however, need to be espresso cups – full-sized ones are very unlikely to fit.
Flick the dial over to steam, and again you’ll have to wait around while the boiler gets the temperature up to par. That done, there’s actually a reasonable amount of steaming power considering the Stilosa’s price. It’s not going to blow your socks off, but as long as you don’t attempt to steam huge jugs of milk, it should do fine. In my testing, it steamed 180ml of milk to 65℃ in around 1min 25secs. Better still, with a bit of practice, it easily transformed that cold milk into a wonderfully silken, creamy microfoam.
What’s the coffee like?
I used the double basket for my testing, and it’s worth mentioning that this is by no means a large basket. I settled on around 15g of coffee as a sensible dosage, and the results were actually really impressive. I dialled in the same grind size that I was using on a range of far, far pricier machines with much larger 54mm and 58mm portafilters – so, very fine, in other words – and the Stilosa brewed some lovely cups of espresso. The light medium roast beans I was using needed a slightly longer shot ratio to avoid sourness, so with 15g going in, I settled on brewing around 35g of espresso in around 25 seconds.
Side by side with coffee machines that retail at 5-to-10 times the price, the Stilosa held its own. There was perhaps a little less body in the cup, and the balance of tart fruit and sweetness was a little less pronounced, but then this wasn’t a blind test. Ultimately, if you feed it freshly roasted, freshly ground coffee – and you have a good grinder – the Stilosa pours a very good espresso. I used a Baratza Vario W+ (£400) for some of the testing, but if anything I’d say my cheaper KINGrinder K6 hand grinder (£99) served up the marginally crisper, fruitier shots of the two.
Learning to get a perfect microfoam on your steamed milk is something which takes time. I’m still not a consistent winner in this regard (you’d think that practice makes perfect, too), but the Stilosa’s limited steaming power means that it’s actually a little easier to manage. After one failed attempt, the result was beautifully creamy-looking flat whites and cappuccinos.
What could be better?
If you were hoping for a helpful manual to get you started, then abandon that hope: it’s not so much a case of reading the manual as deciphering it. In the interest of bridging the language gap (or if you’re more cynically-minded: avoiding incurring costs for drafting and translating a genuinely informative instruction manual into multiple languages), the manual is entirely composed of pictures and diagrams. It’s nowhere near as useful as a simple step by step written guide, and there’s no attempt made to help users understand how to improve or troubleshoot poor quality brews. De’Longhi could do much better here. Thank goodness for YouTube tutorials.
Other complaints about a £100 espresso machine brings to mind a phrase involving gifts and horses, but there is room for improvement. One thing I’d like is a better tamper – the combined scoop and tamper which comes with these cheap De’Longhi machines is an abomination. It works, after a fashion, but it’s horrible to use. My advice: spend a few quid on a nice heavy bottomed metal tamper straight away.
The lack of an option for a water filter isn’t surprising either at the price, but anyone in a hard water area will want to budget for a decent water filter jug, some good quality descaling solution and ensure that they keep on top of regular cleaning.
One more practical complaint is that there isn’t much room between the portafilter’s spouts and the top of the drip tray. With around 90mm of clearance, you’re limited to little espresso cups, or wide, squat cappuccino cups. If you’re serious enough about espresso to want to add a pair of scales underneath, then it starts to feel very, very cramped. And if you want to brew into a mug, then you’ll definitely have to remove the little drip tray. My usual test receptacle – the 115mm-tall Bodum Pavina glass cup, just a tad taller than an average mug – only just slotted in with a bit of care. Thankfully, there’s a chunky lip around the bottom tray, so any drips from the cup or are easy to wipe up.
Should you buy the De’Longhi Stilosa?
If you’re looking for the cheapest possible machine that can make great espresso, flat whites and cappuccinos, then you’ve found it. The De’Longhi Stilosa is a little superstar. Buy yourself a brilliant quality hand grinder like the KINGrinder K6 (£99) and a nice heavy 51mm tamper for about a tenner, and you’ll be able to wean yourself off even the most expensive coffee shop habit for well under £250.
There is a but, however. If this is your first foray into manual espresso, then be warned: the slide into full blown obsession is sudden and unexpected. Once you realise the kind of black magic you can summon forth with a £100 machine, you’ll start to wonder what a £500 machine will do. And then you’ll wonder if doubling that again might help. My advice? Hide the credit card while you still can.
