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- Versatile
- Makes good coffee
- As fully automatic as a filter machine gets
- Large worktop footprint
- Expensive
- Initially confusing settings
If the Melitta Aromaboy is the biblical David of filter coffee machines, then the brand’s AromaFresh II Therm Pro is German brand’s Goliath. It’s bigger, heftier and it’s also a lot more expensive – by a figure of around £245.
The AromaFresh Therm Pro is a bean-to-cup (or, if we’re being pedantic, a bean-to-jug) filter coffee machine. Thanks to its built-in ceramic burr grinder, it towers above most standard filter coffee machines. But size isn’t everything; is the AromaFresh Therm Pro’s lofty and intimidating stature – and its high price – matched by its performance
Melitta AromaFresh Therm Pro: What do you get for the money?
The AromaFresh Therm Pro costs £290 from Melitta’s website, although at the time of writing it was available for £90 less at Currys.
The machine is effectively made up of two adjoining columns: on the left-hand side, the larger of the two is the filter cone, which holds Melitta’s size-four filter papers, underneath a rather bulky ceramic burr grinder with a small coffee bean hopper on top.
On the right-hand side of the machine you have the control panel, made up of a series of hard buttons and a digital display, stacked on top of which is a removable eight-cup, one-litre water jug.
The whole thing measures 268 x 269 x 463mm (WDH) and weighs just under 4kg. It’s big. But with its matte black finish, it’s stylish in its own way. There’s no hot plate to keep your coffee warm, but it comes with an insulated stainless-steel jug that slots neatly underneath the filter to keep your brew warm. It also comes with a sample envelope of filter papers to get you started.
What’s it like to use?
The AromaFresh Therm Pro is, on the whole, very simple to use. Set up the machine with the requisite consumables – coffee beans, filter paper and water – program your desired strength settings and punch the “play button” – the machine will handle the rest, grinding the beans directly into the filter before starting the brew.
Grind size can be adjusted via a knob on the top of the bean hopper and the water tank can be removed for ease of filling. A plastic filter cone is housed in a compartment underneath the grinder that opens out satisfyingly on a hinge and can also be removed to make emptying and washing much easier.
All simple enough. What I found more confusing during my testing were the two programmable “Cup” and “Strength” settings – or more specifically, how these two settings work in conjunction with each other. According to the machine’s instruction manual, the Cup setting (a scale of two to eight, marked by a little cup icon) “is used to set the quantity of coffee beans to be ground”, while the Strength setting (a scale of nought to five marked by a little coffee bean icon) is used “to set the quantity of coffee beans being ground”.
I like to believe that I’m quite sensitive to nuances in the written word. But after reading through these instructions a few times, I still couldn’t tell how these two settings differed from each other in any way.
Contrary to what you might assume, the Cup setting has no bearing on how much water is used. Regardless of how full the water tank is, the machine will empty it completely during brewing, rather than adjusting water dosage to correspond to your programmed settings. Admittedly, this bit is explained clearly in the instruction manual, but I think you could be readily forgiven for assuming otherwise.
I eventually spent some time looking over the AromaFresh Therm Pro’s instruction manual with our ever-discerning Head of Reviews, Jonathan Bray and we arrived at the theory that, while the Cup setting adjusts the base level of coffee to be ground, the Strength setting fine tunes this amount within a range to deliver a stronger or more mellow cup. For instance, Cup level two might grind 6-12g of coffee, while the chosen Strength setting adjusts the exact amount within this range.
To verify this, I ground a whole lot of coffee and compared the weight of the ground coffee produced on various Cup and Strength settings. These tests seemed to confirm our theory. Programmed for three Cups at Strength level one, the machine ground for 7.5 seconds, delivering 20g of coffee, while at Strength level five (and at same Cup setting three again), it ran for ten seconds and delivered 26g of coffee.
At its lowest Cup setting (two) and Strength level one, it ground 14g of coffee in five seconds, and 19g in 7.5 seconds at Strength level five. And at a much higher Cup setting of six, it ground 37g of coffee (14 seconds) at Strength level one and 44g (19 seconds) at Strength level five, although the hopper did run out of beans just before this program was finished.
This suggests a decent degree of versatility, and you’ve got quite a lot of settings to tweak to find out what works best with your chosen coffee. I only wish Melitta was a bit more transparent about what each setting actually did, instead of forcing its customers to experiment and work it out for themselves.
What’s the coffee like?
I tested the AromaFresh II Therm Pro with a selection of coffee beans, including Origin’s San Fermin filter and Elsewhere Coffee’s Daydreamer roasts. Generally brewing around three to four cups at a time and sticking to a medium or medium-fine grind on the third or fourth strength setting, I was able to get some very nice results that brought out the nuanced flavours of the beans.
I normally brew coffee using a V60 pour-over dripper or the Clever Dripper, and I found that the AromaFresh Therm Pro was able to deliver similarly tasty and consistent results, even if there was occasional sediment left in the cup.
The AromaFresh Therm Pro is quite unique in its inclusion of a ceramic burr grinder. We’re used to seeing these types of grinders on bean-to-cup espresso machines but, among filter machines, it’s much less common. The grinder on the AromaFresh Therm Pro is a convenient addition if you regularly buy whole bean coffee, although you can also use pre-ground beans by setting the Strength setting to zero.
The lack of built-in scales might cause scepticism in some who feel that grinding based on a timer is not conducive to an accurate dose. However, I didn’t have any issues during testing and if you want more control, you can always weigh your beans first and then ensure the grinder munches through them all every brew.
Melitta recommends you only put as much coffee in the hopper as you need to brew your coffee, so as to avoid it going stale, which is sensible if you’re not going through beans at the same rate a coffee shop would. On one occasion, I hadn’t put enough beans in for my four cups and, rather than wasting time grinding thin air, the machine paused the process and alerted me to check the hopper and add some more beans before continuing.
I ground some coffee beans at the machine’s finest, medium and coarsest settings, and compared the results. To be honest, the variation and consistency was a little bit disappointing, and the finest grounds didn’t really look all that fine at all.
However, it’s perhaps important to bear in mind that espresso grind fineness is unnecessary for a filter coffee machine, and would make it taste bad anyway. For the purposes of this machine, the grinder is satisfactory – and the coffee I brewed with it is testament to this.
What could be improved?
Aside from the issues surrounding the confusing brew settings, which I have already discussed in depth, I have a few other comparatively minor qualms with the AromaFresh Therm Pro.
The first regards the size of the thing: compared to other filter machines it takes up a significant amount of worktop space. However, what I found more irritating when reviewing it was the way the filter slot opens out on a hinge to the left side of the machine.
The only available space I had in my kitchen to place the AromaFresh Therm Pro was against a wall, meaning this wouldn’t open out fully and I wasn’t able to remove the cone insert to clean it or put a new paper in and, instead, had to awkwardly tilt the whole machine every time I needed to access the filter.
Depending on the layout of your kitchen, you might not have this issue, but not being able to position it to the right of a wall or another appliance is restrictive and it would be more convenient and accessible if it simply slid out at the front.
And while I liked the steel coffee jug and found it kept coffee warm and poured mess-free, it does have a habit of trapping the last dregs of your brewed coffee. When you want to pour out the remainder of my jug, you need to tilt the thing upside down by more than 180 degrees, which feels rather awkward.
There is also the question of whether it’s worth having an integrated grinder on a filter coffee machine in the first place. You can probably spend much less money on a better grinder, pair it with a more affordable filter machine (or even a pour-over dripper) and get superior coffee.
Of course, you’re then sacrificing some of the convenience that the AromaFresh offers, as well as potentially even more worktop space, but it’s good to weigh up your options before making the investment.
Should you buy the Melitta AromaFresh Therm Pro?
The Melitta AromaFresh Therm Pro is a very well built machine that’s easy to use (once you’ve worked out exactly what those buttons do) and makes a nice cup of coffee with enough versatility that lets you play around with variables to suit the beans you’re brewing with.
I can’t deny the convenience of being able to brew a jug of good filter coffee from freshly ground beans with little more effort than a push of a button; that is, when you don’t forget to put the filter paper in, which I made the mistake of doing just once.
Most of the issues I had with the machine are insignificant in comparison to its advantages, but they do mean that there are some key caveats to bear in mind if you’re wondering whether the AromaFresh Therm Pro is for you. The first is the price: you’ve got to be quite seriously into filter coffee, or have money to burn, to spend £290 on this. For the average coffee consumer, a less advanced filter machine will do the job at a fraction of the price.
Melitta – a brand whose wheelhouse is filter coffee – has a lot of affordable alternatives, including the adorable Aromaboy (£45). And although it’s still a significant investment, one of our favourite filter machines – the Moccamaster KBG Select – can be picked up for around £230. I should add that you don’t get a grinder with either of these.
The second consideration is space: you don’t need a mansion to fit this in your kitchen, but it will gobble up a fair bit of real estate on your countertop. I tested the AromaFresh Therm Pro while sharing a kitchen with a flatmate who already had a filter coffee machine on the worktop, so it was inevitably a squeeze. If you have a small kitchen with limited worktop space, the AromaFresh Therm Pro might not be for you.
Caveats out of the way, I enjoyed using Melitta’s AromaFresh Therm Pro. If your coffee habits can justify the price and you have the space, it’s a good choice.
