Profitec DRIVE Espresso Machine

Yna excelente máquina!

This was my first espresso machine purchase. I did a decent amount of research ahead of the purchase and spent a lot of time discussing with the team at Clive to learn even more. I am really enjoying this machine and learning to make great coffee. We went for this model to have the ability to pull back-to-back shots as well as steam multiple drinks in a row. For our household this machine has been working great and we love it. I also really like that this machine has plumb options for drain and water supply. You won't be sad with this machine and how great it looks in the kitchen (not to mention the good coffee!).

This review is for the Profitec Drive, not the Pro 700. I am pretty disappointed with Clive for aggregating the reviews. I know the Drive is the 700's spiritual successor, but Clive is doing a disservice to their customers by combining the two machines' reviews. I'll try to be fairly comprehensive since there's not a ton of reviews out there for this machine given how new it is. The Profitec Drive is a phenomenal machine. The first thing you notice is the absolutely impeccable build quality. I'm coming from a Profitec Pro 300 so I was expecting high quality, but even I was blown away by just how well made this machine is. There's not much to say about the E61 group. It's tried and true and looks classic. The obvious downside is long heat up times to achieve temp stability in the grouphead. I don't use the fast heating feature because I'm worried about increased wear and tear and potentially worse scaling from the increased heat. The E61 heat up time is a non issue for me because it's easy to set auto on times for every day of the week. In fact, you can set 2 auto on and off times for each day of the week. The big new features that the Drive brings are the included flow control and the improved PID display. The flow control device is the same that Profitec sells for installation on other E61 machines. It uses the "ball" style knob that has just under 2 full rotations of movement (though 1/14 is the "standard" flow rate, anything past that isn't really useful). I think I would prefer the paddle style of other FCDs, but I don't have any major complaints about this knob. Once you get familiar with the various positions for your profiles it is easy to use. I drink almost exclusively light roast coffees, and the ability to slow down the flow has allowed me to transition from drinking mostly milk drinks to also having straight espresso in the afternoon. There is also a built in pre infusion function. You can set a time for both "active" pre infusion which kicks on the pump for however long you set it to and "passive" pre infusion where the pump is off and there's either no flow into the puck (if using a reservoir) or line pressure (if plumbed in). The improved display is a major step up from the old seven segment display style PIDs. No more guessing what setting you're changing. My only complaint with the display and interface is that there's only two buttons so you still have to deal with the setting page timing out if you're too slow. Otherwise, the display is easy to read and the symbols used to describe the various features are clear. There's a couple of shortcuts, as well. Hold the down arrow for a few seconds to put the machine into eco mode manually (essentially turns the machine off but the main power button is still on so you can use the auto on timer), hold the up arrow to turn pre infusion on/off, and just press the up arrow to turn the steam boiler on/off. I'm a big fan of the joystick style steam and hot water controls. Steam pressure is fantastic. With the default steam boiler temp the machine sits at about 1.7 bars of steam pressure and can easily steam multiple drinks back to back without an issue. The steam temperature can be easily adjust if you want a bit more pressure, but I don't think it's needed. So to sum up, if you are in the market for a dual boiler, rotary pump machine with flow control and pre infusion, you absolutely can't go wrong with the Drive.