Review: Cafflano All-in-One Coffee Maker

If there's one thing we do a lot of working for the Coffee Magazine, it's travel. And when we travel, coffee is essential. Sometimes, there are places and spaces where quality coffee is just not an option - like riding with low cost airlines, remote wilderness travel and a few AIRBNB spots with great locations but not great coffee brewing appliances in-house.

We have an array of devices that we use to overcome this frequent conundrum, and the most recent and exciting one for us is the Cafflano Klassic, all-in-one coffee maker.

The things we love about it - It's compact and all the pieces fit neatly into each other.  It is cased in a lock-tight plastic moulded, very robust body. But it's light too. Easy to store in a backpack or in your travel luggage without the fear of it breaking.

Next, it has all the parts you need: Flask, pouring spout, filter and conical burr-grinder. So essentially, like a good coffee traveller, all you need is your beans and hot water.

The most important of these are the filter and grinder. 



The filter is a steel, very fine mesh filter. This is nice because you don't need to fiddle with any filter papers and it's easy to rinse afterwards. The extraction is quite sensitive to grind size, but perfectly acceptable. This brings us to the grinder. The burs are ceramic, conical burrs similar to most good quality hand grinders and the adjustments are easy to make. This grinder can go to a very fine grind, but we found optimum flavour was extracted at a fairly course grind. Obviously this is up to your taste preference, but we found the sweet florals and brightness of the Cup of Excellence coffees we were using were more pronounced at a medium to medium course grind, largely due to the very fine mesh of the filter. Bottom line is there's lots of scope for versatility according to how you like it! 

Finally, and this may sound fringe, but it really is a clincher for us,  is the hot water pouring spout built into the unit. Our traveling companions often borrowed this part of the Cafflano after they'd slopped hot water into their crotch for the umpteenth time, while trying to pout hot water from a hotel tea cup into their grounds.