In particular, for light roast coffees, our first attempts with xBloom came out a bit acidic and thin when using the default recipes that came with the app, a sign that the coffee wasn’t being extracted well enough.
Could it be that our initial coffee was not well extracted due to Philadelphia’s semi-hard tap water? Maybe.
Either way, we slowed down the discharge by switching from xBloom’s house filters to thick paper filters. Kalita filtersand they also deviated drastically from the recipes suggested by the app. We increased the pause times for each pour and ground the beans much finer. Once we finally figured it out, the results were admirable.
But let’s say you don’t want to spend days or weeks trying to figure out your ideal formula. The xBloom offers a shortcut in the form of on-demand roasting. xPods ($13 to $24 for eight) Available by mail order, often from some of the more modern third wave coffee roasters, your compostable capsules will arrive with an RFID recipe card, pre-programmed and theoretically optimized for each bean. Simply swipe the card and then press the button.
Results will vary by roaster, just like in real life. A recipe for a single-origin coffee bean from an Indian-American coffee roaster Kaveri It was perfectly brewed, resulting in a cup bursting with chocolate and citrus. Not so for NBA player Jimmy Butler III. Big face Coffee brand. That recipe, apparently left on the machine’s default coarse grind, resulted in a sour and woefully under-extracted coffee.
Still in the making
Pods are also expensive, ranging from $1.60 to $3 each. This makes this option more attractive to people with less time than money or to businesses that want an impressive pour-over device in their break room.
We hope that the people who will be most excited about the xBloom are those who love the technology itself. The xBloom Studio is simply brilliant. It’s new and interesting and fun to play with. And once you get the hang of it, the machine rewards you with delicious coffee.
Photography: xBloom
For gamers or obsessive optimizers, xBloom Studio offers endless variables to toggle in the pursuit of a precise, repeatable pour. It’s a bot that will do almost all the work for you at the push of a button, and you’ll never be distracted by red, bleary eyes from the struggle of facing yet another day.
As with any new technology, some hiccups are to be expected: the same inputs don’t always yield the same results. Sometimes the grinder piles up most of the grounds on one side of the dripper and the machine happily pours water as if this weren’t happening. Other variables that can cause confusion include altitude, water hardness, and coffee freshness.
The machine also had some initial glitches after its launch in June 2024, including a “wait” error caused by the device’s overflow protection algorithm; this has been largely resolved by successive firmware updates. A drip arm also cracked during brewing and was quickly replaced with an updated version.
That is to say, the dream of the always perfect cup has not yet arrived, but it is close enough to be tempting.