Especially with light roast coffees, I found that early on with the xBloom, using the default recipe that came with the app, the coffee ended up a bit acidic and thin, and the coffee wasn’t extracted fully.
Could the initially under-extracted coffee be due to Philadelphia’s semi-hard tap water? Probably.
Either way, I swapped out my xBloom’s household filters for thicker Kalita filters, slowed down my pour speed, and deviated significantly from the app’s recommended recipes — I paused longer between pours, ground my beans more finely, and finally got the hang of it, and the results were great.
But you might not want to spend days or weeks trial and error finding the ideal formula. xBloom offers a shortcut in the form of its roast-to-order xPods ($13 to $24 for eight), which are often available by mail from some of coffee’s most popular third-wave roasters. The compostable pods come with RFID recipe cards that are pre-programmed and theoretically optimized for each bean. Just swipe the card and press a button.
Results, like life, vary from roaster to roaster. Indian-American coffee roaster Kaveri’s single-origin bean recipe was nicely tweaked, resulting in a cup packed with chocolate and citrus. Not so with NBA player Jimmy Butler III’s Bigface coffee brand, whose recipe appears to have been left on the machine’s default coarse grind, resulting in a sour, severely under-extracted coffee.
Still brewing
Pods are also pricey, costing around $1.60 to $3 each, which makes this option most appealing to people with more money than time, or businesses looking to outfit their break rooms with an impressive drip coffee machine.
The people who will be most excited about xBloom are people who love technology. xBloom Studio is just cool. It’s new and interesting and fun to play with. And once you know how to use it, the machine will give you delicious coffee.
For gamers and optimization obsessives, the xBloom Studio offers an endless number of variables to toggle in the pursuit of precise, repeatable drip coffee brews. It’s a robot that does almost anything at the touch of a button, without the distractions of getting bleary-eyed and foggy from the grind of facing another day.
As with any new technology, expect some glitches. The same inputs won’t always produce the same results. Sometimes the grinder will pile most of the beans to one side of the dripper, but the machine will continue pouring water as if nothing had happened. Other confounding factors include altitude, water hardness, and the freshness of the coffee.
The machine also suffered some initial glitches after its launch in June 2024, including a “wait” error caused by the device’s overflow prevention algorithm, but this was largely resolved through successive firmware updates. One dripper arm cracked during extraction, so it was quickly replaced with an updated version.
So the dream of a perfect cup every time is still a long way from reality, but it’s tantalizingly close.