Ninja’s AutoBarista is impressively versatile, but one feature was a dealbreaker for me

I’ve made about a dozen different kinds of coffee drinks with the Ninja AutoBarista, and I have absolutely no idea what sort of grind size, tamping pressure, water temperature, or extraction timing is necessary to pull espresso shots for any of those drinks. The AutoBarista takes care of these considerations for you, making it possible to brew 13 different drinks with just the press of a button.

The AutoBarista seeks to create the experience of having a coffee shop inside of your home, but without having to master the complicated, time-consuming nuances of making perfect espresso. It makes drip coffee and espresso-and-milk drinks, like cappuccinos or flat white. The fully automatic espresso machine can even make a pretty fast cold brew or cold-pressed espresso (just add ice, or else it’s more like lukewarm brew).

The AutoBarista’s versatility comes from its “Grind iQ” feature. This technology allows the machine to pick up on your coffee bean size, roast type, and freshness, auto-calibrating the grind size, weight, and dose of each brew to make your drink of choice. As you customize the number of shots in your drink, the intensity of the shot, and the temperature, Grind iQ adjusts as well.

If using something like Grind iQ sounds like bowling with the bumpers up, or playing Mario Kart with steer assist, then this is not a machine for you — stick with your pour overs and enjoy your gooseneck electric kettle. This is not a machine for coffee snobs who want to control every last detail of the brewing process. Rather, it’s for people who love coffee, but have never analyzed their espresso pucks.

With the caveat that I am not invested in the coffee brewing process, I will say that I think the AutoBarista makes good drinks.

On one side of the machine, it can pull shots of espresso or brew drip coffee, while on the other, it has an automatic milk frother and stainless steel pitcher, which allows you to customize settings based on your desired temperature and heaviness of the foam. It also includes a setting for frothing plant-based milk.

To keep the coffee tasting good, the AutoBarista always rinses itself before and after making a drink. This is a useful feature — I often find myself manually running water through my Nespresso machine, since I don’t use it every day. But the water catches in a drip tray, which fills up after making just a few drinks, so if you live with another person, then emptying the tray will be a daily nuisance. While the design of the machine makes it easy to pull out the tray, I’ve accidentally overfilled it and spilled coffee-tinted water on my kitchen floor more than once. That’s the dealbreaker.

When you pull out the drip tray, you’ll also see the knock box, which collects your spent espresso pucks. Be warned: if you forget to empty the knock box for even just a few days, you may get jump-scared by some blue mold next time you go to dump the pucks. Maybe I should’ve seen that coming, but scrubbing the moldy knock box made me feel ready to go back to my beloved OXO Cold Brew Coffee Maker, which costs just six percent of the price of the AutoBarista.

In the AutoBarista’s defense, most people probably wouldn’t find this machine so arduous to care for. I just happen to be someone who makes one big batch cold brew every other week and tries to keep my morning rituals minimal. If you have more patience than I do before 8 AM, then you may very well love this machine and find it low maintenance.

Ninja excels at making multi-use kitchen products, and the AutoBarista is no exception, combining a drip coffee maker, espresso machine, milk frother, and grinder, and food scale into one device. But if you’re not planning to take advantage of the AutoBarista’s versatility, then it’s not worth paying its $999.99 price.