Video Overview | Lelit Anna

The Lelit Anna is an affordable, compact single-boiler espresso machine capable of making true espresso and steaming milk. The Anna's powerful heating element readies the machine within minutes and transitions from brew to steam heat in fewer than 30 seconds. In this video, Steve shows off this small machine's capabilities before pulling a shot and steaming milk.

Transcript

Hey, guys. It's Steve with Prima Coffee and today, we're going to take a look at the Lelit Anna Espresso Machine. So the Anna is an entry-level espresso machine. So if you're moving from a lever machine or a thermocoil machine, you might be looking at one of these. And it's also very affordable. That's because it has a really small boiler, its 2.5-milliliter boiler, right here above that group head, which does help to maintain the temperature given that it doesn't have a PID. The heating element on that brass boiler is 1,000 watts so it is particularly hefty for this size. The water tank at the back is 2.7 liters. It is removable. You'll just need to take out these two silicon hoses and then you can pull out the tank if you wanted to take it over to the sink to fill it up or you can fill it up inside of here as well. The intake hose here has a net to keep any debris from getting into the boiler. But also if you wanted to take this net off here, then you can fit on the Lelit Water Softener, which you can buy separately if you plan to use your tap water and that water is particularly hard. So you put this on like this and put the net to the side and it does fit right into the tank. On the side of this machine, there is a max fill, so you will be able to see how high that water level is. And when you turn it to the side, you can see how much the water tank takes up. This is a really small footprint machine. You're basically talking about 10 inches deep, about 9 inches wide, and 14.5 inches tall, so it is very small, the majority of that depth taken up with the water tank. As far as the accessories go, we have a 57, not a 58-millimeter portafilter and baskets here. So that does mean that it will be a little more difficult to find your precision baskets and your bottomless portafilters, although they are out there.

Other things that come with it are this plastic tamper, this plastic scoop here, and three baskets. So we have the double basket already in there. They give you a single basket, and then they also give you a basket for pods if that's how you take your coffee. But we don't use this plastic tamper. Instead, we do recommend that you go out and get a metal tamper. Prima Coffee does sell these 57-millimeter metal tampers. The steam wand is a dual-purpose steam wand. So it does steam milk but it also dispenses hot water. To do that, what you'll do is you will make sure that the brew boiler is the one that's turned on and then you will hit both of these buttons and go ahead and open up these steam valves. So we hit both of these at the same time and open up that valve, you can see we've got hot water coming out. If you're going to brew coffee, then all you need to make sure is that this light is on and both of these buttons are raised. So then you can go ahead and put your portafilter in. We have coffee in here already. We've already put in here about 16 grams of coffee into the double basket. You can fit a little more, a little less. It just depends on what you prefer. And when that's set, you hit the brew button and it will go ahead and start. And there's our coffee coming out. Since we've got 16 grams in, I'll go ahead and go 32 grams out. We're finding that with this particular coffee, that tastes very good. That's about 32 grams right there. So when you're going from brewing coffee to steaming milk, all you need to do is hit this button here. And so a couple of things about these lights. When this light is on and this button up here is not depressed, that means that the brew temperature has been reached. So when you first start up your machine, you will wait for that light to turn on, and then you're ready to start making coffee. It takes about five minutes but if you want the whole machine to really be warmed up so that your coffee's going to taste correct, then you'll want to wait about 20 minutes to get that going. But when you want to go between the two, so from the brew up to the steam, again, you can't do both at the same time, you're just going to go ahead and hit that steam button. This light will go out. And then when the steam temperature has been reached, that light will turn back on. What you'll notice is, because this is a 2.5-milliliter boiler, it doesn't take very long. So right there, it's already on. That was less than a minute for it turning on, probably around 30 seconds, and it's already ready to steam milk.

So the steam wand comes with this attachment. That slides on and off. This attachment is supposed to help aerate milk but it will over aerate. It will create a lot of bubbles so you'll probably not want to use that and then just go ahead and use the steam wand itself. So to actuate the steam, you just have this valve and when you want to dispense steam, you'll turn it on. And then turn it off when you are done. You can turn this in and out here, but you can't sort of actuate it completely so that it is at a slant. So it will be difficult to get that vortex to really distribute all the air throughout. But you can get pretty good milk with this. So let's go ahead and aerate it. There you go. So about right there. Take our towel. You can see right there that we have a pretty good texture, maybe a few too many of the bubbles there, but it does look like wet paint. And we'll go ahead and show you that we can make it pop here. Whoops. And there we go. That's really how to use the Anna. It is an entry-level machine, so there's not a lot to it. There's not a PID so you can't necessarily maintain the exact temperature you want and where that particularly becomes evident is when you're done making espresso and then you go to steam. If you want to go back to making espresso, so you'll turn the steam button off. Even when this light comes back on to tell you that it's ready to brew, you will see that it is really hot, right. That is just steam coming out. There is no water dispensed. And it takes a minute for it just to be water, so that will mean that you'll have to wait a little bit between steaming and then going back to making espresso. That is the Lelit Anna Espresso Machine. It is compact, affordable, and it does everything that you're going to need to do with espresso and milk.