Kitchenaid KF4 Coffee Machine reviewed: easy and quiet

A more compact take on lattes and cappuccinos, the Kitchenaid KF4 is a cafe-ready addition for the home so easy, your kids can use it. No more excuses for coffee ever again.

For some of us, coffee is one of the most important rituals of the day. It’s the reason you might be able to move in the morning after one cup. Not having it might be the reason you don’t move at all.

Some of us feel totally disconnected from reality until we’ve had our morning cup. Maybe two.

It’s for that reason why the coffee machine can be one of the more cherished and loved appliances in the home. While not necessary the same way a fridge is, or even a kettle or toaster, the coffee machine can be the first appliance you want to see every morning.

That means it needs to be easy. It needs to be effortless. It needs to give you what you need and nothing less.

While some coffee machines feel like they need a degree to operate, when you just want your daily dose, you want it to be simultaneously seamless and speedy.

And that’s where Kitchenaid appears to have been dabbling, building an automatic coffee machine focused on these ideals, all while keeping the space down. The KF4 is exactly that: a compact take on coffee that aims to be easy to use. Like your phone, it even has a touchscreen.

What is the Kitchenaid KF4?

Kitchenaid’s model numbers don’t do a lot of explaining their purpose, but the KF4 is a coffee machine. Maybe “KF” is supposed to sound like “kaw-fee”, we don’t know. What we do know is the KF4 is designed to be a slim take on making coffee, adding the much-loved appliance to the kitchen without eroding too much space in the home.

It’s one of several in the Kitchenaid automated espresso machine range, also arriving with the less obvious model number “5KES8454”. Catchy. Don’t go using that in a store. They won’t know what you’re talking about.

Mention the KF4, however, and you’ll find a fairly compact coffee machine with a 3.5 inch touchscreen, simple buttons on the outside, plus a 1.8 litre water tank and a smaller milk container with an even smaller hose.

There’s a built-in grinder, plus a system Kitchenaid calls “IntelliGrind” which basically uses sensors to fine-tune the grind so you don’t really need to do anything.

It’ll take care of the grind, the dose, the tamping, and the extraction. You just bring the glass or mug, and potentially milk in the external container, which can be the container Kitchenaid supplies or any jug or cup you put the hose into.

It’ll even handle clean-up quickly of those milk-based drinks, too, with a quick milk cleaning mode that takes you though a few instruction screens to deal spare milk in the line, something you definitely will want to take care of after you’re done making cups.

The concept here is simple: make coffee quickly and easily. Clean it up that way, too.

What does it do?

Of course, coffee comes in lots of different varieties, and everyone has a different style they prefer. Kitchenaid’s small touchscreen aims to cover these with customisations you can use, delivering built-in recipes for:

• Cappuccino
• Espresso
• Coffee
• Latte Macchiato
• Caffe Latte
• Macchiato
• Americano
• Espresso Lungo
• Flat white
• Iced coffee
• Iced espresso
• Frothed milk
• Warm milk, and
• Hot water

Each recipe can have its strength and volume tweaked, basically giving you a way to make an espresso slightly longer than the 25 to 30ml it normally is, or even tweaking how much milk you might want in a textured milk bevy. You can also simply choose frothed milk if you want to make the kids a babycino of sorts, BYO sprinkles and/or cocoa.

Once you’ve made those tweaks, you can easily map them to a profile, with four available.

Does it do the job?

To make coffee, you’ll need to fill the water tank at the back, plug in the included water filter, and pour in some fresh coffee beans, and the machine will take care of the rest. There’s a spot where you can scoop in some pre-ground coffee of your own, handy if you happen to want a decaf later on, but you don’t want to actually fill your machine with decaf beans (totally understandable).

From there, simply turn the machine on and select the coffee you want.

If it’s just a coffee-based extraction — espresso, long, Americano, or simply “coffee” — you’ll just need your cup. If you plan on adding milk, almond, soy, or something else for texture and sweetness, you can use the included milk container, or dangle the steam hose into a jug with whatever milk-type you want to use.

The latter is the easiest approach, though it doesn’t look as nice. There’s no manual milk steaming here, but it all happens for you, and there’s even a quick cleaning process that makes clean-up a cinch, too.

Whatever you pick, the process from no cup to something you can drink is speedy, and is available in little more than a few presses.

You might decide on a tweaked formula you like and will want to reuse. Once that’s been sorted, you can save it to a profile, with four user profiles that support names. Ours were “Mum”, “Dad”, and “Kids”, the latter of which was named because babycinos became a norm that even Ms 9 could work out how to do. If Ms 4 could reach, she would have never stopped, clearly.

Making coffee with the KF4 is really quiet, too. The company has apparently achieved a “Quiet Mark” certification, but that doesn’t mean much outside of the industry. To people at home, however, the sound isn’t a high-pitched pressure system, but rather a minimal assortment of parts spinning up and water coming out.

There’s a grind, a long consistent deep hum from the machine, the dribble of liquid, some vibration, and at the end some mechanical changes moving the coffee out. It takes about a minute depending on the length of the coffee, and is rather easy.

It’s not totally quiet — making coffee makes noise — and you can’t set it ahead of time, but it won’t take you long to use, so it hardly matters at all.

What does it need?

There’s a lot the Kitchenaid KF4 gets right about making coffee easy. So much that you may never consider another coffee machine again.

You may find occasionally that the coffee bean compartment sensor doesn’t fire properly, and an espresso comes out as water rather than as coffee, but that literally only happened once, and you can simply run it again. The standard cup of hot coffee has never been this much of a cinch.

The cold cup, though? That’s a different story altogether.

Iced coffee is itself a very different vibe. You can crave it in the summer or spring when a caffeinated hit is exactly what you’re looking for, sans-heat. It should be easy. It should come naturally. It should taste less acidic than a regular cup of coffee and retain the cold temperature, both of which make the whole point of a cold cup being worth the effort.

It doesn’t quite make sense with the Kitchenaid KF4, or not in the way you’d expect it to.

While cold brew is typically water and coffee steeped for 8 to 12 hours, making cold coffee quickly can be done with cold water. But probably not the way Kitchenaid is doing it.

Rather than quickly steep the coffee or swirl it all together in cold water, the KF4’s cold coffee just makes hot coffee and asks you for an ice cube.

It’s not really making iced coffee. The manual could have done this. We didn’t need an extra mode that basically just said “add an ice cube to the glass”.

That’s the iced coffee equivalent of phoning it in.

Speaking from experience, you’d be better off preparing a second glass with ice and either water or milk, and then running an espresso shot out of the KF4, and then pouring it straight into the other glass. That’s going to be more of an iced coffee than the KF4 can muster.

Is it worth your money?

A lack of a proper iced coffee mode isn’t a deal breaker per se. Iced coffee making isn’t something most machines get right, and using the recipe before any espresso machine can adapt to an iced bevy. This isn’t an issue which is good, because the price is actually fair.

Priced at $1599 in Australia, the Kitchenaid KF4 is a good price for what you get: a no-nonsense coffee maker that simply does what you want it to do, does it well, and can store your favourites.

Automated espresso makers tend to carry a bit of a premium in the first place, but models with screens can up that a little bit.

As it is, the street price of the KF4 tends to sit around $1450, so you may not need to venture quite as high, though Kitchenaid’s model does appear to compete quite well, too. It’s not as inexpensive as some of the Philips options, but it’s also not as high as models from either Jura or DeLonghi.

It’s a good middle ground capable of delivering good coffee. Great coffee, even.

Yay or nay?

There’s little to really complain about in the KF4, beyond the iced coffee issue, and that does feel a lot like a non-issue in the grand scheme of things. BYO ice cube. There. Covered.

For everyone else, Kitchenaid’s KF4 is about the easiest cup we’ve ever had.

It won’t suit the seasoned experts who want maximum control, but they have their manual machines to be maestros of. The KF4 is different. It’s effortless, easy and quiet, and that’s exactly what we want. Highly recommended.