The Future of Coffee May Be Closer Than You Think

On light roast coffees in particular, our early xBloom efforts came out a bit acidic and thin when we used the default recipes that came with the app—a sign the coffee was not being extracted well enough.

Was our initial underextracted coffee the result of Philadelphia’s semihard tap water? Perhaps.

Either way, we slowed down the pour by swapping out xBloom’s house filters to thick-papered Kalita filters, and also deviated sharply from the app’s suggested recipes. We increased the pause times on each pour, and ground our beans much finer. Once we finally got it figured out, the results were admirable.

But let’s say you don’t want to try for days or weeks to figure out your ideal formula. The xBloom offers a shortcut in the form of roast-to-order xPods ($13 to $24 for eight) available by mail order, often from some of the hypiest third-wave roasters in coffee. Your compostable pods will arrive with an RFID recipe card, preprogrammed and theoretically optimized to each bean. Just swipe the card, then push the button.

Results will differ by roaster, as in life. A recipe for a single-origin bean from Indian-American coffee roaster Kaveri was dialed in beautifully, leading to a cup brimming with chocolate and citrus. Not so with NBA player Jimmy Butler III’s Bigface coffee brand. That recipe, seemingly left at the machine’s default coarse grind, led to tart and woefully underextracted coffee.

Still Brewing

The pods are also costly, about $1.60 to $3 apiece. This makes this option most attractive to people with less time than money, or companies who’d like an impressive pour-over device in their break room.

The people we expect to be most excited about the xBloom are those who love technology itself. The xBloom Studio is, quite simply, cool. It’s new and interesting, and fun to play with. And once you figure it out, the machine rewards you with delicious coffee.

Photograph: xBloom

For gamers or obsessive optimizers, the xBloom Studio offers endless variables to toggle in the quest for the precisely dialed and repeatable pour-over. It is a robot that will do almost all of the work for you at the push of a button, and never get distracted while crusty-eyed and bleary from the struggle of facing yet another day.

As with any new technology, expect some kinks: The same inputs don’t always lead to the same results. Sometimes the grinder piles up most of the beans on one side of the dripper, and the machine blithely pours water as if this didn’t happen. Other confounding variables include altitude, water hardness, and the freshness of the coffee.

The machine also saw some early glitches after its release in June 2024, including a “waiting” error caused by the device’s overflow protection algorithm; this has mostly been resolved by successive firmware updates. A dripper arm also cracked during brewing and was quickly replaced with an updated version.

Which is all to say, the dream of the always-perfect cup is not yet here. But it’s close enough to be tantalizing.