A coffee machine for the home barista – and more

The coffee machine for home baristas
It always surprises me how many specialised tasks we think we can do. All children, of course, believe they know how to drive a car from years of watching parents at the wheel, and most seem to have a good idea how to shoot a handgun from seeing it I don’t know where.

This osmotic semi-learning method works for adults, too. From decades of watching skilled baristas make coffee, for example, at some level I think I could kind of get the hang of it – you put the ground coffee into the portafilter thingy (the little bowl with the long handle), you tamp the grounds down flat and then, with a rather flamboyant twisting motion, you clunk it into the espresso machine, while steaming the milk in a particular way that involves rhythmically raising and lowering the steel jug up and down. Then you do the latte-art thing, which, as anybody can see, is dead easy. 

The home bean-to-cup coffee machines I have tested reduce this impressive rigmarole to one button press, and the coffee is often superb. But this magnificent machine from Australia (joint world coffee capital along with New Zealand and, of course, Italy) gives you the chance to do most of the sexy barista stuff yourself. The Oracle Touch is at the top of the Sage Appliances coffee-machine hierarchy, and like its juicing cousin, the Sage Bluicer I introduced in March, is built to Bentley standards.
My loan machine arrived at the beginning of the lockdown when there was time to study it a bit, and by day three I was producing a fantastic flat white – even better than with the high-end home machines I have tried to date. Making coffee almost like a grown-up may not be everyone’s cup of, er, tea, but I found it deeply satisfying. 

Compared to a professional machine, the Oracle Touch is still automated in significant ways: it predetermines the grind, the brew time, the target milk temperature and more, but, just like a proper coffee geek, you can manually override all the settings. Latte art was still beyond me at the time of writing. I will have spent some time on YouTube working on this core life skill by the time you read this.

Sage Oracle Touch, £2,000, sageappliances.com

A high-octane bike for lockdown fitness
When, in 2016, I wrote about a London company’s high-intensity interval training (HIIT) exercise bike called High Octane Ride, the idea of telescoping exercise down to as little as eight minutes, three times a week, sounded like the ultimate free lunch – even though its principle already had scientific backing.

The bike has been relaunched as Car.o.l (Cardiovascular Optimisation Logic) in a slicker, smaller form, with sophisticated, AI-based programming in the cloud. This means it monitors your routines live and adjusts resistance instantly, based on your heart rate, which it reads from the hand grips and pedalling performance. It was tested by the High Altitude Exercise Physiology programme at Western Colorado University for the non-profit American Council on Exercise – and found to work as advertised. 

I know it works from a less scientific test at home. Alternating between sessions on my non-HIIT Peloton and Car.o.l rides, Peloton routines that left me a sweaty mess are now easy.

Car.o.l Bike, £2,995, carolfitai.com

Fire up the ultimate wireless speaker
Veteran Scottish hifi maker Linn would be in most audiophiles’ top five manufacturers in the world. Perhaps because Linn is so high-end, it has never made a wireless speaker. Until now. This is its Series 3, hand-built near Glasgow, and it is simply extraordinary. The volume and deep, massive, majestic quality of sound it produces make me gasp. And most likely my neighbours too. It seems inconceivable that so much glorious sound can come from a pair of unassuming, bookshelf-sized speakers. Devialet’s Phantom speakers from Paris have been my benchmark for small-but-magnificent wireless audio, but the Scots may just have got them beat with this.

Linn Series 3 works with Bluetooth, WiFi and Airplay, and includes an HDMI port so you can run your TV sound through it. It’s pretty easy to set up – not quite child’s play, but OK. You can deploy them singly in mono, but it seems a shame not to link up two as a full-on stereo experience.

Linn Series 3, from £2,950, linn.co.uk

A window onto the world’s great art
Some may consider this electronic picture frame by router-maker Netgear a teensy bit naff. However, while it won’t win the Nobel Prize for picture framing, it’s perfectly inoffensive and the quality of the anti-glare matte display (with an ambient light sensor to keep it at the right luminescence level even in daylight) is superb.

Meural comes preloaded with artworks, and you can subscribe to a massive library of more than 30,000. My preference would be to use it as a display for my supposedly arty photography, although it would be hard to choose whether to hang it landscape or portrait, because portrait photos (or indeed painted portraits) look a bit lame in a landscape frame and vice versa. It does need a mains connection and looks a bit meh with the lead visible – but an easy workaround is to find a shelf or sideboard to place the frame on.

Netgear Meural Canvas II, from £833 (subscription £70 a year), netgear.co.uk

@TheFutureCritic