Updated February 2022

 

The Rok espresso maker is an award-winning non-electric tool for making espresso at home. The Rok espresso maker looks quite solid, well built but also aesthetically pleasing. Made of high-grade aluminium with some BPA-free plastic parts.

Rok espresso review

As any non-electric brewer, you need to make sure to bring all the whole maker hot enough to achieve a great result.

It is great perhaps for a one-shot only per day for when waking up in the morning, but it definitely performs better when brewing more than just once; this is quite obvious as just with the first shot of the day you will not able to reach the best temperature possible and to keep it during all the extraction process.

Anyway, contrary to what is generally thought, the Rok espresso maker does the job on the right condition. You also wouldn’t believe that you can aim for the same pressure you can get with a professional coffee machine.

I’m summarizing here, the key steps for brewing great coffee at home with the Rok espresso maker.

rok espresso maker
rok espresso maker

How to make outstanding espresso with the Rok Espresso Maker

  • Grind fresh with an electric grinder or a high-end hand grinder such as the Comandante grinder: 14-15 g is a good starting point.
  • Get the Best UK online Coffee subscriptions to start with the right quality coffee beans.
  • Distribute the coffee grounds evenly: using the scoop included is quite messy, so bring a dosing tool to dispense the coffee into the portafilter;
  • Avoid the hard water from your tap and buy the right one: you should get softer water from the supermarket such as Waitrose Essential or Tesco Ashbeck;
  • Pre-warm the water tank with boiling water and run at least a blank shot to pre-heat the brewer. I would also recommend running a shot with some leftover coffee or some old one that does not taste good anymore. This would let you heated things, especially your portafilter;
  • Choose for the right beans: the espresso coffee maker does great coffee also with lighter roast coffee beans. You should fill the portafilter as much as possible which is around 16g so that you can extract a good amount of flavour compounds;
  • Load the brewer so you can pre-infuse the coffee puck: you should pre-infuse for at least 10 seconds to get a tasty result. Just lift the arms to start the preinfusion and then press quite heavily to get as close as possible to the right pressure. If you want more liquid in the cup, lift the arms again and press for another time (brewing a tasty shot requires roughly 30 seconds).

And now let’s see an espresso recipe from where to start.

ROK ESPRESSO RECIPE

  • 17g of lightly roasted coffee;
  • 10 seconds of pre-infusion to well saturate the coffee puck;
  • 38g out in 30 seconds. Plunge one.

A few considerations

  1. A pressure gauge would be a great fit to the Rok espresso maker to improve consistency by checking the pressure while pressing down the arms;
  2. A wider tamper would make sure to even the coffee puck but also a bigger portafilter would allow brewing with a higher dose of coffee like if you were pulling shot in a coffee shop;
  3. To really get the best out of your shot, you need to use a scale to dose your coffee and to get the desired yield in the cup. The result is quite good, balanced with a good crema on top.

Who is Rok Espresso Maker designed for?

Manually brewed espresso at home wasn’t that popular until a couple of years ago. The coffee market is now bigger and richer thanks to many designers that invested loads of time on making high-end brewer but also thanks to the different crowdfunding now available that can help you to reach your goal.

I would suggest the Rok espresso maker for the ones that have just started his coffee journey. It’s such a good brewer to have fun with without having so much competence in the field.

You just need a couple of tries to get it right, and once you manage to keep the brewer hot, you just need to look out at the grinding size to get the best out of your coffee beans.

Also, the aluminium part of the brewer is covered for 10 years and 2 years of warranty for the plastic pieces. Another reason for the beginner to get one.
However, If you’re willing to learn about coffee, the Rok espresso maker will be in your hands for just a while. And that’s why I would never get a new one so a secondhand one will be great to start with.

The Rok espresso maker is available in black or grey. It’s respectively for sale at £169 and £149 and it includes a 49.7mm portafilter, a spoon, a tamper, a clip-on double adapter.



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