Barista Pro™ SES878BTR4GEU1

Hey. Firstly, what a sweet thing to think about as a present. I went for [one of these](https://www.sageappliances.com/en-gb/product/bes878) for my first one (a sage barista pro). I think they are considered a pretty alright all in one espresso machine and in the US they are called Breville barista pro but in the uk the brand goes by ‘Sage’. If you can stretch to it - I can say I’ve been really happy with mine over the last year and a half, it’s not let me down once and produced consistently good coffee and has been fun to learn and use with. I’m pretty sure when I went to buy it I emailed sage and just asked them if they could give me a discount code and they did at the time so it might be worth trying that. For a basic essentials for what you are looking for, you kind of want these three things: - coffee bean grinder - espresso maker - milk frother The one I linked above has all of this in one machine for ease. Happy hunting and welcome to ask me any questions though I am relatively new to the espresso machine world

I had the Aussie version of this, rebranded as the Breville Barista Express which we brought here with us when we moved but it shit the bed after years and years of service. We replaced it with .... the Sage Barista Express Pro only because I wanted the fancy screen. The milk frother is on the way out though but we're on really hard water so I suspect it's limescale build up that's causing the issue.

No matter the machine, you will not get good coffee. This fact is inherent to capsules.  If you don’t care, don’t waste your money. If you care a little, get a decent automatic coffee machine (will be more than 700).  If you care a lot, put in the effort and get a portafilter machine and grinder (even beginner level like sage barista pro will get you better results than any automatic machine) 

It's worth trying to upgrade your grinder first. When I did that with my Breville, the pours got better.

I started with a Barista Pro and leveled up to a La Marzocco.

I recently bought the Barista Pro as my first espresso machine and have found it to be pretty easy to learn and like it a lot.

There are tons of really good YouTube videos that walk thru how to set it up and dial it in. I did go thru a lot of beans to get it dialed in the first time but now it’s awesome!