I tested Wacaco’s new portable self-heating espresso maker, and it brews top-notch coffee… but at a cost

On paper, I love everything about the Wacaco Pixapresso. In practice, I love 70% of the Wacaco Pixapresso. Is that enough to make it one of the best coffee makers? If you can overlook annoyances like short battery life and long heating time, then yes. It certainly brews coffee delicious enough to snag the #1 spot.

Even though the coffee is delicious and the Pixapresso is addictive to use, that doesn’t make it a perfect product in my eyes. I wanted to brew shot after shot of delightful espresso, but I found I could only make two drinks before needing to charge the device. And then it took three hours to charge.

All that being said, if you’re a coffee lover who also finds themselves in the great outdoors desperate for one espresso a day, then you’ll easily be able to look past my battery-related grievances. I’ll talk about everything in full in this Wacaco Pixapresso review.

Wacaco Pixapresso: Cheat sheet

• Who is it for? If you crave espresso on vacation or while camping and don’t want to take a camping stove too
• What does it do well? The Pixapresso makes delicious coffee, there’s no doubt about it
• What are its weaknesses? The battery life is pitiful
• Anything else to know? I think the Pixapresso V2 — whenever it gets made — will be life-changing

Wacaco Pixapresso: Specs

Wacaco Pixapresso review: Price & availability

The Wacaco Pixapresso is available for $159 from Amazon U.S. and £149 from Amazon U.K.. While, at first, this may seem quite pricey for a coffee maker, the Pixapresso is the only coffee maker I’ve seen of its kind. It’s not just a portable espresso machine like Wacaco’s previous models — Minipresso GR2 ($59), Picopresso ($129), and Nanopresso ($69) — it also heats up its own water.

The previous Wacaco models necessitated a separate water-heating device as they only work with hot water. Not the Pixapresso. It’s completely battery powered, which means it heats up its own water, meaning that you don’t have to take as many devices on your camping/glamping/weekend trips.

The closest competitor is the $149 OutIn Nano, another self-heated portable espresso maker. I’ve not personally tested the OutIn so I can’t speak for its performance, but other users online report that it doesn’t get hot enough for light roasts, but it performs well for dark roasts.

The Pixapresso is ostensibly one of the cheaper ways to make espresso at home, but it’s not what some coffee purists would call a real espresso machine. Obviously it doesn’t steam milk and it’s battery powered, so it isn't as adept at slinging shot after shot like a traditional espresso machine.

I would recommend the Pixapresso as a supplementary coffee maker as opposed to your main espresso machine, as it’s intended to accompany you on trips away rather than brew espresso at home.

Wacaco Pixapresso review: Design

As with all other Wacaco products I’ve reviewed, the Pixapresso is a feat of engineering. Inside the 3-inch chamber are all the moving parts required to brew espresso on the Pixapresso. There’s a shower head, mini portafilter, outlet head, a small cup and a large cup. There’s a handy fabric travel case where you can put all of these accessories when you’re traveling.

The Pixapresso is quite heavy, at 1.8 pounds, but it’s obviously nowhere near as heavy as a traditional espresso machine. If you’re going on a trip and need to tuck something small into your carry-on, then the Pixapresso is your best option.

There are two drinking cups (small, large) that slot inside the Pixapresso’s body, so you don’t have to take another mug with you. You can obviously take another cup with you should you want to serve multiple large drinks at once.

My favorite design aspect is the color. I’ve tested other Wacaco gear that comes in a rather unflattering shade of green, but not the Pixapresso. It’s a gorgeous deep purple color, like mulberry or blackberry. I love this color choice.

Aesthetics aside, there’s a definite functionality to the rest of the Pixapresso’s design. There’s a tactile power button that’s also used as a control button, and a black LED screen that’s also a touchscreen.

This touchscreen displays icons for charging, water heating, and extraction. I do wish it displayed how much charge remains in the Pixapresso without having to turn the product on or consult the user manual for its confusing button-mashing.

I think I would’ve liked to see dedicated buttons, just to save my poor caffeine-deficient brain from studying the user manual, trying to figure out the exact button-pressing routine to get my coffee brewing.

I’ll talk about this more in the ‘Performance’ section below, but let’s just say that Wacaco really shot itself in the foot by not including different buttons for different volumes and setting modes.

Wacaco Pixapresso review: Performance

I’ll discuss battery and coffeemaking in this section. Spoiler alert: delicious coffee, but you’ll be waiting a lifetime for it to charge.

Battery

Right off the bat, I’ll just say that the Pixapresso takes ages to charge (about 2 ½ hours), and won’t be able to make coffee adequately until it’s fully charged. I made the fatal error of trying to brew a lungo shot when it had 20% battery left and was met with a cold coffee. Can I even call it coffee? It was more like brown water. It was gross.

You can’t use the Pixapresso while it’s charging, which is just ridiculous. Wacaco didn’t do itself any favors with that, as I’d overlook the mediocre battery life if you could at least use it while plugged in.

Once it’s fully charged, it can only make a couple of drinks before needing to be charged again. As a result, I’d recommend charging it every night of your trip to save your sanity. I learnt this the hard way.

Obviously you could fill the tank with hot water to save battery, but that kind of defeats the point of buying a self-heating portable espresso maker.

Now that little caveat is out of the way, I’ll talk about the two brewing types — ground coffee and pods — in this section.

Ground coffee

To use the Pixapresso with ground coffee, you’ll need to find the portafilter attachment and the showerhead attachment. It took me about ten minutes of studying the user manual and inserting the incorrect attachment into other incorrect attachments to figure it out. I would definitely practise using the Pixapresso before you go on vacation or take it on camping holidays.

Otherwise your friends will be waiting for so long that the initial fancy-new-contraption awe will wear off and your scrutinizing the user manual will drive them to boredom.

Wacaco recommends that you dose 8g of finely-ground coffee in the portafilter basket. After grinding on my Comandante C40 MK4, I scooped 8g into the Pixapresso and tamped with the back of the spoon.

After fiddling with all the attachments, I screwed everything in tight and poured 55ml of cold water into the water tank. I pressed the power button, selected my drink size, and let it do its thing.

Thankfully, after just two minutes, I had a delicious fresh espresso. As you’ll discover in the ‘Nespresso pods’ section below, I had some drinks take almost ten minutes to finish, so the two-minute wait period for the espresso was a relief.

Here’s a photo of the espresso.

How cool is that? The crema is thick and bright in color, which is what you want with espresso. The taste was top-notch too: juicy in all the right places, with no bitterness at all, and a nice, clean sweetness at the end of the sip.

You can also adjust pre-infusion. The instructions are a little confusing, as with everything else Wacaco makes, which just proves my point about multiple buttons. I think each feature should be accessible on an individual button and I’ll die on that hill.

After I’d activated pre-infusion, I filled the water tank with 55ml of cold water and turned it to the heat setting. It took 3 minutes and 2 seconds to preheat. I let it pre-infuse for about ten seconds — longer than I initially wanted, as I couldn’t figure out the buttons — then extracted.

The espresso was still tasty, but a little more bitter than the first one. The tart berry notes were more pronounced on the pre-infused shot, which would be great for a mocha.

Overall, the Pixapresso makes delicious espresso. No, it’s not as technically perfect as the Picopresso, but they’re different coffee makers with different use cases. The Picopresso is more for espresso perfectionists, and the Pixapresso is for coffee lovers who need espresso and lungo shots while traveling.

Nespresso pods

The Nespresso attachment comes in the accessories bag, but it’s easy to set up. There’s a basket with small metal prongs that pierce the bottom of the capsule, and then a flat disc that slots into the outlet head.

At first, I was a bit perplexed by all the different names and parts, but once I brewed one shot, I’d mastered the setup. As I mentioned earlier, actually starting extraction is a little annoying due to the confusing button mashing, but once I did this for the first time it was relatively easy.

At max capacity (150ml in for 100ml out), it took 9 minutes to make one drink. This is longer than the OutIn Nano, but, then again, it is a larger water volume. This is one of my biggest cons with this machine: it takes ages.

Immediately after extraction, my food thermometer read 156°F, but I promptly burnt the heck out of my mouth, so I think the shot was much hotter than that.

Even so, let’s chat about the actual flavor of the coffee. That’s the most important thing, right? For this test, I used Grind’s House Blend pods, which I’ve had before and I love. I don’t like Nespresso pods due to the burnt and bitter taste, but Grind pods don’t suffer from this same malady. I thought my testing would be more fair with pods I actually like.

There was little crema, but that’s a pod problem, not a Pixapresso problem. The flavor was juicy at the back of my tongue, with balanced bitterness, but lacked the decadent oiliness I love in espresso.

Considering the coffee was from a pod, though, I was pleasantly surprised. This is definitely something I could see myself using in a pinch on vacations instead of instant.

However, the Pixapresso’s battery is a major disappointment. After one lungo shot, the Pixapresso had just 40% battery left. What do you mean, this thing uses 60% battery for one shot of coffee?

Obviously you could save battery by preheating water, but the whole point of the Pixapresso is that it can self-heat. Unfortunately, the battery life is too low for me to realistically take this on vacations. Otherwise my boyfriend and I would be fighting over two shots of espresso every morning, and that doesn’t bode well for the longevity of our relationship. I jest, but it is quite annoying that the Pixapresso is only capable of making two drinks.

Wacaco Pixapresso review: Storage & maintenance

As the Pixapresso is a small device — just 7 inches long and 3 inches wide — it can easily be stored pretty much anywhere in your house. When you’re taking it on vacation, it’ll fit into any backpack. That is the Pixapresso’s USP, after all — it’s a vacation-ready coffee maker, designed to fit onto any carry-on luggage or hiking backpack.

I found cleaning the device relatively easy: I just washed up the pieces in hot soapy water and dried them with some kitchen towel. Before each use, I rinsed the pieces before brewing, to wash off any stagnant water from storage.

Be mindful of the amount of moving parts: there are loads of little pieces, and if you lose one, the Pixapresso won’t work the same after. Users on Reddit report that Wacaco has sent them replacement parts after reaching out to customer service, but as of right now, you can’t buy spare parts online.

Wacaco Pixapresso review: How does it compare?

As far as I’m aware, the only reputable product that does exactly the same thing as the Pixapresso is the OutIn Nano. The OutIn Nano is $149, so $10 cheaper than the Pixapresso, but basically works the same way.

As I said earlier, I’ve not tested the OutIn Nano, so this is all what I can glean from online reviews. Other users report that the Nano can pull two shots on one charge, and takes under two hours to charge. The Pixapresso takes a whopping 2 ½ (or 3) hours to charge (and felt much longer when I was desperate for a coffee!), so the Nano has pipped it to the post here.

However, the Pixapresso is more versatile. It has a bigger water tank, at 150ml, whereas the Nano tops out at 80ml.

Wacaco Pixapresso review: Verdict

The Pixapresso is so close to being great. At present, though, it’s firmly in the ‘very good’ ballpark. To be truly great, it needs a few tweaks: longer battery life, shorter battery charging, and faster water heating time.

I’m sure the water heating issue is a direct result of the poor battery life, as the device can’t consume as much power as it would like to, lest the battery die even faster. However, this is still an awesome coffee maker that would benefit any serious coffee lover’s luggage.

The Pixapresso truly makes delicious espresso, and I’m already salivating at the thought of drinking another one of its carefully crafted shots. Unfortunately, though, I’ve got to wait three hours for the thing to charge. Whether that’s a worthy sacrifice for premium on-the-go coffee or not is up to you.