Lavazza's smart new coffee machine automatically adjusts its settings to suit your beans – and it looks stunning too

• The Lavazza Assoluta is a new bean-to-cup espresso machine
• It's optimized to work with Lavazza's coffee, selected using the mobile app
• It's available to buy direct from Lavazza, and is half price with a subscription

Italian coffee specialist Lavazza has launched a new automatic espresso machine that not only looks great, but promises to help get the best flavor out of your coffee by automatically configuring its own settings to suit your chosen beans.

The Lavazza Assoluta isn't the only machine that can tailor brew settings to suit different beans (De'Longhi's Bean Adapt Technology works in a similar way), but the Assoluta is designed to work specifically with Lavazza's own blends, which you can select through the Piacere Lavazza mobile app (available for iOS and Android).

Most coffee machine apps only offer tips on maintenance (such as alerting you when it's time to run a descaling program or change the water filter), but the Lavazza app lets you scan the barcode on a bag of beans, then uses that information to tailor the infusion settings.

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The daily grind

Like De'Longhi's machines, the Assoluta requires you to adjust the grind size by hand, but unusually for a bean-to-cup machine, it offers just two settings: coarse and fine (most espresso machines offer between 12 and 20 settings) The Assoluta is optimized to work with specific types of coffee, so getting consistent results without dialling in the grinder should be easier, but I'm interested to see how it works in practice. (You can use other types of coffee, but Lavazza recommends sticking with its own for the best results).

The Assoluta certainly looks the part, with a compact, coffee-brown chassis and clean lines that should look right at home in a modern kitchen.

The Assoluta costs £699 (about $950 / AU$1,400) and is available exclusively through Lavazza's website. If you want fresh coffee beans delivered to your door, you can get 50% off the machine when you subscribe to one of Lavazza's coffee plans.

I'll begin testing the Lavazza Assoluta next week to see how it compares with its rivals, and whether it can earn a place in my guides to the best coffee makers and best espresso machines.

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