Yahoo’s Tester Keeps the $130 Lavazza Tablì After a Month

Yahoo’s home editor Jessica Dodell-Feder used the Lavazza Tablì for a month and is keeping it on her counter, she writes in a review for Yahoo Shopping. The $130 machine brews espresso from tabs of pressed coffee with no capsule at all.

Her favorite things about it are speed and simplicity. According to the review, it heats up in about 35 seconds, pulls a single shot in 36 seconds and a double in a minute, and used tabs drop into a built-in bin that she says holds about 10 before it needs emptying. The removable parts go in the dishwasher. She liked the light and medium roasts best and found the darker ones a bit bitter.

The downsides are the ones you’d expect from a closed system. You can only use Lavazza’s tabs, there are just five varieties for now including a decaf, and she puts them at about $1 each. It makes espresso, double espresso and lungo only, no regular coffee. The machine itself is mostly plastic and looks bulkier than it is. She also says the tabs come in plastic trays of six that are hard to open one at a time, and per Lavazza they keep for two weeks at room temperature or 45 days in the fridge.

Our take: the short shelf life is the detail to think about. If you drink one shot a day, a pack of six goes quickly, but a household that only brews on weekends could end up with stale tabs. At $130 it’s much cheaper than the $500 Keurig Alta, which also uses pressed coffee, but it can’t make a mug of drip. We covered another reviewer’s take on the Tablì earlier, and our guide to greener ways to brew covers other ways to cut pod waste.