The best coffee machine can unlock your caffeine fix for you at home, and make mornings that bit more bearable. So it also serves as a useful guide, if it’s trimming loads off, you probably need to reduce the grind amount and if the razor doesn’t touch the coffee, you’ll need to dispense more. We like that the filter is dishwasher-proof, and the whole machine stays really clean thanks to the non-drip system. The pods are recyclable, albeit through Lavazza's slightly complicated scheme, and the machine is very easy to use.

If you want to control everything at a very fine level of detail through an LCD digital display then it may be worth paying the extra.this isn't a coffee machine in most budgets, but it might be one to daydream about or save towards if not - thanks to just how incredibly good it is at making coffee. The razor is a unique tool that you won’t see your local barista use, but after tamping you can use it to trim off any excess coffee in the portafilter to make sure it’s at exactly the right level. Both the Express and the Pro are excellent coffee machines but we still rate the Express ever so slightly ahead of the Pro because in our opinion you don’t need 30 grind settings on the Pro v 16 grind settings on the Express and turning a dial to get the correct amount of coffee ground works fine on the Express and you don’t really need to select it by the second on a digital display.

Freshly ground beans are probably the single most effective way of improving homemade coffee, and this machine means you don’t need to bother with a fiddly separate grinder or save up for an expensive bean-to-cup machine. Weigh your portafilter and adjust the length of time in which the grinder grinds your coffee easily with the dial on the front of the machine. It’s a lot more expensive than most others but once you taste the coffee it produces and you understand the level of personalisation that it offers then it’s not hard to give this top marks for value for money.

It’s very much a domestic version of a commercial espresso machine as it doesn’t have the built in grinder like many of the other Sage coffee machines and has two separate boilers. Using the steak analogy again, if you cook even the best fillet steak for too long you will end up with a tough piece of leather so you need to make it just right to get the benefit from the quality product you are using.