KitchenAid KF8 Review

KitchenAid is diving headfirst into the super-automatic espresso machine market and making quite the impression. The flagship machine is often how these companies are judged so we’ve spent a good amount of time on this KitchenAid KF8 review to see how it stacks up.

In short, the KitchenAid KF8 is an extremely strong contender at the top end of the bean-to-cup market. The espresso is excellent, the machine looks stunning, is easy to use and clean, and it has some nice features. Its only real downfall is that the cappuccino milk could be better, and it’s probably not worth the extra money over its little brother, the KF7, or possibly even the KF6.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, as KitchenAid has packed this beauty of an espresso machine with some cool features and taken a strong fight to the established names in the market. Have they redefined the standard for machines at this price? Let’s find out:

At a Glance: KitchenAid KF8 Review

1. 12 Coffee Recipes

The menu has 12 different coffees for you to choose from, plus two temperatures of hot water, warm milk, and a portion of milk foam. All the coffees can also be customized to create your ideal version, and all but Americano can be made as 2 drinks at once.

The drinks are:

• Americano
• Espresso
• Ristretto
• Coffee
• Lungo
• Cafe au lait
• Caffe latte
• Cappuccino
• Cortado
• Latte Macchiato
• Macchiato
• Flat white.

This should cover almost any coffee drink that you would want to have. Or, if you want to get creative, KitchenAid also gives you a booklet full of recipes that aren’t programmed into the KF8, but you can use it to make.

2. Removable Bean Hoppers

Probably our favorite unique feature of the KitchenAid KF series is the swappable bean hoppers, meaning you can switch out your beans for something new.

Well, if you buy a spare hopper, anyway.

When you swap it out, the machine will even purge the old beans from the grinder to ensure there’s no cross-contamination. We love trying new beans, so we’re big fans of this.

On a practical level, it also makes cleaning the grinder much easier as you have easy access.

3. 15g Dose

To get great espresso, you need a large dose. The 15g max dose on the KF8 allows the machine to extract rich and full-flavored espresso.

This is larger than both Gaggia and DeLonghi super automatic machines, although not quite at the level of Jura machines.

4. Plant-Based Milk Settings

A very rare feature, the KitchenAid KF8 has a specific setting for using plant-based milk instead of cow’s milk. This is useful because plant-based milks have different fat and protein levels, meaning foaming them is a little different from the more common dairy milk.

This setting can be saved to your favorite drinks on your profile, so you don’t need to choose plant-based or dairy milk each time.

There’s just one setting, though, which renders it pretty useless as the fat/protein levels in oat vs soy milk are very different. So, whilst cool, I’m not convinced this feature sets the KF8 far enough ahead to be the best KitchenAid espresso machine.

5. Flow Control

The “body” setting on the KitchenAid espresso machine controls the “flow rate” or the speed at which the water moves through the coffee puck. This gives you more subtle control over the taste of your coffee and can be very useful for longer extraction coffees such as lungo and coffee.

You can choose between light, medium, or strong body, with the flow rate being a little slower as you turn the body setting up.

6. 5″ Color Touch Screen

The large color screen looks fantastic and makes choosing, customizing, and saving your favorite coffees really simple. We find it really responsive and smooth – touchscreens on espresso machines have come a LONG way in recent years.

It’s also great for showing you how to do the basic maintenance and letting you know when you are low on beans or water.

7. Stainless Steel Casing

The exterior of the machine is entirely made of stainless steel. This is very uncommon and gives a premium look and feel to the machine. It also makes it more durable, which ultimately is very important in a machine you hope to have for many years.

You can get it in the plain stainless steel ‘color’, or in white, black, or juniper (like a pale green).

8. 2-year Warranty

Along with high-quality build materials, KitchenAid also offers a 2-year warranty.

This is an expensive machine and it shouldn’t break, but it’s good to know that KitchenAid has the confidence in their product to offer a 2-year guarantee.

Let’s get our slight annoyance out the way first: you can’t swipe your screen to scroll the menu like you would on your phone. Instead, you have to touch the arrow buttons at the bottom corners to switch between menu screens.

Other than that really tiny gripe, the KF8 works incredibly easily.

Having such a large touchscreen makes customizing your drinks super easy as you can see all the settings and jump in and out of them, adjusting them as you go. There’s no need to squint at tiny icons or fight with unresponsive touch. Even typing your profile name using the onscreen keyboard is easy.

If we were trying to find issues with the KF8, it would be that we’d prefer there to be a quick way to see only the black coffees or only the milk-based coffees. As a workaround, you can use 2 of the 6 profiles for this if you like, but that involves setting them up.

Double Shot or Double Drink?

KitchenAid markets its “2x” option as a “2-shot” version of the drink. It’s available on all the pre-programmed coffees except Americano.

Why can’t you get a double shot Americano?

Well, because the KF8 doesn’t actually make a 2 shot version. Instead, it makes 2 drinks at the same time, and there’s only one hot water spout so it can’t pour 2 Americanos at once.

In terms of espresso “purity”, this is great as it goes through 2 full brew cycles. But, if you’re looking for an extra caffeine hit with a double shot cappuccino or latte, you probably don’t want double the milk.

So, if you frequently want double-shot drinks, you’ll have to use another of your 6 user profiles to create them specifically. To do this, customize the drink setting to have half the amount of milk you’d normally use so you get the right balance.

It doesn’t leave us with many profiles after we have one for black coffees, one for white coffees, and one for double-shot coffees.

KitchenAid has a fairly standard setup with a large bean hopper (9.5oz / 270g) and a ground coffee bypass chute. What sets them apart from the super-automatic competition, though, is the removable bean hopper:

You can remove the bean hopper entirely, seal it, and replace it with a different one. Making swapping out your beans super easy.

They sell the extra bean hoppers separately, of course. But this is still a great (and simple) idea. Especially if, like us, you like to switch to decaf coffee at a certain point in the day. It also makes cleaning the grinder significantly easier.

Sure, you could also use the pre-ground coffee chute for this. However, the quality dips significantly over freshly ground beans. This isn’t a KitchenAid issue – it’s a pretty universal truth across all styles of espresso machines.

Quiet Grinding

The KitchenAid KF series all have a Quiet Mark sticker on the front. This means they have been independently tested and are in the top 20% of super-automatic espresso machines for noise suppression.

The grinder emits around 60 dB, which is really impressive and certainly won’t wake the whole house up.

The Looks

The KF8 is maybe the best-looking of the KitchenAid KF series. The gorgeous touchscreen adds to its appeal. You can choose between black, white, stainless steel, and juniper (a light green) – and I honestly don’t think there’s a bad choice here.

Anything other than the stainless steel offers a stylish two-tone look that will fit into almost any kitchen. It’s very much in the minimalist style that’s popular right now, unlike the vintage aesthetic of their more famous stand mixer.

Just be careful – the drip tray can be prone to scratching.

The KF series all share the same basic casing, so the dimensions are identical. They’re a little deeper than some other machines but also a little narrower, which is the better way around as countertop space is premium real estate.

At only 10.2 inches wide, the KF8 is quite narrow. Then, at 14.3 inches high and 18.5 inches deep, it’s still a large machine but no larger than other super automatics. (For our metric friends, that’s 26 x 36 x 47cm.)

The Build

If it matters to you, KitchenAid builds its espresso machines in Switzerland. Being mostly stainless steel on the exterior, it feels solid and premium. There’s a smoothness to how everything fits together. All the removable parts – water tank, drip tray, and bean hopper – click into place very snugly.

Having said that, the drip tray isn’t our favorite.

It’s large and annoying since it’s combined with the used puck container. Thankfully, it’s pretty big, so you shouldn’t need to empty it that often. The puck bin holds around 12-15 coffee pucks.

There are wheels on the back of the machine to help you maneuver it around your counter without scratching the work surface. I’m a big fan of how thoughtful this design feature is, especially since it weighs 37 lbs (16.8kg), so the wheels make all the difference if you need to move it anywhere.

Maybe the biggest thing that gives us confidence in the longevity of this espresso machine is the 2-year warranty. Manufacturers kinda have to offer a 1-year warranty as it’s the industry standard. But having that extra year of security shows real confidence from KitchenAid in the build of their coffee makers.

To try and save you some time when you first get your KF8, these are the settings we used to get the best espresso from medium roast Yirgacheffe beans:

We used the 2nd finest grind setting, max strength, strong body, medium temperature, and 1oz (30ml) length.

It will probably be different for you based on personal taste and your beans of choice, but hopefully, this saves you from throwing too many bad shots of espresso down the drain.

Now, once we got to these settings, the espresso was very impressive. Rich, full-bodied, and syrupy with nice complexity and aroma. Sure, it’s not the absolute best espresso we’ve had from a super-automatic machine (Jura stands alone), but it’s as good if not better than most of the competition.

The KF8 automatically adjusts for the longer extraction drinks such as lungo and coffee, so you don’t need to worry about fiddling with all your settings to get those 2 drinks nailed too.

Milk Frothing

The milk from the KF8 follows the same pattern as the other machines in the series. It’s good but not great. But it’s only not great if you want a cappuccino or macchiatto drink with a nice dense foam. For latte or cortado or flat white its absolutely brilliant. You can even do latte art with it if that’s your thing.

Then there is the “plant-based” option from your milk foaming menu. Since plant-based milks have different fat and protein content to cows’ milk they don’t foam the same, this setting is “optimized” for plant-based milk.

I don’t know how you can do that with 1 setting as the variance across plant-based milk is huge. It foamed our oat milk nicely, but then so did the regular milk setting. But it’s there if you feel that would be useful.

For their flagship machine, KitchenAid hasn’t really saved anything special. Compared to the previous generation, the KF7, the only extra features you get are the plant-based milk foaming option and a few extra pre-programmed drinks.

This isn’t a knock on KitchenAid as they have some great features in all their super automatic machines. For example, the flow control setting (body) and the “milk or coffee first” option that’s on both the KF7 and KF8.

This does make it harder to justify splurging on the KF8 over the KF7, or even the KF6 since so many of the great features are in all machines.

Psst… You can read our full KitchenAid KF7 review, here.

Nobody wants to clean their coffee machine, so it needs to be easy. The KF8 will prompt you whenever something needs cleaning, then talk you through everything.

The milk system will ask to be cleaned after every drink, which is good (milk goes bad real fast). The milk container needs to be cleaned every couple of days too.

You’ll need to periodically remove and deep clean the brew group, but you can rinse it as often as you like. It’s easily accessed from a side panel and takes around 30 seconds to rinse out.

Even with the water filter, your KF8 will need to be descaled every month or two, depending on usage and water type. This is by far the worst job of cleaning any super automatic espresso machine, but only because it takes around 20 minutes of your day. Again, you’ll be told when it needs to be done, and the screen will guide you through the steps with helpful images.

One bonus of the removable bean hoppers is how easily you can access the grinder to vacuum it out every couple of weeks. This really helps the flavor of your coffee and doesn’t take long so we’d really encourage you to do it.

The Investment: Jura E8

It may be unfair to compare these two as the Jura E8 is around $500 more expensive than the KF8. However, we’re talking about a serious investment in a coffee machine, so we should look at the best options

As far as we’re concerned, the Jura E8 is probably the best combination of quality and price out there. Just as long as you *really* care about your coffee quality. The espresso and milk quality are both better than you’ll get from the KF8, though the list of available drinks is basically the same.

It’s also bigger than the KF8, and Jura machines have a plastic exterior compared to the stainless steel of the KF8.

Really the question is: are you willing to spend $500 more to have better espresso and better milk foam? Not even necessarily miles better, but a little better. Most people will probably say “no”. We’re the weirdos who would, and maybe you are too.

Ultimate Coffee Options: DeLonghi Eletta Explore

A little cheaper than the KitchenAid, the DeLonghi Eletta Explore is an iced coffee lover’s dream.

The Eletta Explore brews the coffee and foams the milk at a lower temperature which, when combined with the suggested number of ice cubes, creates perfect iced coffee at a touch.

You get all this alongside excellent customization, an easy-to-navigate menu, and the ability to fill travel cups.

You may wonder what the drawback is here… but the coffee isn’t as good as the KitchenAid. So if you’re an iced coffee addict, or someone in your house is, then the Eletta Explore is absolutely the machine for you. If you aren’t a fan of cold coffee drinks though, it’s well worth the extra for the superior quality and looks of the KF8.

So Glamorous: Gaggia Accademia

This is a gorgeous espresso machine with excellent coffee and excellent milk frothing, plus a wand if you want to do it yourself. We seriously love the espresso from this machine. Maybe the KF8 is marginally better, but it’s very close. The milk from the Gaggia Accademia is definitely superior, though.

It’s incredibly tough to separate these two as they both have a great collection of coffees to choose from that are well executed. Both are great to look at and easy to use, with amazing build quality.

The KF8 does have more coffee options plus the x2 function, whether set to make double drinks or two of each, which is very nice. You also get the large touchscreen in the KF8 vs the screen/buttons combo on the Accademia.

There are no wrong choices here; both are amazing espresso makers. We’d maybe lean towards the Gaggia for the superior milk plus the option to use the milk wand. But it’s extremely close.

The KitchenAid KF8 looks fantastic, makes excellent coffee, is really easy to use, is simple to clean, and is as good as any machine in this price bracket. Pretty much the best result you could hope for.

The problem is that the KF7 and KF6 are also excellent, produce just as good coffee and milk, and are cheaper. Okay, so there are more drinks, the plant-based milk setting, and the large touch screen.

But if you’re someone who loves lattes with cow’s milk, espresso, or Americano, then the KF6 will do just as good a job for you at nearly half the price.

(Read next: KitchenAid KF6 review)

So the conclusion from our KitchenAid KF8 review is that it’s good, but the other KitchenAid machines are much better value for money.

Don’t forget to buy your KitchenAid KF8 On Amazon

Matt Woodburn-Simmonds

Matt's coffee obsession started in 2006 when working as a Barista. A tendency to turn up to work hungover kickstarted his coffee journey which quickly turned into a love affair. As he moved on to work as a Restaurant Manager and Sommelier, the obsession continued to grow. Now, his passion is helping others to enjoy better coffee at home.