Atomi Smart Coffee Maker with Grinder review: Master the basics

Coffee being the most essential nutrient to humankind, smart coffee makers are rapidly becoming required hardware for anyone seeking to thrive in the 21st Century. But “smart” is a relative term, and it’s challenging to find a machine that strikes the ideal balance between cost, convenience, and capability. The Atomi Smart Coffee Maker with Grinder delivers competent, if conventional, drip coffee production with solid automation and app connectivity.

With a built-in conical burr grinder, this simple brewer will take you from conception to consumption with a tap in the app on your smartphone, so long as you remember to empty and clean the filter, and pre-fill the beans cup and water reservoir. At its $300 price point, that’s very solid automation, eschewing some of the fancier self-cleaning and water-hookup features found on smart brewers in the higher price ranges.

For those who want straightforward control when it’s time to brew via the app, this machine is a good fit. Those looking for more intelligent control over the grind and brew settings via their app, on the other hand, will want to look into a higher-end option.

It’s worth noting at the outset that Atomi isn’t primarily in the coffee-maker business. The company produces a wide range of smart home devices, all of which are controlled by the same mobile app. So this brewer is intended to fit into a suite of other devices in your home, from lighting and smart plugs to space heaters and aroma diffusers. Considering coffee isn’t Atomi’s main focus, the coffee maker itself is well made and performed well across a couple months of testing under daily use.

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Does the Atomi Smart brew good coffee?

The Atomi Smart Coffee Maker and Grinder is intelligently designed. The construction is relatively solid compared to other brewers at this price, and we liked the look and feel of the components–with the exception of the plastic grind control knob on the top of the brewer, which looks and feels cheap compared to the rest of the device. 

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

While the bean hopper is on the small side, it holds enough beans for several full 12-cup brew cycles. The burr grinder itself is extremely noisy, though. Setting the machine to brew first thing in the morning, we found the whirring of the burrs loud enough to ensure we wake up to go drink the coffee while it’s fresh. If you’re hoping to let the rest of the household sleep while you prepare your morning brew, you’ll want to skip the grinder and put pre-ground beans directly into the filter, which is an option. You can control the size of the grind via the aforementioned 8-position plastic knob atop the machine. We found the knob solid enough in its function, and it held its position well in daily use. What we would have preferred, however, is a software-controlled grind adjustment, rather than a manual knob.

The Atomi app does give you three options to control the strength of your brew. Setting it to Mild, Medium, or Strong adjusts the volume of beans to be ground into the filter. So between the manual knob and the Brew Strength setting, you can fine tune to suit the beans you’re brewing. 

The machine comes with a gold cone filter, which resides behind a door on the front of the machine. To access it, you press a silver button on the side of the device, which pops the door open. The filter is capped with a splash guard, which helps keep the inside of the machine fairly clean from brew to brew, and which you’ll need to rinse off along with the filter itself between brews.

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Filling the 12-cup water reservoir is somewhat awkward due to the position of the reservoir at the back of the machine. The flap that covers the reservoir is fairly narrow, leading to spills during refills, and we had to pull the machine out from under the cabinetry each time. Fortunately, the machine is lightweight, so this is no great strain. Surprisingly for a $300 brewer, there is no filter for the water reservoir, so you might prefer to use pre-filtered water for brewing to minimize mineral buildup in the machine.

How smart is the Atomi Smart Coffee Maker?

What makes the Atomi Smart Coffee Maker and Grinder smart is its mobile app, which connects to Alexa and Google Assistant for voice control when your phone isn’t handy. The primary value of the app for this brewer is setting up timed brews. Before bed, you can fill the bean hopper and water reservoir, check the filter and grind control knob, and then use the app to set the time, strength, and volume to brew.

The app gives you options for recurring brew schedules, so you can have it automatically brew every morning at wakeup time. But given that you must manually prepare the beans and water anyway, we found it better to just set it each time. That way we didn’t have to worry about the machine trying to brew from an empty water reservoir or hopper if we’d forgotten to fill them or–worse–grinding fresh beans into yesterday’s grinds in the filter if we’d forgotten to clean it. The app does know if the water reservoir is empty, so it won’t brew from an empty tank, though we were never able to get it to detect a full 12 cups in our tests–it consistently detected 12 cups as 10.

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

Robert Strohmeyer / Foundry

For brewing on demand, we liked the Atomi Smart’s simple one-touch brewing on the machine itself. Some smart brewers take the app control a step too far, forcing you to use the app to do a basic brew. This one is easy-peasy. If you’re already standing at the machine, just press the Brew button on the front and it goes to work.

Atomi offers a good smart coffee maker for the money

Ultimately, the Atomi Smart Coffee Maker and Grinder is a very competent option in smart brewing. It’s reliable, produces good heat, and grinds well. It’s a one-trick pony in that it only does conventional drip coffee, but those looking for easy programming and fresh grinds in the morning drip will find this machine adequate to the task.

If you prefer something that does espresso, cold brew, and drip, with self-cleaning capabilities and a tap-water hookup, you’ll have to spend considerably more on something like the Spinn Coffee Maker.