Fellow's Gorgeous Espresso Machine Is $200 Off Right Now

The Fellow Espresso Series 1, our current pick for the best espresso machine, is $200 off for Amazon Prime Day. If you were on the fence, this will be the best price you’re likely to get until the end of the year. If you’re looking for more info, keep on reading for my full Series 1 review.

Fellow

Espresso Series 1

Amazon

Fellow

Williams Sonoma

I have to be up front about something: I’ve become a Fellow stan. I’ve been testing coffee gear from the California brand for five years, and I’ve seen them master a very specific niche in a very crowded landscape. The brand’s equipment will both hold your hand tightly through a completely directed brewing experience and offer up as much customization as anything out there—meaning a complete novice will be able to brew as good a cup of coffee as any java nerd.

Cramming the features necessary to make a user experience feel as personalized as it is straightforward can be tricky with something as simple as a scale or an electric kettle, but Fellow has tackled the much larger challenge with its first espresso machine.

If you’re an espresso novice, the Series 1 gives you the option to just lock in the portafilater, push a button, and walk away. In that way it operates similar to the Breville and De’Longhi machines that have come to dominate kitchen counters in the last 10 years. The default setting will pull a shot, starting with a low pressure pre-infusion, then ramping up to 9 bars over the course of about 35 seconds. If that sounds like it involves more thought than you want to put into your coffee, the TL;DR is that it will pull what is essentially a textbook shot.

But if you want to tinker with your morning coffee, you can change the times for pre-infusion and shot length and alter the shot volume and pressure settings. It also comes with a range of presets for different roast levels (higher temperature, higher water-to-coffee ratio for light roast; slightly lower pressure for dark roast, for example). Like the pressure profile of a manual lever espresso machine? You can get that too.

This is similar to the approach Fellow took with its Aiden drip coffee maker in 2024, offering up a “guided brew” option with temperature and time presets designed to mimic pour-over coffee while allowing users to set all of their own parameters if they want to.

Much of the secret sauce in the Series 1 comes down to its heating technology, what the brand is calling a “boosted boiler.” Instead of using the slow heat up of a standard boiler or the remarkably fast but somewhat less stable thermojet that’s all over mid-priced machines, the Series 1 pulls a bit from both camps. A low thermal mass heater essentially preheats water incredibly quickly before it goes to hang out in the boiler, then a final heat controller at the group head (the part of the machine where the water comes out) stabilizes everything. As a result, this machine is ready to brew much faster than its competitors. The machine that featured on my own counter for years, the Lelit MaraX, takes somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes before it can pull a shot (and it will pull a better one if you can let the temperature stabilize for more than 20). The Series 1 was good to go about two minutes after I flipped the on switch. To account for some of the temperature stabilization issues on start up, it also makes adjustments to the volume of water and brew temperature for the first couple shots. Changing those offsets to your own preferences are yet another bit of customization the Series 1 offers.

The steam wand is chunky, easy to manipulate, and comes with a thermistor built into it. That measures the temperature of the milk in real time and shuts the steam off once it’s hit the mark for flat whites and cappuccinos, which call for slightly different temperatures to get the right foam texture; 135℉ for a flat white, 140℉ for a cappuccino. I prefer this set up to the automatic milk steaming that Breville has mastered in recent years because it actually lets you develop a feel for the process.

Finally, like all of Fellow’s products, the Series 1 looks good on the counter. Lots of high-end home espresso machines have an industrial style—all stainless steel and black plastic. The Series 1 comes in a few colors (black, red, and a light chocolate brown) and has a distinct fancy coffee shop aesthetic to it. It’s a bit wider than most home machines, so you will have to give over a bit of counter space to it, but it’s squat enough to nestle it under your top cabinets.

What’s it like to use the Fellow Espresso Series 1 every day?

After being hands on with the Series 1 for weeks (it has indeed taken a little while for inventory to come online), I’m as impressed with the ease of brewing as I was when I first got test one out. Dialing in shots across all the profiles is sped along with the machine’s feedback (that it produces based on the extraction time of a shot). It’s also the first espresso maker I’ve tested that I was able to put in front a totally new user and have them figure out almost immediately.

Espresso has been consistently tasty and customizable as I’ve cycled through different shot profiles, and it fits seamlessly into my daily routine.

It isn’t a perfect machine, though. The steam wand, despite the thermistor that is supposed to help produce perfect texture every time, has taken more practice to consistently master than I expected. If I do not position the pitcher just so, I end up with unevenly steamed, thin milk. It also made a meaningful difference if I neglected to correctly set the type of milk I was using (if you’re using oat milk, don’t use the dairy setting).

The last thing to know is that, if you have some experience with prosumer espresso machines, you will notice the Series 1 is less heavy, less substantial than some you might be familiar with. Setting it side by side with my old Lelit MaraX, the Series 1 plastic pieces were apparent. But I look at that as the main trade-off of the Series 1. It’s priced on the low-end for prosumer espresso machine (even less expensive right now that it’s on sale), but it has technology built into it that seems like it could command a higher price. It seems to balance that tech with the build of the machine in a way that makes it more affordable. None of that is to say that it feels “cheap”; it doesn’t. And my experience with Fellow equipment is that it’s reliable for years. The Aiden drip coffee maker, which I also use almost every day, is similar: It feels like a light, plastic coffee maker, but it’s shown almost no signs of wear after use.

My final verdict

The Fellow Espresso Series 1 sits right in the sweet spot for someone who isn’t yet an espresso expert but strives to get better and wants to drink good coffee every day while they do. It’s more fun than something like Breville’s Oracle Jet that does all the work for you (and is also more expensive). And, if this is your thing, it’ll add a bit of flair to you counter too.