A bean-to-cup machine should give your team café-quality coffee at the touch of a button. When the drinks taste bitter, sour or just flat, it's tempting to blame the machine, but most flavour problems come down to a handful of simple things you can fix yourself.
How to Improve the Coffee From a Bean-to-Cup Machine?
Start with the quick wins below, and if you're still not happy, we'll cover the deeper issues that need a professional to look at.
Start With The Quick Fixes
Occasionally, there may be fundamental issues with your office' bean-to-cup machine preventing it from brewing great tasting coffee. However, more often than not, there are easy fixes and changes you can make to instantly improve the flavour.
Before raising an issue with your coffee supplier or machine manufacturer, start here:
Use Fresh Coffee Beans
Coffee is at its best in the weeks after roasting. Once roasted, beans gradually lose the aromatic compounds that give coffee its sweetness and character, and older beans taste dull, papery or stale.
Always check the roast date on the bag (not just the best-before date) and aim to use your beans within the first month after roasting. Buying from a roaster who delivers regularly in smaller quantities is the easiest way to keep your office supply fresh.
Improve Your Water Quality
A cup of coffee is around 98% water, so the water you use has a huge effect on flavour. London and much of the UK sit in hard water areas, and hard water gets in the way of good extraction, muting the coffee's flavour.
A water filter reduces the hardness, giving you softer water that pulls out more of the coffee's natural sweetness and complexity. It also protects your machine from limescale build-up, which is one of the most common causes of breakdowns and poor performance.
Deep Clean the Machine
A dirty machine will spoil every drink. Coffee oils and milk residue build up inside, turning rancid and making your coffee taste bitter and stale.
Run the automatic cleaning cycles as recommended (usually daily for the milk system), and regularly empty the grounds bin and drip tray and clean the brew unit using the manufacturer's approved cleaning products.
Dial in the Coffee Recipe
Your machine's brewing settings, or "recipe", control how the coffee is extracted, and small changes can make a big difference. Your first port of call should be your coffee or machine supplier, who can often adjust the settings for you or talk you through it.
If you can change the settings yourself, start with the espresso, since it's the base of almost every drink. Assuming you're already using fresh beans and filtered water, taste it and adjust the grind:
If it tastes bitter, the coffee is over-extracted, so make the grind coarser.
If it tastes sour, the coffee is under-extracted, so make the grind finer.
Make one small adjustment at a time and taste again until the espresso is balanced and sweet.
Look At The Beans Themselves
If you're using fresh beans, have filtered water and have experimented with the recipe but still can't get good results, the beans themselves may be the problem. Coffee that stays bitter no matter what you do is often too dark a roast. Coffee that stays sour is often too light a roast, which bean-to-cup machines struggle to extract fully. In both cases, switching to a quality medium roast is usually the answer, as it's the roast profile best suited to bean-to-cup brewing.
Use Good Quality Milk
Most office drinks are milk-based, so the milk matters as much as the coffee. Make sure it's fresh and in date, and keep it properly chilled. Full-fat dairy milk gives the best texture and sweetness in a coffee machine. If your team prefers plant-based options, choose barista editions of non-dairy alternatives, which are specially formulated to foam and blend well with coffee.
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Adjust The Milk Recipes
If your machine lets you change the milk settings, it's worth getting them right. You're looking for smooth, glossy microfoam rather than big bubbles. A flat white and a latte should have a thin layer of foam on top, while a cappuccino should have a thicker, denser layer.
Keep an eye on temperature too. Once milk goes above around 75°C it starts to cook, giving a powdery texture and unpleasant flavours, so keep the temperature below this.
Time to Call In the Experts?
If you've worked through the quick fixes and your coffee still doesn't taste right, there's probably an underlying issue with the machine itself.
At this point, get in touch with your machine supplier or coffee roaster.
Common issues include:
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The grinder, where worn or faulty burrs grind the coffee unevenly, leading to uneven extraction and muddled flavours.
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Brewing temperature, where the machine runs too hot (causing bitterness) or too cold (causing sourness).
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Limescale, which restricts the flow of water through the coffee and affects both flavour and reliability.
These problems need a trained engineer to diagnose and fix, and regular servicing will help prevent them from coming back.
With all the quick fixes checked and performed, now the only possible option is to call in your coffee supplier's engineer department for support.
Great Workplace Coffee with Bridge Coffee Roasters
Since 1985, Bridge Coffee Roasters has helped businesses across the UK serve coffee their people genuinely look forward to. We bring together everything that goes into a great cup, so you don't have to manage it yourself.
We roast high-quality, medium-roast specialty coffee in-house, developed to taste its best in bean-to-cup machines, and deliver it fresh to your workplace. We supply and install commercial bean-to-cup machines matched to your office, treat your water supply at installation, and train your team to get the most from them. And with our engineer support and servicing plans, we'll keep your machine running smoothly and your coffee tasting great, day after day.
