What we bought: The Outin Portable Espresso Machine keeps me caffeinated anywhere

Wait, so I’m supposed to get in my car, commute to some hoighty toighty coffee store, find and pay for parking, then wait in line to pay $3 for a few tablespoons of mediocre hot pressed bean juice served to me in a paper cup? Why would I do that when I can just walk my lazy ass to my kitchen and brew up a single piping-hot serving of concentrated coffee in under 5 minutes from the $150 Outin mobile espresso maker?

I stumbled across the Outin (which keeps autocorrecting to Putin so not great branding) on Amazon while doing research for an upcoming Holiday Gift Guide and turns out that there are a shocking number of mobile, battery-powered caffeinated beverage brewers on the market these days. I was drawn to the Outin because, unlike a vast majority of available models, it handles both coffee pods (specifically, of the Nespresso variety) and ground espresso — you simply have to swap out the pod holder for small container about half the size of a film canister that holds the ground coffee. It does both hot and cold brew too. The well-equipped Outin starter pack comes with a coffee scoop, among myriad other accessories sleeves, and carrying cases, that is perfectly fitted to both fill and tamp down the grounds into the canister.

The actual brewing process gets a bit complicated as the Outin is built like a Russian nesting doll. You have to fill the canister with coffee grounds, tamp those down, snap on a perforated lid, drop the now-sealed canister in a larger mounting cup, screw that into the bottom of the heating unit before sliding the receptacle cup over the mounting cup to catch the coffee when it is extruded – where are you going there are still more steps – then pour exactly 70 ml of water into the upper chamber (gods help you if you overfill), put a cap on that, then hold the control button down for at least two seconds – but less than four, otherwise you get cold brew – and wait three to four minutes for the water to heat to 270 degrees F. From there, the Outin will automatically begin pushing said hot water through the coffee-filled pod at 20 bar pressure, but won’t stop until it runs out of batteries or you press the control button again.

Ooh, that reminds me: batteries. The Outin has 7800mAh of them and that still isn’t nearly enough. It takes around 45 minutes to fully charge the device from dead using the included USB-C cable. You get three cups of espresso out of that (four if you’re lucky) before another three-quarters hour on the charger is required.

Also, I’m not a fan of having to memorize yet another obtuse sequence of button presses to get this thing to work because the designers thought they’d be clever and save money by having a single command input control everything. I’ve already had to commit to memory the patterns for a dozen various vape pens and desktop rigs, LED flashlights and household gadgets. It’s all too much so I wind up just pushing the button on this and swearing until something happens. Hell no I’m not reading the instructions, I’m an adult.

That said, espresso that makes me go “meh, at least I didn’t have to drive to get it” is still better than the alternative of “no espresso.” Plus, it’s leagues superior to the stuff I normally drink in hotel rooms while on assignment. I’m certainly not dragging this thing and its menagerie of lids-that-are-as-easily-lost-as-they-are-essential-to-the-device’s-proper-operation anywhere near the great outdoors, but I could see myself using it to pregame before working livestream events or press conferences. Maybe I’ll caffeinate myself to the point of oscillation in three-shot bursts for the duration of CES 2023.