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The xBloom Studio: Competition-Level Pour Over on Autopilot

I almost titled this post “The Super Auto of the Pour Over World,” but that felt like a bit of a dig, and the xBloom Studio doesn’t deserve being based like that. Don’t get me wrong: super automatics are impressive machines. They’ll make you a perfectly decent, drinkable espresso every morning without complaint unless you pressed the single button too hard. But there’s a ceiling, and no amount of money spent gets you past it. That’s just a fact with bean to cup espresso machines.

The xBloom Studio has no such ceiling. It produces competition-worthy pour over, the kind of cup that makes you stop, mid-sip, and reflect on your life choices.

If anything, it’s the super auto that super automatics wish they could be.

The xBloom Studio, in Sage Green, after initial setup on the counter. Reservoir (small!), Omni Dripper installed, pod holder in gold on the side.

What Exactly is the xBloom Studio?

The xBloom Studio is a $600, fully automated, single cup pour over brewer that handles the entire process from whole bean to finished cup. It weighs, it grinds, it blooms, it pours, with a level of repeatability and precision that a human hand simply cannot match at seven in the morning. You load your beans, select your preset, and walk away. That’s the workflow, if you want it to be.

Packed into a pleasingly compact (but tall) countertop footprint is a 48mm conical burr grinder with 80 grind settings, a variable temperature kettle, a precision scale accurate to a tenth of a gram, and a kinematic vibrating pouring arm that executes your brew recipe with mechanical precision. Our test unit is the new Sage Green with gold accents model, and it is a proper looker. This is a machine you leave on the counter because you want people to notice it. Heck, this could be a machine you design your kitchen around, or at least your coffee nook.

Here’s the xBloom set up with an external reservoir (a 27 cup Brita water filter system) with a minor hack to the Brita to “plumb in” the Studio machine. We also use a coffee cellar with pre-measured doses of coffee.

Three tactile, knurled front knobs handle control, governing the grinder, brewer, and scale respectively. No touchscreen, just a bank of LED dots the Studio uses with a refined layout. The companion app is where you build and transmit custom brew profiles to the machine via Bluetooth, but once your presets are loaded, the app steps back and the knobs take over.

A major firmware update some time back brought the much-lauded “auto mode” to the machine, giving you a bank of 3 programmable presets for true one-touch operation of hyper-customized recipes. Once these are programmed in, you won’t need your phone on hand to craft competition-level coffee.

The three knurled metal control dials on the xBloom Studio – they rotate and press. Grinder component on the left, the pour spout on the right. The scale is one of the new things on the Studio machine, and it is very accurate and useful. The grind settings listed under the reservoir flap. Ignore the espresso settings. The sliding door on top where you pour in your whole bean coffee. The back of the machine showing the power plug, reservoir, and where you can plumb the machine in.

Beyond all the pour over magic happening inside, the Studio moonlights as an on demand variable temperature kettle (up to 203F or “BP” for boiling point), a standalone precision scale, and a capable grinder handling up to 30g for brew methods like Chemex, AeroPress, and siphon. Tea drinkers are looked after too, with an optional filter holder supporting steep times up to six minutes and multi temperature control in a single cycle. (we might be getting one to include in our full review; if so, it will be the first time we review anything tea-based on CoffeeGeek!)

One caveat worth flagging now: despite the manufacturer’s claims, the grinder cannot go fine enough for espresso. Tested and confirmed. But it does a pleasing grind for most other brew methods, with a maximum grinder-only capacity of around 30g. 

The Studio was built around xBloom’s own xPod ecosystem, pre-dosed specialty coffee from top tier roasters, each paired with a custom NFC recipe card. But it works equally well with whatever beans you bring to it, and we’ll dig into all of that properly in a later section.

The xBloom Studio retails at $599 USD, or $799-$849 CAD depending on your distributor. Amazon USA occasionally drops it to $549 with a coupon, so it’s worth watching.

Using the xBloom Studio: The Workflow

If you set up your three Auto Mode presets and never open the phone app again, you will still be making comp-level pour over every single morning. That’s the point. Load your beans, tap your preset, walk away. The machine handles the grind, the bloom, the pour sequence, and the shutoff. Three presets live directly in hardware memory, selectable from the front knobs, categorized by default for light, medium, and dark roasts out of the box (after a firmware update), but fully customizable to whatever you want them to be. It is truly the closest thing to a super auto workflow that filter coffee has ever had.

The Preset mode, with A, B, and C selected. You can still do some minor adjustments or just press the corresponding dial, and press the “play” symbol that shows up next.

Step off Auto Mode and into Pro Mode, and the machine opens up considerably without ever needing your phone. Using the three front knobs you can independently set your 80-click grind settings, your target water temperature, your water volume, your coffee dose, and your pour pattern, choosing between static centre, circular, or spiral pours. The Studio is a capable standalone brewer by any measure. The one thing you cannot program solely via the machine are stages or steps in the brewing process, you do need the app for that.

The pro mode display, showing controls for grinder settings, water, and using the scale.

The companion app is where the xBloom Studio stops being impressive and starts being a bit ridiculous, in the best way. Here you can build multi-step brew recipes with individual temperature settings, pour patterns, and pause times for each step. Flow rate is adjustable between 3.0 and 3.5ml per second, which is one of several advanced features the physical knobs on the front of the machine cannot touch. Once built, recipes transmit to the machine via Bluetooth and can be saved as presets. The rabbit hole here is deep, and the xBloom community has gone enthusiastically down it.

The app, in use; even when using pods with the NFC cards, the app gives you a live view of the active brew.

If all of that sounds like more than you signed up for, the xPod workflow exists for exactly that reason. Drop a pod into the included metal xPod ring holder, tap the NFC recipe card against the machine sensor, and the Studio reads the roaster’s own dialled-in recipe and gets to work. No grinder settings, no temperature decisions, no pour patterns to think about. The roaster did that work for you, and these are not corner-cutting roasters. More on that shortly.

xBloom xPods, with the included NFC card, which you just tap the top of the machine with to get the preset recipe.

Three rapid presses of the centre knob toggle the machine between Auto and Pro Mode, which is also how you access the hot water function. In Pro Mode, the Studio dispenses water at any temperature up to 203F, plus boiling point on demand, useful for French press, siphon, a Nextlevel Pulsar brew, or just a proper cup of tea without the optional filter holder. Bear in mind you will lose around 10-15°F between the water pour spout and your cup.

And while you are in there, the grinder is fully available as a standalone unit for your Chemex, AeroPress, siphon, or any other brew method outside of espresso.

Basically if you don’t do espresso, the xBloom Studio will quietly, and elegantly, replace every other device that lived on your counter for brewing coffee and tea.

A Bit about the xPods

Here’s where xBloom could have gone full corporate yet didn’t. The machine was conceived from the start as both a brewer and a supply chain, with the xPod ecosystem as the revenue engine. A less scrupulous company would have locked the hardware down tight, maybe even engineered a proprietary filter design just to keep you buying their filter papers.

xBloom went the other direction. You can use any coffee you want, and the Omni Dripper 2 filter holder is specifically engineered to easily use the widely available Kalita Wave 155 filters. This is worth recognizing, and applauding.

The xPod side of things is worth your attention regardless, and not just as a convenience play. xBloom partnered with many top tier American roasters to stock their lineup, and each pod ships with an NFC recipe card dialled in specifically for that coffee by the people who roasted it. It’s an excellent, seasonal exploration service for finding roasters and flavour profiles you might not have stumbled across otherwise. Their seasonal sampler boxes are little bundles of daily discovery joy.

8 pack of xPods from xBloom; it also includes an NFC card for you to tap the machine with.

And if you want to support what they’re doing while using your own sourced coffee, their own filter papers are worth picking up too. They’re not significantly more expensive than Kalita Wave 155s, are specifically engineered for the Studio’s modus, and buying them acknowledges that xBloom left some easy money on the table.

Concluding Thoughts, for Now

The xBloom Studio is a rare thing: a structurally pleasing piece of coffee hardware that delivers on its ambition without asking you to compromise on the things that actually matter. It is precise, it is flexible, it is beautiful on a counter, and it produces the kind of pour over that makes you reconsider every shortcut you have ever taken with your morning coffee.

At $599 USD on Amazon ($799 to $899 CAD depending on where you land it), it is not an impulse buy. But it is a considered one. xPods run $17 to $28 USD for an eight-pack depending on the roaster and the rarity of the beans, and the seasonal offerings are worth budgeting for. Keep an eye on Amazon USA as well, where the machine occasionally drops to $549 with a coupon.

We are just getting started with the xBloom Studio here. The full review is coming, and it is going to be thorough. We will be testing grind quality, grind speed, water temperatures, repeatability, and more advanced territory like plumb-in options, descaling, and grinder cleaning. In fact, three weeks from this publication date we have one of our focus groups scheduled here in Victoria, and the Studio is going to be the primary star of that hands-on testing by some serious coffee nerds.

If this introduction left you curious, the full review is going to leave you with a decision to make. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the xBloom Studio, or own one and want to share your thoughts, our comments section is at your service below. Please feel free to jump in.

#automatic #pourOver #pourover #superAuto #xbloom #xbloomStudio