Philips Series 5500 LatteGo EP5546/70 Coffee Machine review: a dream machine for custom coffees

The Philips Series 5500 LatteGo is a fully automatic bean to cup coffee machine, designed to make it easy to create hot and iced coffees at the touch of a button. It starts quickly and runs quietly. It also has an Extra Shot feature that can turbo-charge your coffee without also adding a bitter aftertaste. It comes with a companion app that can give you extra recipes and step-by-step instructions, so if you're looking to make espresso martinis and mojitos there's lots of fun to be had with that.

The big selling point here is the LatteGo milk system, which delivers smooth, frothy milk (including plant-based milks) without the mess or clean-up of some frother attachments.

If you need to share your coffee machine with others, you'll like the customisation options here. Not only can you store your settings for each individual coffee, but you can have four different profiles for four different people. There's also a fifth profile for guests.

Less excitingly but just as important for your everyday happiness, the Philips is easy to clean and doesn't require descaling as frequently as some rivals. Let's get into the full review for all the details...

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: price and availability

The Philips Series 5500 LatteGo EP5546/70 Bean to Cup Coffee Machine has an RRP of £649.99 and is available in the UK from retailers including Currys and Amazon.

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: features

The Series 5500 can make over 20 different drinks including not just the obligatory espressos, lattes and cappuccinos but also cold brew and iced coffee. You can also get additional recipes via Philips' phone app, such as coffee-based cocktails. Each recipe tells you exactly what options you need to select on your LatteGo before chucking in booze, cream or whatever other ingredients the recipe asks for. Although it's a bean to cup machine it has a small bit where you can add pre-ground coffee instead.

The 5500 supports four individual profiles and can save coffee specs for each, so for example my big, strong morning coffees were saved to my Yellow profile while other family members' smaller, less strong drinks were saved to their profiles without messing with mine. 

There's very extensive customisation for each coffee option: five brew strength settings, quantity, temperature and Extra Shot, which Philips says delivers "an added kick without the bitterness". And you can also customise the machine itself with eco-friendly options that vary the illumination brightness and auto shut-off. You don't need to go into the settings if you don't want to, but there's enough customisation here for even the pickiest coffee fiend like me.

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: design

At first glance it looks like the LatteGo has an enormous TFT touchscreen, but on closer inspection you'll see that you're looking at a grid of photorealistic illuminated buttons with a small display in the lower centre. The button illumination is very bright, although you can dim it if you wish. I liked it because there was no problem seeing what was selected even in bright sunlight – an issue I have with my own coffee maker.

Although it's made of plastic the 5500 looks expensive thanks to sensible colour choices and good use of curves. It looks smaller than it actually is despite having a 1.8L water tank, built in grinders and a built in milk frother. The frother snaps into the front of the machine and is easy to remove and dismantle for cleaning.

That frother is one of the key selling points here. Like many premium coffee makers the milk system has its own reservoir and attaches directly to the Philips – no need to run a pipe into an external container – but unlike some rivals' designs it's exceptionally simple with no place for milk to hide and curdle. It's also dishwasher safe, so no fiddly manual cleaning here. However, the placement of its spout means that some milk remains there after the drink has been made, requiring a quick rinse before re-use.

Another pain point that Philips has addressed is descaling, which is a real irritant with my own coffee machine: despite living in the softest of soft water areas my own machine demands far too frequent descaling and refuses to make coffee if I don't descale quickly enough for its liking. Philips has an optional alternative, a £13 micro-porous AquaClean water filtration cartridge that means you shouldn't need to descale until you've made around 5,000 cups. It should improve the taste in harder water areas too.

The grounds container is deep enough that you won't be constantly emptying it, and the drip tray is a good size too: not so small you'll fill it fast and not big enough to become too heavy when full.

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: performance

The 5500 LatteGo is fast. From a cold start with the highest coffee temperature selected it took just 24 seconds for the first coffee of the day to start pouring; even our morning jet fuel, a 200ml cup of very strong coffee with an extra shot, was done in a minute and a half. It's relatively quiet too, so much so that it's been awarded Quiet Mark certification.

If you're as fussy as I am it takes a little bit of tweaking to get your coffee perfect; my tastes tend towards the rocket fuel when it comes to brew strength and I like my coffee to be hot rather than warm. I didn't encounter any problems customising the coffee types to suit, adjusting the grind size or adjusting the auto shut-off so it stayed on long enough for my first few coffees of the working day. 

The LatteGo system is very impressive. It uses cyclonic frothing to deliver very smooth milk foam (I used cow's milk but it works with plant-based milks too) and delivers it quickly without making a mess, although some milk does remain in the spout post-pouring. Just watch when you take it apart for cleaning, as any leftover milk will have pooled in the section you'll be unclipping.

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: value

With an RRP of £649 this isn't cheap, although it does come in at a lower price than some similarly smart rivals. You get a lot of features for the money, and there's a two-year guarantee.

The closest rivals (see below) are all slightly or significantly more expensive than the Philips, but if you don't need the fancy features and extensive options of these do-everything designs then of course you can get a perfectly good if less entertaining bean to cup machine for about half the price. But it'll probably be half the fun.

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: verdict

Whether the Philips Series 5500 is worth the expense really depends on your personal circumstances: if you're looking for something simple to make espresso or long coffees then this multi-talented machine is clearly overkill. But if you're looking for something quiet, clever, customisable and suitable for families, flat shares or for entertaining then the flexibility and customisability – and the relatively mess-free operation and effortlesss cleanability compared to more traditional-looking machines – of the Philips justify the premium price. 

If like me you've lusted after the highest of high-end fully automated bean to cup coffee machines but can't afford the price tag, Philips has delivered a very impressive coffee maker for a fraction of the cost. I liked it a lot: it makes great coffee and it's great fun to experiment with.

Philips Series 5500 LatteGo review: alternatives to consider

The De'Longhi Rivelia is another high-tech funhouse of a coffee machine, although the distinctly odd design is likely to dismay as many people as it delights. There's no denying its capabilities, though: like the Philips it's capable of making pretty much anything. However, it costs a little more than the Philips: expect to pay around £750.

T3 hasn't tested the £895 Jura E6, but I have tested its five-star sibling, the Jura E8. That's an astonishingly good if very expensive coffee machine; the E6 loses some of the higher-end features such as twin grinders but is a mighty machine nevertheless.

T3 thinks the Sage Barista Touch Impress is the best bean to cup coffee maker right now, but it's more of a traditional espresso machine than the high-tech Philips. It's a beautiful thing and makes wonderful coffee but it's also much more expensive with a typical street price of £1,199.