JURA C9 Review

Around the office I’m known as the “JURA Guy” and it’s a nickname I’m happy to own. JURA has produced some of my favorite super-automatic espresso machines and they keep us on our toes with frequent innovations and model updates. The subject of this review, the new JURA C9 espresso machine (and JURA’s new C-Series as a whole), is firmly in the “shaking things up” camp and delivers an all-new brewing mode known as “Light Extraction Process” (L.E.P.) that surprised me quite a bit when I first heard about it. On top of that, the C9 breaks from a long held convention by JURA for their compact machines with the inclusion of a full sized 5-16g brew group. It’s also a great machine to look at, but we’ll get into that in just a bit.

First Impressions

One of the first things I noticed about the C9 was its design, in particular the curved facade from the front panels. Just like the ENA series machines it replaces, the C9 is very stylish. The front panels on the C9 feature a “concave-convex” design that was first introduced on the JURA Z10, one of their premium espresso machines, several years ago. It refers to the fact that at the base where the panel meets the drip tray, there is an inward curve where your cup sits. Tracing the panels upwards, they elegantly curve out up towards the screen

At just 10.2” wide, the C9 is actually 0.5” narrower than the ENA series machines that it replaces. This is largely due to the elimination of the ENA series asymmetrical design which had a freestanding water tank positioned on the right side of the machine. Surprisingly, the C-Series machines actually manage to increase the water tank capacity to 54oz over the ENA’s 37.2oz, putting them squarely between Gaggia's Cadorna and Magenta machines at 50.7oz and 60oz respectively. In the back of the machine, the bean hopper holds a little under half a pound of whole beans at 7oz so you'll want to keep an eye on it to make sure you don't run out of beans while brewing.

The Interface

On the topic of the display, the C9 has a full color LCD display with four analog buttons, two on either side of the screen to select drinks and make programming changes and another two for menu navigation. In my opinion, this back to basics approach is a major upgrade over the touchscreen used on the JURA ENA 8 that the C9 replaces. The buttons provide clean, unambiguous control over brewing and programming.

The top row of buttons is used to brew and program drinks with an image of the corresponding beverage next to the button on the display. Pressing the button will prepare the drink, while pressing and holding will enter the programming menu to make changes to its settings. The bottom left button is dedicated to selecting your desired brewing mode, Classic Hot Extraction or Light Extraction. You can also press and hold the button as a shortcut to access the machine’s cockpit menu to address maintenance alerts and program additional settings. The bottom right button is used to navigate between menu screens both for drink selection and in programming.

Brewing on the C9

When brewing a drink, if you’ve never used a JURA espresso machine you’ll be surprised by how fast and how quiet it is. Pressing the button next to your desired drink’s icon on the screen will begin brewing. Like all JURA machines, the C9 does give you a brief window at the start of your shot to modify your coffee strength via the menu buttons. While you technically can modify the strength, the grinder is so fast that it’s typically a race against time to make changes before the machine begins brewing your shot. You can likewise modify the volume of your drink while it’s dispensing and skip ahead during various phases of multi-step drinks like milk drinks.

For drink customization, you can set coffee strength in 10 increments (from 5-16g) and one of three temperature settings. Using the temperature logger, I took the temperatures of coffee brewed at Light Extraction, Low, Normal, and High settings to get an average range for the extraction temperatures. The results looked something like this:

The C3 and C9 both use a 7 step, conical steel burr grinder known as the Professional Aroma Grinder. As I mentioned it’s very fast and very quiet and ultimately one of the things that truly defines the experience of brewing with a JURA espresso machine. All espresso drinks on the C3 and C9 use JURA’s Pulse Extraction Process which is a unique pulsed brewing cycle reserved for low volume extractions.

Light Extraction Process

The Light Extraction Process is easily the most interesting feature of the C9. When selected, Light Extraction will dramatically lower brew temperature down to 140° and reduce the coffee dose by 10%. According to JURA, the intent behind L.E.P. is to produce milder coffee that’s immediately drinkable. What’s interesting is the implication behind not just serving the coffee at a lower temperature, but brewing it as well. This is what intrigued me the most from a purely “coffee” perspective.

I tested L.E.P. with both light (Ethiopia Limmu) and medium (Crema Wave) roasted coffees as both espresso and long coffee. One thing I noticed that was actually a nice plus when selecting the Light Brew World option (yes, that is how it’s presented) is that you can independently program the light brew drinks with their own unique settings, meaning you can essentially create an entire second menu to suit your tastes.

Brew Temperature Testing

Having prepared myself a number of drinks with the Light Extraction Process, it was obvious that they were significantly lower in temperature than what I was used to on JURA espresso machines. That wasn't enough to satisfy my curiosity however so I borrowed our temperature logger from Marc and took temperature readings at the spouts and in a variety of cups for both Light Extraction coffee and regular as well.

For my test I used three cups: Paper solo cups from our kitchen, Kinto CAST Milk Cups, and Kinto SCS 400ml Mugs.

I was aiming to select cups that were more or less the size and shape of what you’d find in the average American cupboard (albeit a little fancier). For testing I brewed three back-to-back coffees at default 5oz volume and at maximum brew strength (16g) and the finest grind setting using light extraction process. All of the cups were at room temperature. I used two probes, one to capture the temperature of the coffee at the spouts and another to capture the temperature at the bottom of the cup. I took the temperatures 10 seconds after the brew cycle completed and recorded them in the table below.

As you can see from the results of my testing, brewing into a larger ceramic mug can reduce your in-cup temperature as low as 111°F. Brewing multiple back-to-back cups did result in climbing temperatures as a consequence of heating the thermoblock and coffee circuit. This was reflected in temperatures both at the spouts and in the cup.

Getting the Most Out of L.E.P.

Because L.E.P. dispenses coffee that’s significantly cooler than usual for a super-automatic, I found that there are some ways to optimize the extractions in order to make the best use of this feature.

Cup Selection Matters

Cup selection and coffee drinkability are pretty closely connected. Thick ceramic cups or metal travel mugs (especially ones that sit in cupboards with poor insulation) can rob a lot of heat from your coffee, resulting in a difference of around 10­° F in-cup. If your goal is to drink it immediately, selecting thinner walled cups like our KINTO CAST series that don’t absorb as much heat will keep your light extracted coffee hotter so you can still enjoy it.

Rinse First

Your mileage may vary a bit on this one based on your preferences, but a way to get around the lack of a hot water dispenser on the C9 is to use the rinse cycle as a way to pre-heat both the brew circuit and your cup. Now, I don’t mean to use your cup to catch the automatic rinse when you power the machine on, but instead, manually trigger a rinse via the cleaning menu. This will prompt the machine to heat the thermoblock and run water through the spouts to flush everything out.

I use a similar technique on Gaggia super-automatic espresso machines called pulling a “blank shot” which is where you select the pre-ground option when brewing a coffee and simply don’t add any coffee to the bypass chute. In the case of the C9, the machine recognizes that you don’t have any coffee in the brew group, so you can use the “rinse” technique as an alternative. In my testing using the KINTO SCS 400ml Mug, after running a rinse and swirling the water in the mug, the recorded in-cup temperature was 10° hotter at around 126°F. On the KINTO CAST mug, in-cup temps were closer to 132° after rinsing.

Avoid Light Roasts

My initial testing of L.E.P. used our Ethiopia Limmu single-origin as I was curious to see how it behaved when brewing at a lower temperature. I found that the acidity in such a light roast coffee wound up being a little too emphasized in-cup for my tastes, but that same coffee tasted just fine with regular extraction.

The Verdict on Light Extraction

After much testing, and more importantly many opinions from our team, ultimately I think that the Light Extraction Process is a nice addition to JURA’s repertoire of brewing options. Overwhelmingly people preferred the traditional hot brew when it came to simply pulling a shot to drink normally, but in the context of preparing a drink that you could toss back quickly, fans of light extraction began to emerge. The lower temperature was the key factor there, more so than the milder flavor with the argument being made that it brewed coffee that could be drunk in a hurry during a busy morning, or served to people with greater sensitivity to heat.

Brewing with Pre-Ground Coffee

Like most super-automatic espresso machines, the C9 is capable of brewing with pre-ground coffee via the bypass chute. The chute is accessed on the top left of the machine and features a hatch that slides back, allowing you to insert the ground coffee. There’s an included funnel that makes it easier to add your coffee, and the inner lining of the chute can be removed for easy cleaning.

However, unlike machines like the Z10 where brewing with pre-ground coffee can be permanently selected and saved for a customized version of a drink, the C9 has a dedicated option for brewing with pre-ground coffee called “Powder Mode.” The main issue I have is that it’s buried in several layers of menu and accessed via the main settings menu. Within the powder mode menu you can enable pre-ground brewing for a single drink (after which the machine reverts to using the grinder) or multiple drinks (in which case the machine remains ready to continue accepting pre-ground coffee). For what it’s worth, you can actually pull some great shots this way and the included funnel and scoop for dosing work very well. Your mileage may vary based on the quality of the coffee you put in, but here at the office I used our Beaned Up blend, freshly ground by an Anfim Alba and the results were very good.

Milk Drinks

For specialty milk beverages, the C9 has an integrated milk frother built into the main spout assembly. With a maximum clearance of 4.5” you fit most standard sized cups under it and you’ll appreciate it when brewing standard tall coffee drinks in general. Like all JURAs, milk is siphoned into the frother via a pickup tube that can be dropped into any kind of container with fresh milk or connected to any compatible JURA milk carafe accessory. There is only one milk texture (foam), and no option to adjust milk temperature like you find on higher-end JURA models or the ability to grind in an extra shot into your drink.

However, when they say “Foam” they really mean it. The frother on the C9 produces incredibly dense milk foam that floats on top of the beverage. That said, the Latte Macchiato the C9 still features JURA’s signature “pause” variable to program a delay that allows the layers of milk and milk foam to separate.

The menu of milk drinks includes: Cappuccino, Latte Macchiato, Flat White, Cortado, Macchiato, and Milk Foam.

In an unfortunate update over the ENA series machines that the C-Series replaces, neither the C3 nor the C9 have the ability to dispense hot water. I find this to be a pretty big omission on a machine that retails for more than $2,000.

Milk System Cleaning

Like all modern JURA machines, the C9 comes with a milk system cleaning attachment or “caddy” as I like to call them. This accessory connects to the milk system and creates a closed circuit for the machine to siphon milk cleaner into the frothing assembly and dispense it directly into a container for easy disposal. A key difference on the C9 is that with the absence of a hot water dispenser, the process is slightly less automated as you will have to manually combine the milk cleaning tablets with hot water and dissolve them to form a cleaning solution rather than the machine doing it for you.

The JURA C3

I’ve mentioned it several times throughout this review because while I was testing the C9, I was also hands-on with the new JURA C3 as well. The C3, like the C9, replaces a corresponding ENA series model, in this case being the ENA 4. Just like the ENA 4, the C3 is a “coffee only” machine with Espresso and Coffee being the only two options on the machines beverage menu. In terms of the design, it’s nearly indistinguishable from the C9 save for the screen, the buttons, and the absence of the integrated milk spout. Like the C9 now features a 5-16g brew unit, however, coffee strength can only be set to three aroma (AKA strength levels (mild, balanced and intense).

Compared to the ENA 4 which used icon based navigation like the Gaggia Brera, the C3 does feature an updated dot matrix screen with the ability to display color and text, and has a similarly oriented suite of 4 buttons to the C9. The C3 also features the same pre-ground functionality as the C9, requiring you to select it from the menu for either a single drink or multiple drinks.

From a coffee quality and aesthetic standpoint, the C3 looks great and brews simple, high quality coffee. You can program the Espresso between 0.5 and 2.5oz and the Coffee from 0.5oz all the way up to 8oz to prepare a full cup in one brew cycle. That said, some of the limitations of the C3 are something to consider when comparing pricewise to competing machines from Gaggia or De’Longhi where more robust programming and wider drink options are available.

ENA Series vs. C Series

To wrap things up with comparisons I figured I'd do a quick comparison of the older ENA machines that the C3 and C9 are replacing so you can get an idea of how things have changed with this new generation. I'm particularly impressed with the increased brew group size and larger water reservoir and bean hopper, despite the fact that the overall dimensions have remained relatively unchanged.

Final Thoughts

After spending some quality time with the C3 and the C9, I'm happy to say that the quality of the coffee they can prepare is consistently good and they retain my favorite JURA features in terms of things like beverage quality and fast and quiet grinding. The new design looks sharp and makes much better use of space than the old ENA series did and the inclusion of the 16g brew group on a compact machine is really appealing on a super-automatic.

The lack of a hot water dispenser and the somewhat niche appeal of the Light Extraction Process will matter more to some than others. On the other hand, the ease of maintenance and optional compatibility with JURA's J.O.E. app are great features to have. At the end of the day, if you want quality coffee, the C3 and the C9 both deliver.

Photography and Graphics by Grace Walker and Elley Ellison

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