The Gaggia Classic GT Dual-Boiler Review

The Gaggia Classic: an iconic, Italian-made espresso machine that’s inspired tens of thousands of aspiring home baristas, spawning a thriving online community of espresso enthusiasts. At the heart of its success are three essential qualities: reliability, performance, and value. 

Those same qualities come to you now, housed in a bigger, more powerful machine, equipped with modern features that place it at the forefront of consideration—not just for a Classic enjoyer looking to take their brewing game to the next level, but for anyone interested in the best-value prosumer dual-boiler there is. 

Ladies and gentlemen, at long last, the Gaggia Classic GT is here.

The excitement around the release of the GT has been strong, especially in our office. Does it live up to the hype? Does it deliver on the promise of nailing the nexus of performance, build quality, and value? Stick around for those answers and more as I give you a full tour of Gaggia’s very first dual-boiler espresso machine. 

The Gaggia Classic GT: An Overview

Out of the box, you might be forgiven for mistaking the GT for a Classic. And, in all honesty, you wouldn’t be too far off: deep inside, the GT still has the soul (and brew boiler) of a Classic, but it’s bigger, more powerful, more precise…and, of course, it’s got a dedicated steam boiler, too. 

Let’s take a look from the top down, starting with the ample 9.5” by 6” cup warming surface. “Warming,” in this instance, is a bit of an understatement. Due to its position directly above both boilers, this platform heats to 139°F—that’s hot. One thing’s for certain: if they’re sitting on your machine when you turn it on, you won’t need to worry about cold cups ruining the temperature of your espresso. 

On the very front of the GT’s upper face you’ll find a 2.4” color TFT display with a series of capacitive-touch buttons: the nerve center. On the main screen, the display shows the set brew boiler temperature in large, white font, as well as the set steam temperature in blue and, if the machine is heating, the current brew boiler temperature in yellow. You can adjust brew temperatures by pressing the + or - buttons, or enter the settings menu by pressing the gear. 

The settings menu gives you control over automated pre-infusion profiles, the wake-up timer, stand-by mode, eco mode, button sound toggling, temperature units, and steam boiler temperature. Let’s tackle these one by one. 

Automated Pre-Infusion

The GT has three pre-set pre-infusion profiles, which you can activate or deactivate by using the pre-infusion toggle on the front of the machine (more on that in a moment). Each profile is optimized for a particular roast level (light, medium, and dark) and includes a gentle, low-flow wetting of the puck at 3 grams per second, as well as a soaking time. Here’s how each of those presets shakes out: 

Wake-Up Timer

In this menu, you can set the GT’s internal clock (that’s the clock icon without the little squiggle lines) as well as program a time of day at which the machine will automatically power on. One thing worth noting, is that the GT doesn’t allow you to program this on a day-by-day basis. So, if the wake-up timer is enabled, the machine will turn on at that time every day of the week. 

Stand-By Mode

Rather than programming a time of day at which the machine should power off, the GT uses a stand-by setting, which shuts it down after a pre-determined period of inactivity, anywhere from 15 to 480 minutes. Of course, you can turn this feature off, and the machine will stay on perpetually.

Eco Mode

On the GT, the eco-mode shuts down the steam boiler entirely to conserve power. Pressing the steam or hot water toggles will deactivate this setting and turn the boiler back on. If you want to re-enable eco-mode, you can do so from the settings menu. 

Button Sound

Big surprise here—this one turns the button sounds on or off. I actually like the pleasant beeping the machine makes when the sound is enabled, especially with the capacitive touch interface. It’s a nice way to know for sure you actually pressed a button. 

Temperature Units

Another doozy for ya: this menu allows you to switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius on the GT’s display. 

Steam Temperature

The last menu allows you to set the temperature in the steam boiler to one of four presets: 248°F, 257°F, 266°F, or 275°F. The higher the temperature, the more steam power and pressure you’ll get for frothing. 

As a general rule, I prefer a tactile interface to capacitive-touch (don’t get me started on my love for the rubber buttons on Gaggia’s Cadorna). But, I’ve been using the GT for a while now and I’ve got to say, with the GT, Gaggia did the genre justice. These buttons remind me of the ones on the Ceado E37S, which is generally considered one of the finest pieces of grinding equipment known to mankind. The capacitive touch buttons on the GT are clear, responsive, and accurate—a gentle tap is all they need to react. And, despite how responsive they are, I’ve never mis-pressed one of them—not once.

But capacitive-touch buttons are not the only user interface on the GT. Moving down the front face of the machine, you’ll find a neat row of—not buttons, but toggle switches. This is an interesting choice from a design standpoint and one I don’t fully understand. But, one thing’s for sure: they are quite a lot of fun to press.  

These switches control the GT’s core functions. There’s one to power the machine on, one to control pre-infusion, one to start and stop brewing, one to dispense hot water, and one that toggles the steam boiler. The power switch is pretty self-explanatory: it turns the machine on and off. The rest, however, have some nuance that’s worth discussing. 

Manual Pre-Infusion

The pre-infusion toggle, when pressed, activates or deactivates the GT’s built-in pre-infusion function. But, it also allows you to do a manual pre-infusion at whatever timing you prefer. Press and hold to start the gentle wetting of the puck. You’ll see a timer displayed on the screen that counts how long the active pre-infusion has lasted. Release the switch when you’d like to start the soaking period, and another timer starts to time your bloom. 

When you’re ready to get your extraction started, press the brew switch and a third timer appears to time your extraction. I really like the way these times are all displayed on the screen—it’s really easy to keep track of everything as you’re working. Now, the one thing this feature doesn’t do is save custom pre-infusion profiles, so if you don’t want to adhere to one of the machine’s built-in presets, you’ll need to time your own for each extraction. But, all in all, this feature offers quite a lot of flexibility when it comes to how you brew, and you’d normally need a machine with an E61 group and a flow control device installed to be able to do this kind of thing. 

Brewing

You might think the brew toggle is pretty self-explanatory, and, sure: you press it to start an extraction and press it again when you’re finished. If you’ve got the automated pre-infusion setting turned on, that will happen first, of course. But, you can also program automated extraction timing with this toggle as well. Just press and hold the toggle until you see a timer start and the word “PRESET” appear on the display. Then, press the toggle again when your extraction is finished and the GT automatically saves your extraction volume. 

Want to abandon your preset and brew manually? Just press and hold the brew and pre-infusion toggles at the same time until the word “PRESET” disappears from the display. And don’t worry: the GT hasn’t forgotten your preset extraction volume. Just press and hold those toggles again to re-enable it. With the preset enabled, a single press of the brew toggle will dispense your programmed shot volume. 

Hot Water

When you press the hot water toggle, a solenoid valve opens up to allow water to flow from the steam boiler through the hot water wand. The GT will dispense well over one cup of hot water at a time—far more than you’d need even for a large Americano—and you can do this over and over and over again, dispensing as much water in this way as you like (so long as you continue to refill the reservoir, that is). Compare this to certain other machines that require pressure to build up in the boiler before hot water can be released. Basically, in my experience, the GT will dispense all the piping hot water you could ever possibly want. How hot, exactly, that water is will depend on how frequently you choose to dispense it: if you dispense hot water repeatedly, temperatures will decrease, since the boiler will need to refill itself. If you want to make sure your hot water will be as hot as possible, just wait until the indicator light that surrounds the hot water toggle is lit solid (this will take about 7 minutes from a cold start).  

Steam

 

The last switch toggles between your selected steam boiler temperature and a lower, 230°F setting that’s ideal for dispensing hot water. 

Beneath the toggle row is a retro-stylized brew pressure gauge that allows you to monitor in-puck pressure during your extraction. Your ideal extraction is going to happen right around 9 bar, but really anything between 8 and 10 should yield perfectly acceptable results. If you want to adjust the stock flow rate on the machine, you’ll find an externally-adjustable OPV on the lower right-hand side of the machine. Just use a flat-head screwdriver to turn the screw and you can raise or lower the brew pressure as you please. Not many machines, even prosumers, have such an easily-accessible OPV, so this is a nice little touch on Gaggia’s part. 

On the lower half of the machine you’ll find the fully-articulated steam wand, hot water dispenser, telescopic decompression duct, and adjustable drip tray. In its default configuration, that drip tray gives you 4.5” of clearance beneath the included spouted portafilter, so you could reasonably expect to fit a coffee mug and a scale there (depending on your mug and scale, of course). When you slide the drip tray up, however, you reduce that clearance to just under 3”, which helps prevent heat loss and splashing when brewing into smaller espresso cups. 

Using the Classic GT

When I first saw the GT, I must admit my thoughts skewed skeptical…maybe it was the toggles that threw me off a bit…perhaps the rather odd, yet definitely intriguing shape. Whatever it is, something about the way the GT looks…challenged me. Honestly, it still challenges me. But I’m not against it. In fact, the more I talk about it, the more I appreciate it: the zaggy line that runs along the cup warmer evokes lightning, and the toggle switches and analogue brew pressure gauge make me feel like I’m in some sort of cockpit, maybe a racecar. It really is aesthetically fascinating, and I’m ultimately thrilled that Gaggia chose to eschew the “shiny metal box” style guide when designing the GT. 

The shift in opinion you experienced with me in the last paragraph in reality occurred over the course of the week I had the GT at my work bench back in the studio. I set it up to use as my daily driver and we went on quite the journey together, the GT and I. 

At first, I feared my skepticism was well-warranted: I didn’t find the interface particularly intuitive, and it took me a little bit to sort of get the hang of how the machine reacted to the toggle controls. 

But, a few shots in, I realized I was genuinely enjoying myself. 

I quickly discovered that, after a pretty flat learning curve, the GT is actually quite intuitive. Every machine has its quirks, sure, but more than on just about any other prosumer I’ve used, everything on the GT does exactly what you’d expect it to. 

Making Espresso

Pulling shots on the GT feels remarkably similar to brewing on the Profitec MOVE, which is one of my favorite machines. Press the toggle to start; press it again to stop…end of story. I actually prefer the interface on the GT because it defaults to manual extraction timing (on the MOVE, you have to press and hold the brew button in order to bypass the shot programming). The GT also features even more functionality than the MOVE. 

The variable pre-infusion presets are a real nice touch, and I especially like how they associated each preset with a roast level—rather than having a light, medium, and heavy pre-infusion, they have a pre-infusion setting for light, medium, and dark roasts. This reduces the amount of thinking you need to do to get a well-extracted shot considerably. For those interested in doing a bit of experimenting, the press-and-hold manual pre-infusion is super easy to access as well. 

Frothing Milk

When it comes to milk frothing, the GT performs nearly as well as top-of-the-line prosumers that cost more than twice as much. In Marc’s testing, it steamed 5 oz of milk to 140°F in just 20 seconds, about 1 second behind the top-performing Synchronika II. It’s a dry steam, too, adding under 10% of water by overall weight, which is about 5% better than what we tend to deem “respectable” for a prosumer-grade machine. 

For anyone worried about steam recovery on the GT: don’t be. In his testing, Marc opened the steam valve and let it rip for five whole minutes and saw no observable drop in steam power whatsoever, even though the pump activated to refill the boiler a couple times.  

I actually really like the way the GT steams milk. The single-hole tip produces a vigorous roil in the pitcher, and I felt like I had a lot of control over how often and when to add additional air. I tend to like my cappuccinos frothy, and I had no problem getting a solid inch or more of foam when frothing on the GT. 

Under the Hood

I don’t usually get into internal build stuff in my blogs. However, there are a couple really cool things going on inside the Classic GT I thought would be worth touching on. My thought is that lots of folks are going to assume the GT is basically just a Classic with some extra frills thrown on top. 

That is absolutely not the case. 

Ok sure: there are some similarities. The brew boiler, for example, is almost exactly the same as on the Classic Pro E24. But that’s basically where the two machines’ paths divide.

Gaggia custom-designed many of the internal components on the GT, including the steam valve, OPV, and manifold. They’re all made of solid brass, extremely high quality, and emblazoned with the Gaggia G, a bit of an easter egg for anyone who takes the time to investigate what’s going on inside their espresso machine. 

The GT also uses two pumps—one for the brew boiler and one for the steam boiler. This is a nifty little perk that you don’t often see (to my knowledge, the only other machine that has two pumps is the Rancilio Silvia Pro X). It’s not going to change your life or anything like that, but, one day, you’ll be brewing and steaming simultaneously and the steam boiler will need to refill itself. And, on the GT, when it does, you won’t lose any of your brew pressure. 

Final Thoughts

After a week of heavy use, I’m happy to report that Gaggia has a real winner on their hands with the Classic GT. I may still be coming to terms with how I feel about the way this thing looks, but I absolutely love what it does. It’s as simple or complex as you want it to be, and I was able to develop a daily workflow that was every bit as streamlined and enjoyable as my favorite espresso machine ever—and that’s saying something. 

I think there are folks out there who will want more functionality than the GT delivers. Stuff like precise steam boiler temperature setting, or the ability to do ramped pre-infusions with a flow control valve. But, honestly, if your main concern is brewing excellent coffee at the correct temperature consistently, the GT does that unbelievably well. 

Photography by Grace Walker. 

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