The La Marzocco Linea Micra costs 3,700 euros in the eight colour finishes and 3,490 euros in Stainless Steel. That is the European price, from a shop in the country where the machine is built: two separate stainless steel boilers with PID control, a 58 mm portafilter of the kind that lives behind a bar, a 2 litre tank, 42 lbs (19 kg) sitting on 11.5 in (29 cm) of worktop. It suits anyone who drinks espresso every day, grinds fresh, and wants to learn to drive it.
That was the easy part. The hard part is the question that has kept you on the product page for a few weeks now: does a machine like this genuinely change the coffee you drink in the morning, or is it the most expensive way to carry on drinking yesterday's?
We sell the Micra, so you have every right to read us with a hand on your wallet. That is exactly why the answers that do us no favours are in here too, starting with the one about buying used.
What it costs, and what changes across the nine finishes
On our shop the Linea Micra is 3,700 euros in eight colours (dark blue, satin metal, yellow, white, grey, red, light blue and black) and 3,490 euros in Stainless Steel. The 210 euros of difference sit in the finish of the panels: boilers, group, electronics and portafilter are identical across all nine versions. If the colour is neither here nor there for you, Stainless Steel saves you roughly what an excellent hand grinder costs.
If the figure you had in your head was a different one, it was probably quoted in another currency by a review filmed somewhere else. This is the euro price, from a European shop, and it is the number a European buyer actually pays. It comes with a detail reviews tend to skip: the machine is ordered in and prepared for the person buying it rather than pulled off a shelf, so plan on a wait instead of picturing a same day pickup. A machine like this gets bought once, and the waiting weighs very little inside a decision that lasts years.
What the machine is, in the numbers that matter
The Micra is a scaled down version of the Linea Classic S, the brand's bar machine, and it is the first model La Marzocco designed to live in a kitchen instead of behind a counter: it was introduced in November 2022. Inside there are two separate stainless steel boilers, a small 0.25 litre one dedicated to coffee and a 1.6 litre one for steam, both with PID temperature control.
Translated into the cup, those numbers say three things. Brew temperature holds from the first coffee to the fourth, without the wobble you hear about on single boiler machines. Steam is there while you are still extracting, so a cappuccino never asks you to wait for the machine to change trade. And the 58 mm portafilter is the professional standard, which means baskets, tampers and distribution tools from the bar world drop in with no adapters, today and in ten years.
The rest is decided by your worktop. A 2 litre tank, 42 lbs (19 kg) of weight and 11.5 in (29 cm) of width make a compact machine for what it is, one that still wants a place of its own, permanent, with room around it for the grinder, the scales and your hands.
Why it costs what it costs
La Marzocco has been building espresso machines in Florence since 1927, and the dual boiler you find inside the Micra today is the layout it brought to commercial machines in 1971. The price tells that story: steel in place of aluminium, components from the same family as the professional ones, a machine meant to be opened, repaired and put back to work rather than replaced at the first serious fault.
There is a less romantic piece, and it is just as concrete. The 58 mm standard and the spare parts of a manufacturer that supplies bars across half the world mean that in eight years your Micra will still be a living machine, with a service network that knows where to put its hands. That is the difference between an appliance and a tool for work, and you pay it up front.
Bought from the country that builds it
Here is the part that reads differently from where we are standing. In Italy espresso is a public drink: you have it standing at a bar, which here means the corner place that opens at seven and pours coffee all day, in thirty seconds, several times between morning and afternoon. The home setups that fill your feed are far rarer here than you would guess, and the country that invented the machine mostly leaves the ritual to the person behind the counter.
Two consequences are worth having. The first is that 58 mm here is the everyday measurement of every bar in every town rather than an aspiration, which is why we talk about that ecosystem as something lived instead of something read. The second is that La Marzocco builds the Micra in Florence, in a country that drinks most of its espresso out of the house. What you are buying is a bar machine asked to move into a kitchen, and that is the honest description of the object.
Who it makes sense for, and who should stop here
It makes sense if you drink espresso every day, if more than one cup a day passes through your hands, if you are willing to weigh the dose and watch the timer at least for the first few weeks, and if you like the idea of being the one in charge of what happens in the cup. It makes most sense if milk drinks at home are something you want to do properly: that 1.6 litre steam boiler is the part of the machine that most surprises people arriving from a domestic model.
In other cases it is worth stopping, and those deserve saying out loud. If you drink one coffee in the morning and you want it in your mouth in ninety seconds while you are looking for your keys, the Micra will ask you for a ritual you have no appetite for, every single day. If what you actually love is the pale, aromatic cup of filter, read what really changes between espresso and filter before you order, because the same money split between an excellent grinder, a set of scales and outstanding coffee would take you far closer to what you are after. And if the kitchen has no stable place to leave it switched on, a 42 lb machine that lives inside a cupboard stops being used within a month.
The machine does a third of the work, the grinder and the coffee do the rest
This is where the most expensive mistake happens, and we watch it happen often. The beautiful machine arrives, it goes on the worktop, and next to it stays the ten year old blade grinder, or the bag of supermarket pre-ground. The result is an espresso that looks nothing like the one that was imagined, and after three weeks the thought that surfaces is always the same: maybe I bought the wrong machine. In almost every case the machine is innocent.
Grind size is the control that governs extraction, and we wrote it out at length in the complete guide to coffee extraction: change the particle size and everything changes with it, from the speed the water crosses the bed to the sweetness that reaches your mouth. On a machine in this category, a grinder that cannot hold a fine and consistent setting becomes the bottleneck for all the rest, and how to choose one is a piece of its own.
If you make two or three coffees a day, the Comandante C40 Nitro Blade at 270 euros (300 in the wood finishes) sits next to the Micra without embarrassment and grinds espresso too, with a bit of arm. If there are four of you in the house and cappuccinos go round in the morning, budget for an electric grinder dedicated to espresso: it is a genuine second expense, and it is better to know that before ordering the machine than to discover it afterwards.
Then there is the coffee, the piece forgotten most often. A Micra extracts precisely what you give it, so a coffee roasted months ago comes back as a precisely reproduced old coffee. We roast in Albenga and for espresso we start from our espresso blends, Genoa and Scirocco, built for exactly this cup. On freshness, how you keep the beans counts as much as the roast date: how to store whole beans is a ten minute read that protects every bag you buy.
An honest starting point for the first few weeks: the 17 g basket (it comes in the box alongside the 14 g one and the blind basket for cleaning), around 34 g of coffee in the cup, 25 to 30 seconds. From there you adjust the grind, and you adjust it by tasting.
Is a used Linea Micra worth buying?
This is one of the questions that reaches us most often, and it is also the one where the comfortable answer for us would be a different one. The true answer is that in certain cases used is the right choice, and the main case is this: if the saving on the machine ends up inside a serious grinder instead of staying in your pocket, a used Micra with a good grinder beats a new Micra next to any old grinder nearly every time. You hear the difference on the first coffee.
The Micra has existed since November 2022, so even the oldest one in circulation is still a young machine. The risk here sits in the history that machine has had and that you cannot see from the outside, far more than in its age. Before you close the deal, these are the things to ask and to look at.
- What water it has been drinking. Limescale is the invisible damage and the most expensive to repair. Ask what water the owner used, whether they softened it or bought low mineral bottled water, and whether the machine has ever been descaled. A vague answer on this point counts as a no.
- How hard it has worked. Two espressos a day for two years is one thing, an office with ten people walking past it is another. Ask how many coffees a day it made, and since when.
- The invoice and the service paperwork. Without the original invoice you have nothing in your hands with the service network. If you are told it has just been serviced, ask for the document from the job: no paper, no service.
- The group and the gaskets. If the portafilter goes in rotating well past the natural locking position, or if it drips at the edges during a shot, the gasket needs replacing. It is a small expense, and it tells you about maintenance that was put off.
- Steam and start up, in front of you. Have it switched on, wait for it to come up to temperature, open the steam and check that it is dry and steady. A machine the seller will not let you see running stays where it is.
- How it gets to your house. That is 42 lbs (19 kg) of steel and brass. If you can, collect it in person rather than trusting it to a courier and whatever box was in the cellar.
- How much you are really saving. If used costs a little less than new, you are paying almost in full for a machine with no warranty and no certain history. The gap has to be wide enough to buy the risk.
The case where used becomes the wrong choice is the mirror image: a seller answering in monosyllables, no documents, water described as "just the tap, but it's good here", and a price that brushes against new. In that situation the 3,490 euros of a new Stainless Steel, with its warranty and with somebody who answers the phone, is the better spent money.
Linea Micra or Linea Mini: which of the two
These are La Marzocco's two home machines, and the choice gets made almost entirely on the kitchen worktop and on the number of people drinking. The Mini is bigger in every dimension: about 14 in (36 cm) of width against the Micra's 11.5 in (29 cm), 66 lbs (30 kg) against 42, a 2.5 litre tank against 2, and a 3 litre steam boiler against 1.6.
That larger boiler is the whole practical difference. If cappuccinos get made in a row at your house, for a breakfast of five or for Sunday guests, the Mini holds the rhythm with more margin. For two people drinking espresso and the occasional cappuccino, the Micra does the same job in a great deal less space and for less money. The Micra is the one we keep, and the one we recommend when the question arrives.
Questions and answers
How much does the La Marzocco Linea Micra cost?
With us, 3,700 euros in the eight colour finishes and 3,490 euros in Stainless Steel, with exactly the same machine inside all nine versions. It is ordered in rather than kept on a shelf.
Is it worth buying a Linea Micra used?
It is worth it when the seller is documented, the machine can be seen running, the water history is clear and the saving is big enough to end up inside a good grinder. It is worth a lot less when the invoice is missing, when a claimed service has no paperwork behind it, or when the price brushes against new: there you pay almost everything without taking home either a warranty or any certainty.
What is the difference between the Linea Micra and the Linea Mini?
The Mini is bigger and holds more: about 14 in (36 cm) of width against 11.5 in (29 cm), 66 lbs (30 kg) against 42, a 3 litre steam boiler against 1.6. For a family making cappuccinos in a row the Mini makes sense, while for two or three people the Micra does the same job in much less space.
Do I need a separate grinder?
Yes, and it has to be counted inside the machine's budget. Without a fresh grind you can dial in fine, the Micra will precisely extract a coffee that was already wrong before it started. A hand grinder like the Comandante C40 covers two or three coffees a day well, while for more cups and a daily cappuccino an electric grinder dedicated to espresso is the sensible move.
If you have read this far, you probably already had the answer and were looking for somebody to say the whole of it out loud. The Micra is a machine that lasts, and it earns its money when it arrives on a worktop that also holds a grinder worthy of it and coffee roasted with your cup in mind. We roast that coffee in Albenga, in a roastery in full view of the room, which is why what ends up on your worktop genuinely interests us.
The Linea Micra on our shop, in all nine finishes: we sell inside the European Union, and you order it there in the colour that looks like you.