Tea and Coffee Machines for the Office: A Practical Guide

The phrase tea and coffee machine suggests a special bit of kit. In practice it is an ordinary office coffee machine with a hot water outlet, and almost all of them have one. The hot water is drawn from the same boiler that makes the coffee, so it arrives fast and properly hot, ready for a tea bag or a pot.

That means a single machine on the counter handles the lot. Coffee drinkers get cappuccinos, lattes, flat whites and americanos. Tea drinkers get hot water for a builder's brew or a herbal bag. And most machines carry a hot chocolate option as well, which keeps the people who drink neither tea nor coffee in the room. One machine, one counter, the whole office served.

It is easy to spec an office machine around coffee and treat tea as an afterthought. That is a mistake. Tea is still the most poured hot drink in the country, and in most offices the split between tea and coffee is closer than the coffee drinkers like to admit. The UK Tea and Infusions Association puts Britain among the heaviest tea drinkers in the world, while the British Coffee Association tracks coffee as one of the most popular drinks in the country. A good office machine has to serve both camps, not pick a side.

Leave the tea drinkers out and you get the thing every office manager wants to avoid: a smart new machine that half the floor ignores, while the kettle stays plugged in next to it. Cover both from the start and the kettle goes in the cupboard, the counter stays tidy, and nobody feels the machine was bought for somebody else.

Here is the part most product pages skip. There is no office machine that makes a genuinely good cup of tea automatically, and you should not go looking for one. Tea is a bag or leaves and hot water, left to brew for a couple of minutes to taste. That last part, the brewing, is personal, and a machine that tries to do it for you tends to do it worse than the person holding the cup.

So the goal is not an automatic tea brewer. It is good hot water, on demand, next to a good coffee menu. Get that and your tea drinkers are sorted, because they were always going to add the bag and the milk themselves anyway. Chasing a machine that pours a finished tea is spending money to solve a problem a tea bag already solves better.

And if your office is genuinely tea first, with only a handful of coffee drinkers, you may not need a full coffee machine at all. A good hot water source and a decent tea selection might be the honest answer, and we will say so rather than sell you a machine the office will underuse.

Two types of office machine cover tea and coffee comfortably, and which one fits comes down to how much the coffee quality matters and how much daily upkeep you want.

An instant machine is the simplest way to cover everyone. It mixes a quality freeze dried coffee with hot water, carries a hot chocolate canister, and pours hot water on demand for tea, all from one compact box. Instant carries some baggage from the jar on the break room shelf, but a modern commercial machine makes a genuinely good cup, and it is the lowest cost and the easiest to run of anything we supply. Plenty of offices arrive asking for something fancier and leave with an instant machine once they see what it covers.

A bean to cup machine is the one to pick when the coffee itself is the priority. It grinds fresh beans for every cup and pours cafe standard cappuccinos and flat whites, and the same machine dispenses hot water for the tea drinkers. You get fresh ground coffee and full tea cover from one machine, in exchange for a few more minutes of daily cleaning than an instant machine asks for.

If you are weighing the two up, our guide to the best coffee machine for an office walks through how to choose against your numbers. Either way, the coffee that goes in the machine is ours, roasted for commercial machines and supplied alongside it.

If tea matters in your office, the hot water is worth a moment of attention rather than an assumption. A few things to look at:

• Temperature. Hot water for tea wants to be properly hot. Machine hot water comes off the boiler and is usually hot enough, but if your tea drinkers are particular, ask what temperature it dispenses at so there are no surprises.
• A dedicated outlet. The best setup gives hot water its own button or tap, so a tea does not wait behind a queue of lattes at the morning rush.
• Volume. If several cups get filled at once, check the machine keeps up with hot water without the boiler needing to recover between drinks.
• Cups or pots. If people brew by the pot rather than the cup, a measured hot water option that fills to a set volume saves holding the button and guessing.

None of this is complicated, and most of it is the kind of thing we sort out when we install the machine, setting the hot water up the way the office actually uses it. The aim is the same whichever machine you land on: coffee the coffee drinkers look forward to, hot water the tea drinkers can rely on, and a counter that finally lets the kettle retire.

If you want a hand matching a machine to a floor that drinks as much tea as coffee, tell us roughly how many of each and how busy the morning gets, and we will point you to the one that fits.