If you go into enough kitchens, you’ll start to see a pattern. A brushed stainless steel Breville espresso machine is usually sitting next to a bag of single-origin beans that someone bought at the farmers market, somewhere between the toaster and the knife block. It’s become a shorthand for a certain kind of home cook: someone who really knows how to make breakfast.
The way Breville makes home espresso has always been based on what the company calls the “4 Keys formula”: freshly ground beans, the right temperature, the right pressure, and the right texture of the milk. It sounds like marketing speak on paper, but in reality, it’s pretty close to what people who work in specialty coffee are crazy about. The point is that you don’t have to skimp on quality just because you’re not running a business bar. It’s possible that claim hits home differently depending on how much time you’ve spent in real coffee shops, but the results are strong for many drinkers.
The Barista Express, which costs $699, is in the middle of the group. It’s the one that gets the most attention, likely because it has a full espresso machine and a conical burr grinder built right in. In less than a minute, you can grind the beans, dose them directly into the portafilter, tamp them, and pull the shot all from one machine. There are 16 settings on the grinder, so you can finetune the extraction for different roasts. Through a Thermocoil system with PID control, the water stays at 200°F. At extraction, there are nine bars of pressure. Before the real pull starts, there is a low-pressure pre-infusion phase that helps saturate the puck evenly. It is not a simpler form of espresso. It’s the process itself.
The Barista Pro, which costs $849, has a ThermoJet heating system that gets to extraction temperature in three seconds. This is for people who want speed without sacrificing quality. The grinder has up to 30 settings and uses Baratza European precision burrs. This is a big improvement for people who have spent a lot of time trying to find the right grind size between a little too coarse and a little too fine. It’s hard not to notice how much thought went into cutting the morning routine down to just a few seconds without skimping on the shot.
At its base level, the $299 Bambino has only the most important features. There isn’t a built-in grinder, so you’ll need beans that have already been ground or a separate grinder. However, the espresso machine works very well. They tested all of Breville’s machines and found that the Bambino Plus was the best overall. It has the same 9-bar extraction and pre-infusion. Some people were shocked by that decision. For $499, you can get an espresso machine that works better than machines that cost three times as much. This shows that Breville put some thought into their engineering.
The Oracle line, on the other hand, is in a completely different class. The $2,999 Oracle Dual Boiler automatically grinds, tamps, and extracts the coffee. It has two boilers, so you can make a shot and steam milk at the same time without having to wait for the machine to change modes. This is the kind of machine that a serious home enthusiast would buy after learning how to use a simpler one for two or three years. How important the ritual is to you determines whether it’s worth the cost.
It seems like home espresso machines have grown up a lot in the last ten years, and Breville has been a big part of that change. A machine that seemed like a luxury purchase at first is now more like a well-thought-out purchase, especially when you think about how much going to a café every day costs over a year. It’s still not clear if most buyers actually use all the features they pay for. People who do, on the other hand, tend to really care about the process.
