Breville – the Barista Pro Espresso Machine with 15 bars of pressure, Milk Frother and intergrated grinder – Black Truffle

I have had this espresso machine since 12/2022 and IT IS AWESOME. I had previously bought a few others and ended up having to return them because something always went wrong. But… this machine has definitely been GOOD to me. The first thing to go on the other machines we’re always the grinders, and the grinder on this machine has not skipped a beat since the day I got it. The frothing works 100% legit and it works amazing. The wand is easy to use and wipe down. I completely recommend this machine to any NEW espresso enthusiasts.

Great machine if you are a true espresso connoisseur and/or have barista experience! Makes a phenomenal cup truly tailored to your individual preferences as the appliance is quite customizable. This machine is designed for semi-pros who have a basic understanding of both grinding whole beans then the brewing process as their are settings that need to be configured respectively. That being said, anyone could learn how to use it but will have to do some research online about the basic concepts of coffee grinding and brewing along with some experimentation to get the proper settings (but this will vary coffee to coffee). I will say this has allowed my wife and I to no longer need to visit Starbucks and other such coffee shops as this really brings the coffee shop to home! This is not an intuitive machine to use in that if you have guests or kids (old enough to drink coffee of course), you will initially have to make their drink for them as it is too complicated for them to figure out on their own, unless they have experience with using a portafilter, grinding and brewing. BEWARE: This machine is semi-automatic! This is not a good or bad thing, just a fact and for your awareness. This is why the coffee is always consistently good but essentially, you need to understand the basic principles of coffee making (like on a Barista level – hence the name) before you use it (you can YouTube it for the most part). This is not a machine whereas you select the type of coffee you want and it instantly does all the work, there are various manual stages that require you to know what you are doing so do not buy it and return it because it was too hard to use or figure out! PROs: – Eliminates going to the coffee shop as it the same level of quality (if not better in some cases) surprisingly – Color touch screen along with software adds automation to take the legwork of making a particular type of coffee (for the most part) but again, there are still two (three if you want milk) distinctly manual stages you will need to perform – Truly makes a remarkable cup of “real coffee” types and allows you to create and save custom drinks too – The built in self cleaning options for the brewer, milk frothing and water descaling are neat and useful. They neglected the hopper cleaning process however (see below). – When water tray (drip till) gets full, you will see the water level EMPTY ME pop up slowly as it fills (manually) – When water is low, you will be notified CONs: – Expensive but good quality costs money and this would be of good example of you get what you pay for! – Machine could have been QA’ed better as far as on screen verbiage (see attached screenshots) – Hard to get a hold of their support and customer service is not great as far as follow-up (had to call vendor as they did not return tickets I submitted). Might be a training issue. – As previously pointed out, the water temperature could be hotter but its not a deal breaker as its still “entry level hot”. One workaround that helps is to preheat mug or cup in advance. – Milk frothing was not designed well as far as self cleaning as it makes a mess. – Cleaning the underneath the hopper grinding component (after removing) it very hard! If all the small particles of beans are not removed, you will not be able to secure the grinder back in place. The only way to clean successfully I found is to use an air can, which as you can imagine is very messy. This is poor design in my opinion as consideration should have been taken to make cleaning much easier. – No way to remotely update firmware for typos or misinformation (see screenshot) so machine has to be sent to HQ Bottom line: Its a great machine overall, I just think my expectations were higher due to the cost. My standards are akin to the Bose and Apple standards whereas you almost always get consistently great customer service and product support. I think if they can work on that, this could be a 4, maybe 5 star product. If this was at a lower price point, my review would reflect accordingly and I wouldn’t be as critical but in this category, I expect perfection or close to it.