So this is a review of the Oracle Touch espresso machine.
Now it's made by a company called Sage in the UK,
or better known as Breville in the rest of the world.
Now, I'll start with the truth, which is,
for a decade, I haven't had an espresso machine at home.
And to be honest, I haven't really wanted one.
When people ask me, "What espresso machine should I get
"for my house?", well, I ask them a question back.
"Do you really want a new hobby?"
Because that's what espresso at home is.
For most people, it's an investment in equipment,
but it's also an investment in time.
When I got started working in coffee,
I started selling little domestic espresso machines
and I know all too well that the romantic idea
of getting up at the weekend, reading the paper,
making a little cappuccino, that's very appealing to people,
but it's not true.
You skip the bit where you turn on the machine,
you wait for it to get hot,
then you dial in two or three shots
to see how things are tasting,
then you pull a couple of shots,
and then you spend some time cleaning up.
And for me, well the idea of paying two pounds
for someone else to do that, to make me an espresso,
that seemed like a good deal.
Now at home, I typically just brewed filtered coffee,
so taking this home for a little while,
well that was the first time in literally ten years
I've made espresso at home
and it was interesting.
This is a 2,000 pound espresso machine
and that's quite a lot of money these days
and a lot of money to invest in an espresso machine.
Especially in one that's labeled as a bean to cup.
For people who didn't want to hobby,
that was kinda your choice, right?
If you didn't wanna do all the hard work,
then you just push a button and the machine did its best
and you got coffee.
And they all had a problem that made them quite finicky,
quite difficult to extract well with
and prone to breaking down.
There were trying to work out how to get coffee
from a grinder into a brewing chamber
and then to get rid of it.
And that moving of ground coffee both wet and dry
is pretty difficult to do
and Sage's solution is pretty simple.
You just get the human to do it.
So this machine comes with a portafilter and a grinder
and it's all built in as one
and you're going to be the one that moves ground coffee
around, that's going to be your contribution
to the brewing process.
So, the way this thing works is kind of interesting
because it's kind of against the typical
obsessive, geeky, wanna control every factor
and they know espresso making is hard
and so what they've done is take away some of the variables.
What this means is that the way the grinder works
is that when you lock it in, click it into place
and you click across to the right hand side,
it'll start grinding.
It'll grind, dose, tamp, the whole deal, all in one go,
leaving you a prepped portafilter ready to brew.
So you lock that in and you hit go.
Now, it's a touchscreen, and this means you've got
lots of choices and what it lets you do
is choose the different kinda drinks you wanna make,
choose the grind setting and choose the brew time
for each one, and that's another key part.
This doesn't let you control the amount of liquid
going through, like a volumetric might
or with weighing scales or something like that.
It's gonna brew at a fixed pressure
for a fixed amount of time.
Now this is no bad thing.
By and large, what you might wanna do
is use your consistent dose setting
and therefore use a consistent brew time
and then simply adjust the grind setting,
finer or coarser to get the desired amount
of liquid that you want in the kind of ideal brew time.
So I'll just set the brew time to 28 seconds,
I'll just use my grind setting
to control my espresso brew ratio.
Speaking about brew ratios.
This things, the set up it has,
it doses quite a lot of coffee into the portafilter,
it's kinda dependent on the basket that you're using.
Typically I brew coffees that taste good
at a one-to-two, to about one-to-two point two
as a ratio, so if I put 20 grams in,
I'm getting between 40 and 44 grams of liquid out
in my desired brew time.
Here, I probably say with those kind of coffees,
you probably want to push them to one to two point five,
so if you have 20 grams of ground coffee,
you probably want about 50 grams of liquid out.
So to be honest, with certain lighter roasts,
shorter, tighter shots of espresso,
closer to a ristretto, even like a traditional,
normal espresso, they're a little bit harder to do.
If you enjoy that kinda thing
and you're very texture driven,
then lighter roast may not be the answer for you
and you may wanna brew with a slightly deeper,
more developed roast that's gonna give itself up
a little bit more easily.
Sage made waves with their first espresso machine,
had the really good temperature control,
all of that stuff is still here,
so they've done the kind of hard work
on consistency and control,
while trying not to overload you with too many variables.
So it brews pretty good tasting espresso.
I got some very tasty shots out of it.
It was pretty easy to use.
It required reconfiguring how my brain works a little bit
with the fixed dose and fixed time
and just manipulating with grind,
but I didn't mind that too much at all.
One thing that this machine does incredibly well
and Sage has done for a little while now,
is steam milk beautifully.
Now this, the automatic steaming of milk,
is not new on commercial equipment for sure.
You know, there's been big commercial espresso machines
that have been able to automatically texture milk
to a really beautiful foam.
Certainly you can pour a great latte out with it,
that's been around for a while,
but these guys have been doing it more and more
on domestic machines and the quality is frustratingly good.
When you can do something that good at home,
you really have to question why this kind of technology
just isn't everywhere all the time.
And I get that the lack of craft may upset some people,
but there's really no excuse left in the world
for serving anything other than
a really beautifully textured milk drink.
Even if you can't pour latte out on the top,
it should still have great texture.
That technology is now very much available.
So a couple of quick things,
you can program your milk temperature.
It has a little thermocouple on the end of the steam wand
there that senses the milk's temperature
and stops at the right point.
You can adjust texture of the milk as well
and one neat little feature is
when you're finished steaming,
when you push the steam wand back in,
it purges itself automatically.
Again, just thoughtful use of technology
to make our lives a little bit easier.
A few quick likes and don't likes.
Things I like:
The touchscreen.
Actually, it's great.
This is not a Wi-Fi enabled machine,
but having a touchscreen means you can do
walkthroughs for setting it up,
you can do troubleshooting, you can offer a lot of guidance.
The touchscreen is perfectly fine in terms of usability.
I think that's a really nice upgrade
to these kind of machines.
I think the steaming is excellent.
One thing, and I particularly love,
is that when you remove the drip tray
and if you twist the dial,
you can just move your machine around the counter
really really easily.
That's just great.
I love that you can load water in the top,
so you can fill it from the front
if you've put your machine in your kitchen
it's the back, but you still have
a fully removable water tank
that can be accessed from the back.
That's kind of nice thinking.
Things I don't love as much:
The grinder does suffer the same problem
that many other grinders do,
which is as it gets hotter as you use it more,
it's grind setting does shift a little bit.
So what I would tend to do is,
because I would just make a couple of drinks in the morning
and that was it, I would have the machine switch itself on,
about half an hour before I wanted to get up,
it was nice and hot, I would come down,
pull a shot, clean up, be done.
If I had to pull two, three, four or five shots,
then I know my grind would change,
but at the end of doing that,
I would just reset my grinder back to the original lumber.
That way when I woke up the next morning
and it was ready to pull it's first shot of the day,
it was at the right grind setting
and grind settings held pretty well for me in testing.
For me, the grinder is okay,
I kind of wish I had more control again
and again, I wish I had a little bit more control
over the dose going in.
Typically these doses are pretty high
and that's not how I usually brew coffee.
So again, I'm probably not the target audience here,
but I have to be honest in the things
that I would want to change or want more control over.
And lastly, there is the price point.
It's 2,000 pounds.
That's not cheap and that I know that's not a bad thing,
you get a really well built, good quality machine,
you get good support in the UK and other places,
but you can't help but mention that price,
it's a little bit higher than a lot of other
domestic bean to cups.
That said, I would anticipate that you're gonna
have a lot less issues.
This can run you through your own descaling programs,
it's just less parts to go wrong
compared to a traditional bean to cup.
In summary, if you are an espresso obsessive
and you wanna play with your coffee,
this is probably not the machine for you.
It won't offer you enough control,
enough granularity about your coffee brewing.
If you're someone who does actually want that
coffee at home, cappuccinos in the morning,
a little flat white, but you don't want a new hobby,
well I guess Sage have built this machine for you
and I have to say they've done a pretty good job.
Thank you very much for watching.
If you wanna comment, if you wanna ask a question,
ask it down below, I will do my best to answer every one.
If you enjoyed this, let met know.
If you have someone in your life
who got one of these for Christmas,
send this their way, go and see them,
go and have a coffee, see what you think.
I'll be back with some more reviews in the new year.
Thanks for watching and have a good one.