Breville Oracle Jet Espresso Machine, Brushed Stainless

The item was broken, and Breville customer service was no help. I wasted $20 on expensive coffee while Breville told me the machine was broken. Breville offered to replace it, but it would have taken weeks. I found having to manually video chat through Breville's link to get any help with customer service very intrusive. Since you have to connect the Breville to the internet, they should be able to run a full diagnostic online, like Bosch and Miele.

So, having lost my Breville Touch to my kid, I decided to upgrade. This beast is AWESOME! Worth every penny of the money saved versus buying cafe’ drinks at $5/day x 365=$1,825.00. Including milk and other necessities, you’ll be at a break-even at about 1-1/2 years after buying it. Pros: Ease of setup, ease of use, auto grind/puck compression feature, the best screen interface in the industry by far, excellent cafe-quality of each of the multitude of coffee drinks, great selection of options for milk frothing, water tank is large enough for a bunch of cups and/or drinks Cons: weight of machine (but it has the wonderful move-assist function to offset the weight issue), pucks have a tendency to remain in the PortaFilter even after banging the life out of the thing (requires fine-adjustments of ground courseness and volume), wanted a 2 oz cup of coffee but they limit the machine to 8oz

It makes an alright coffee but for the price I feel like it should(at least occasionally) bring it to me in bed while wearing lingerie. This thing cost more than my project car, and while neither will currently drive me around town, at least one has the potential to maybe do so someday. Wife told me it was cheaper than starbucks and we'd save money in the long term but we live in the middle of nowhere and the nearest starbucks is over 100km away so I'm not holding my breath. Best eggnog latte I've ever had tho

We were really excited about this machine. The Oracle Jet makes excellent coffee when it works. Beautiful design, automatic features, and a great milk system. Then it auto-updated. After the update, the machine completely stopped tamping. We tried everything: full reset, multiple grind settings, all drink profiles, deep cleaning, and even holding the portafilter to the left like forums recommend. Nothing worked. The shots were watery, fast, and had zero crema. The pucks were loose no matter what we did. Customer support forums confirmed we’re not alone — the most recent firmware update seems to have broken the tamping logic. The machine grinds, but doesn’t tamp, which defeats the entire purpose of an automated espresso system. We returned it and ordered a replacement. New unit arrives tomorrow, and we will not be connecting it to Wi-Fi to avoid any future firmware failures. This is a beautiful machine and clearly has potential, but the fact that an update can disable core functionality — and there’s no way to roll it back — is a major red flag. If you buy it, disable auto-updates or skip Wi-Fi entirely. Great coffee isn’t worth espresso PTSD.

I should lead by saying that i'm a relative newbie to the world of espresso, and by no means a coffee-snob (but have friends who are). The best thing is the instant heating. No other machine can match this type of machine for the innovative thermocoil style heating. Breville has legacy espresso machine makers beat hands down here. However, nearly a year of experience has taught me that this is machine fails to live up to several promises in terms of idiot-proofing the process of making espresso. There are several key core failings that I find frustrating even as a relative newbie that doesn't expect the ultimate coffee machine, but mostly wants an appliance that works and makes good coffee. The worst thing is the firmware is STILL broken many months after release. The promised barista guidance doesn't work reliably, has several bugs (support has told me software fixes are coming.. but that was months ago and I still see no fixes) on switching back and forth from cold brew mode, and is just generally pretty useless. This is due to several additional aggravating deficiencies in the product as I detail below. Other key confounding issues are : 1) the inability to reliably set grind dose outside of manually adjusting a hidden set screw (and then only by +/- a gram or so.. the min dose I could get consistently was ~21g of grind, which is frustrating when many people like 18g). 2) Unreliable and inflexible volumetric dosing. A promised feature is that you wouldn't have to time shots, but could instead just choose a volume of water to be delivered and have the time adjust to match. Sadly, this works very poorly in practice based on repeated weighing measurments that show significant inconsistency in the delivered amount of liquid during a pull. It's impossible to tell if this is due to grind variance or actual water-delivered variance. It's not even clear what precisely is being measured here. This is compounded by the horrible lack of details in documentation and the onscreen UX setup that doesn't allow you to specify the delivered dose in mL for normal coffee but only in abstract sizes (small/medium/large , etc). I had to switch to timing mode and throw away the attempts at volume after becoming frustrated. 3) Dialing in using the "stepless digital grind settings" is an exercise in frustration, as there's a lot of slop and backlash in the grinder setting dial and a lot of movement before something registers as a change onscreen. If this was instrumented correctly they'd have far higher precision and accuracy, but this part feels very imprecise and aggravating as over/undershoot is common. 4) A bottomless portafilter feels like it ought to be standard in order to gauge shot quality/channeling issues, as the automatic tamper function is underwhelming and not the most reliable at getting great pucks.. it definitely feels like sometimes the pucks channel water, but a bottomless filter would sure help with seeing when. With all these mostly unaddressed issues for a premium machine even a year after launch, it's hard to give it more than 3 stars. It does a lot, you could even say a decent amount for the money considering it often makes good coffee.. but it has a lot of core issues that feel like they could be resolved with better design, better software, and increased flexibility in the hardware, probably at not too much greater a price. Breville can do better, i'm sure of it.