Review: Breville Barista Express Impress

Coffee is a strange beast. It's delicious and gets you going in the morning, but the more you study about making it, the more there is to learn. Espresso is an extreme version of that, to the point that people who want a café-quality cup are often warned off, as there are so many variables, so much that can go wrong, and so much money you can blow in the process. Experts often counsel folks to buy espresso drinks in a café and use other methods, like drip, French press, or pour over, when you're at home in your slippers.

That said, there are plenty of home espresso machines that pull a solid, though not quite café-quality shot, and Breville's new Barista Express Impress is among them. A machine made for espresso-curious beginners, the … let's just call it the Impress … has all the standard parts, like a grinder, a tamper, a steam wand for frothing milk, and a hot-water dispenser. Some interesting touches include the tamper being actuated by a lever you push down, ensuring a nice, flat, and polished puck of grounds. There is also a meter to make sure you have the right volume of grounds in the portafilter, a widget to shave some off the top if there's too much, and an unlabeled “a bit more” button to top it up if it's low. 

You can run the Impress in a mostly automatic mode or do a little customization. With a minimum of tinkering on the automatic side, I was able to get the Impress to make solid, and sometimes very good, espresso. However, if you're truly interested in the process and want to get better—or if you're me—the Impress might just tie your brain in a knot.

Testing the Impress was an up and down affair, but even when things got weird, the quality of the shots it pulled were rarely worse than good. 

To make a cup, you set the grind size and hit the dose button; the beans drop from the hopper into the grinder, then directly into the portafilter basket. This can be done automatically, and it will gradually (and impressively) learn how many beans to dispense—or “manually,” which means you set a knob to determine how long it grinds. That tamp lever automates the tricky parts of tamping. A dose-level indicator lets you know if you need to adjust the amount of grounds in the puck. Slide the portafilter over to the group head—its interface with the espresso-pouring side of things—and tap a button to start brewing the shot. The cycle begins with a pre-infusion, a dampening of the grounds. A Breville video demonstrates that the pre-infusion should take about 10 seconds, at which point the pressure kicks in and the first drops of luscious liquid fall into your glass. From there, the machine should finish making the shot at about the 30-second mark.

Ideally, your espresso comes out with a beautiful, thick crema, that frothy layer of goodness on top. Too coarse a grind will let too much water through, meaning your glass will be too full and the crema will get all flabby. This is called under-extraction. Conversely, too fine a grind means very little water gets through the grounds and the over extracted shot is wee tiny. The machine always uses the same volume of water, so on an under-extracted shot the puck will be relatively dry, whereas the puck in the over-extracted shot will be almost muddy.

Using Big Truck blend from WIRED's friends at Washington's Olympia Coffee, I tinkered my way to the best shot, which was at grind size 17, a tick away from the recommended starting point of 16. Every time you try a new coffee, you'll need to do some version of this. As I tested, I built a spreadsheet to keep track of variables like grind size, the weight of the dry grounds, how long pre-extraction and the full shot took, and how much the poured shot weighed.

After pulling dozens of shots, all with Big Truck at the same grind size (17), the weight of the dry grounds stayed fairly constant at around 17.5 grams, even after I occasionally needed to add a bit more or scrape some off the top with the provided tool. Using the lever pushes the tamper down with 22 pounds of force before it twists 7 degrees at the bottom of its stroke to polish the puck.

Shot times, including the pre-infusion, ran about 27 seconds, give or take, which is good. But the final shot weight varied, even when all the other variables went unchanged, which is not so good. Shots averaged a bit more than twice the dry puck weight, which is pretty impressive—a 1:2 ratio for those variables is a classic starting point. But with that average of 17.5 grams of dry grounds, shots ranged from a pucker-inducing 22 grams to a droopy 52 grams. Throwing out those highest and lowest numbers brought a little clarity, and I could see that it tended to pour a longer shot than I wanted. It wasn't an under-extracted shot, I just wanted the machine to shut off sooner. I did wish I could grind just a tiny bit finer, but the built-in grinder is not quite that precise.

Again, the Impress did pretty well overall. On a coffee-rating scale of all espresso where a 0 is reminiscent of old Sanka and a 10 is a perfect cup in a Neapolitan café with the sun streaming in and an incredibly gorgeous stranger staring at you, the Impress espresso is a 6. For a home countertop machine, that's pretty darn good.

The problem—and this will only be a problem for some—is that the machine's features are based on time or volume, not weight. Beans are ground into the portafilter basket on a timer, and a volume of water is dispensed in a shot. Weighing your beans then grinding them would give you the most consistent amount of beans in the puck, without any waste. Once I realized my shots were going longer than I wanted, a coffee-nerd friend suggested going a more manual route: pouring the shot with the cup on a scale, cutting the water off when it hit the 1:2 ratio at 35 grams, then adjusting the grind so that process takes about 30 seconds.

Breville's in a bit of a bind here, as basing it on weight would mean incorporating a couple of scales into the machine. That would put it into an altogether different price bracket and perhaps alienate the beginners it's looking to attract.

Before I start wondering aloud who this is for, let's take a look at some other pluses and minuses, starting with the Impress being a very solid machine. Not pro level, of course, but at $900, you get a good bang for your buck. You might nod your head in time with the poky clunkings of the machine as it works up a head of steam to froth your milk, but it still makes cappuccino-worthy foam. I also love the Breville classics like the little float that rises up from the drip tray to read “empty me” as it fills, and I'll always pause to salute the company’s brilliant O-shaped power plug that makes it easier to remove from a wall socket.

In the “both good and bad” column, you can tweak or hack workarounds for many variables, notably pre-infusion and extraction lengths, and you can make water-temperature adjustments, but doing so can feel like using a Mario Bros. cheat code when a dial or a button made for the purpose would work much better. For example, to decrease the water temperature by 2 degrees Fahrenheit, you turn the machine off, hold three buttons down as you turn it back on, then wait for a beep and press the manual dose button. Many home baristas will want to take the training wheels off at some point, and those workarounds will be annoying.

On more of a downside, the removable water tank has a wacky and awkward double-articulated handle that spans the width of the machine. More annoying, when the tank reads “min,” what it really means is “pretty empty,” and there's no alarm to alert you that there's not enough water for a shot. In my testing, this led to a notable amount of wasted coffee. A Breville rep suggested this might change in the future.

Finally, and this will be a whopper for some, you don't want to use anything but fancy beans with this machine. Breville's rule of thumb is that if the coffee bag has a “roasted on” label, you're probably fine—and in my words, “best before” is an invitation to disaster. Here's why: Even well-stored beans tend to decline around 30 days past their roasting date. After that, volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide levels in the beans change, and pulling a consistent shot is not guaranteed; the machine may struggle to build up enough pressure to push the water through the grounds, and it might not be able to do it at all. It took me a long time to figure this out when I was using grocery store bulk-bin beans. Breville provides double-wall portafilter baskets, which try to combat this by using a single tiny hole for the water to pass through, which builds up more pressure, but it's a crapshoot. Make sure your budget has a line item for expensive beans from now till forever!

Speaking of budget, remember to set at least 20 or 30 additional clams to buy a knock box for your spent pucks. I bought one from Breville that works just fine.

So who is this for? The Impress allows beginners to make good and sometimes very good coffee, right out of the box. That's amazing! But to do that, there are some pretty fat training wheels bolted on—which some might refer to as “nannyware,” meaning that when it's time to move on to a more advanced machine, the user has acquired very few transferable skills.

“It doesn't teach you anything,” summarized my wife Elisabeth, when I was puzzling things out with her. I thought about it and realized that instead of learning to make espresso, you really just learn how to use this machine.

If that and a bit of inconsistency from shot to shot doesn't bother you—and you just want to drink your espresso, not learn about it—the Impress is a fine value. If, however, you're like me and want to advance your skills, I'd recommend getting a separate scale, grinder, and espresso machine, and a knock box. You'll be happier in the long run.