Breville The Oracle Jet

I received my Oracle Jet (purchased refurbished from Breville eBay) three days ago as a replacement for my old Barista Touch, and so far it’s been excellent. It was shipped with the incorrect hopper but Breville were quick to ship out a replacement. There was a small learning curve at the start, but the on-screen guidance makes a big difference and quickly helped me dial in the coffee just right.

The machine is very intuitive and does a great job of taking the guesswork out of making quality espresso, especially compared to my previous setup. Everything feels well thought-out, and once you’ve had a bit of a play, it becomes very easy to use.

It’s definitely an expensive machine, but if it’s within your budget, I’d absolutely recommend it.

Every time my partner & I visited a particular friend, I always came away jealous of the coffee that he serves! I had a Delonghi Dinamica Plus, fully automatic coffee machine, which I owned for over 3 years. The Dinamica Plus produced very consistent & enjoyable coffee (I have received many compliments, for my coffees, from friends over the years). I do not like the milk frothing system on the Delonghi as it does not produce dense & creamy froth. So I have been using a Breville BFM600 milk frothing machine, when making Cappuccinos & Lattes. This combination has worked well! However, the coffees I made were nowhere near the 'Coffee shop quality' coffees that my friend makes.

He uses a Breville Dual Boiler manual coffee machine & Smart Grinder Pro coffee grinder. I have used manual coffee machines & grinders, in the past, but could never get consistent results. This could be because I was not diligent & disciplined enough .... But this doesn't mean that I don't enjoy & desire a rich, full bodied coffee with good crema!

So I started researching Automatic & Semi Automatic Coffee machines, with built in grinders. After much time spent watching You Tube reviews, I decided that the Breville The Oracle Jet should suit my needs. From the reviews that I watched the Jet looked relatively easy to set up to get consistent results, with a few more steps required during coffee preparation, compared to the Fully Automatic machines. The on board, 4 core computer system is very helpful, combined with the full color touch screen, which is easy to navigate & will not bamboozle anyone familiar with a modern smart phone. It took just 3 cups of latte to get very nice coffee dialed in, with the quality that I was hoping for. The Jet does go through coffee beans at a higher rate than the Dinamica Plus as it's 58mm portafilter holds a larger shot of coffee grinds for each cup. This is probably part of the reason why the coffees it produces are richer & more full bodied.

This machine is aimed at a user who likes their coffee, but doesn't want to get too involved in the technical side of espresso coffee machines. It offers a level of control which yields consistent results without too much fine tuning.

The Oracle Jet is quite expensive & I suppose from a value point of view, hard to justify. However, if you can afford it, it will provide much satisfaction over the years. There are some cheaper Breville semi automatic machines that you may wish to investigate, if you don't wish to invest as much as the price of the Oracle Jet. Here is a link to Breville ... https://www.breville.com/en-au/shop/espresso. There is also a new Oracle Dual Boiler machine, just released. This offers all the automatic functions as well as optional 'manual' control, which might suit someone looking for more control of their coffee.

As it has been on the market for over 12 months, I was able to negotiate a good discount on a new machine, from Harvey Norman.

After enjoying a series of Breville Oracle and Oracle Touch coffee machines over more than a decade, I naturally turned to Breville again when my old Oracle stopped working a month ago. Unfortunately, I thought my lengthy experience with Breville allowed me to bypass time wasting reviews. But I regret that now. When I saw the Breville Oracle Jet on display, I assumed it would fulfil all my well-developed coffee needs! And the extremely high cost only gave me brief pause!

So now, with a month of several times a day experience behind me, let me begin with the Oracle Jet's positives. Firstly, and most obviously, it looks great. It's smaller than the old Oracle; it's shinier and is brightly lit by embedded lighting. It's impressively automated with a significant number of touchscreen pre-programmed coffee options which in addition to the "standards", include Iced Coffee, Espresso Martini, Babyccino and Hot Chocolate. It sure encourages experimentation.

It's also wifi connected, and this allows the Oracle Jet's programming to be updated in the background. Who knows whether this is as useful a feature as Breville suggests. I never updated my old Oracle/Oracle Touch machines, and I don't know whether or not my Oracle Jet has been updated or in what circumstances and update would be performed. So who knows whether is that a positive or not?

But a truly significant positive is that the Oracle Jet provides instant coffee production; I no longer have to wait for the "old Oracle" double boilers to heat up. It offers instantaneous coffee - and that's a truly great feature! But it comes at a cost because while it allows me to make a cup of coffee instantaneously, it doesn't allow me to make coffees the way I used to. My usual practice with the old double-boiler Oracle was to simultaneously make a double-cup of cappuccinos for my wife and I - achieved by selecting a suitable volume for both the coffee and the milk, and placing two cups under the coffee steamer head.

This has proved almost impossible with the Oracle Jet - and not for want of trying on my part! The strength of the coffee crema, while satisfactory for one coffee, is inadequate for two; and more importantly, the milk frother is simply inadequate; it even struggles to provide satisfactorily frothed milk for one coffee, let alone two!

I had a number of exchanges with Breville about this issue, which I considered fairly significant, but couldn't achieve a satisfactory outcome. It was suggested I should change from 2% milk (which I used with the old Oracle) to full fat milk; I should make sure there was not too much milk in the frothing jug; that the steamer outlets weren't blocked. None of these suggestions improved the frothing function, and Breville and I eventually fell into silence concluding that the Oracle Jet was simply not up to the task of providing my expected level of frothed milk.

Had I not rushed to buy the shiny new technology, I perhaps would have read and watched reviews BEFORE purchasing rather than having my experience confirmed AFTER purchase. In relation to the milk frothing issue, a lengthy and detailed YouTube barista review entitled "Sage (Breville) Oracle Jet Review & Test (deep dive)" put up by Tom's Coffee Corner, flagged the trouble he had with the auto milk frothing function, and recommended a solution that involved holding the milk jug. I tried it, but with only limited success.

In summary, there's much that can be praised about the Oracle Jet machine. It's a beautiful and versatile piece of (very expensive) coffee-making technology and I have yet to explore its full potential. But it hasn't met my personal, fairy limited, needs for a two cups of cappuccino. I've lowered my aim and I'm becoming used to making one cappuccino at a time - and standing at the coffee machine while my wife drinks hers! But I wonder was it really worth the $3308 it cost me? Probably not.