Breville Oracle Touch Review: Does This Automated Coffee Machine Hold Up In 2024?
The Breville Oracle Touch provides convenience for brewing the coffee drinks your palate most desires. It’s a feature-packed, fully automatic espresso machine that prepares your favorite beverages in three easy touchscreen motions – swipe, select, and tap. Does this fingertip-operable coffee machine deserve its expensive price tag? Our Breville Oracle Touch Review will give you all the specs, benefits, analysis, and what real-world users think of the machine.
We spent hours researching the best-in-class and top-of-the-line home coffee machines. Without a doubt, the Breville Oracle Touch is worth the dough and will give you the best coffee experience at home.
Breville Oracle Touch Review 2024 – Summary
Breville Oracle Touch provides convenience for brewing the coffee drinks your palate most desires. It’s a feature-packed, fully automatic espresso machine that prepares your favorite beverages in three easy touchscreen motions – swipe, select, and tap.
The Breville Oracle® Touch is a super automatic espresso machine that simplifies coffee making through its automated touch screen operation.
It features a dual boiler heating system, a professional 58mm stainless steel portafilter, and a fully integrated conical burr grinder with 45 grind settings. It also includes hands-free milk texturing capabilities, an easy 3D interactive setup, and customizable settings for up to 8 different coffees.
Pros
Cons
Breville Oracle Touch – An Overview
The Oracle Touch is Breville’s next-generation super-automatic espresso machine. It makes brewing any cafe-quality gourmet coffee as simple as grind, brew, and milk — simple steps that will make you fall in love with Breville Oracle Touch every time you brew coffee.
The Oracle Breville allows you to customize the coffee strength, temperature, and milk texture to satisfy your coffee preference. You can personalize each coffee setting you make by creating and saving up to 8 personalized coffees.
Every stage in making coffee and other milk-based beverages with Oracle Touch is automated. You can automatically achieve the taste of your cafe’s favorite coffee with its integrated conical burr grinder that grinds, doses, and tamps 22 grams of coffee.
It uses digital temperature control (PID) technology to ensure that the temperature needed to make a balanced-tasting espresso is maximized to its optimal range, thanks to the heated group head and the dual boiler.
To ensure that there’ll be no bitter flavors in every espresso shot, it uses the Over Pressure Valve (OPV), which can limit the maximum pressure in extracting the flavors and nuances from the coffee beans. Likewise, it employs sufficient steam pressure to create a third-wave specialty coffee with a balanced espresso taste and a rich micro-foam.
The Breville Brand
Breville, marketed as Sage in Europe, has been a renowned kitchen appliance brand since 1932. It is highly regarded for its espresso machines, known for their excellent quality-to-value ratio.
Their acquisition of Baratza, a leading coffee grinder brand, further solidifies Breville’s esteemed position in the coffee brewing market, appealing to a broad range of coffee enthusiasts.
Who is the Breville Oracle Touch for?
Before we go full dive into this Breville Oracle Touch review, we want to be clear about whom this product is best suitable for. Knowing if the Breville Oracle is the fully automatic coffee maker destined to be in your kitchen or not is like fitting a shoe in the mall before you buy it. So is this the espresso maker for a coffee lover like you?
If you cherish a barista-quality and delicious coffee, love to share good coffee with family and friends in highs and lows, and adore a coffee maker like it’s part of your family regardless of the price you have to pay, then the Breville Oracle Touch is the espresso maker for you.
Oracle Touch’s versatile features, great value, and convenience offset the golden price tag. Rather than stand in long queues in cafes, accidentally set fire in the kitchen, or hurt yourself while making coffee, you can leave all the anxieties in making a delicious coffee with Oracle Touch because it will not let you down.
Main Features of the Breville Oracle Touch
Breville Oracle offers convenience and delicious coffee, which you can achieve through the following features and benefits of Oracle Touch worth considering.
Setup and Operation
When you unbox the Breville Oracle, anticipate that you’d spend 20 to 30 minutes of your time putting it together. If you’re planning to do something else after setting up this fully automated coffee machine – don’t. It’s better if you focus your energy on this magical box of delicious coffee drinks for initial setup, system purges, and machine tutorials for proper operation,
Before you start putting the removable parts together, it’s best to wash them first. These removable parts include:
- cover
- drip tray
- filter baskets
- portafilter
- water tank
Manufacturers highly recommend washing the parts that touch the water as some features may contain manufacturing residue.
Once you’re done washing the parts, fill the water tank with 2.5 liters of water (that’s the reservoir’s max capacity) and press the power button. You’ll hear a five-note startup sound that will proceed to fill the boilers with water automatically. As this process goes on, the touch screen’s front lights will blink and ask for you to set up the basic settings such as language, temperature reading (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and the date and time.
After setting this up, the touch screen will flash you instructions about doing the initial setup on a step-by-step procedure. It will remind you to keep the filter baskets and the portafilter handy. Likewise, it will flash a prompt to ready your water filter and water filter holder.
At this phase, you are already running the water filter setup and will be asked to do a hard water test using the test strips. Never skip this part as it will determine the cleaning regimen suited for our machine.
As the setup continues, you will be prompted to purge the system. The purging involves running a lot of water through the boilers, the group heads, the hot water tap, the steam wand, etc. It is done to flush it out and prepare the machine for coffee brewing.
After the purging, the Breville Oracle will either let you start brewing your coffee or run through a series of demos for your first drink. To ensure that you’ll never get lost operating the machine, we recommend you do not skip the Oracle Touch walkthrough. It will provide confidence for building a perfect flat white, making quality coffee, perfecting your milk frothing skills, and achieving an overall familiarity with the espresso machine.
Brewing Capacity
Breville, the Oracle utilizes the bean-to-cup system. Meaning, the brewing process starts from the bean hopper then the coffee beans fall into the conical burr grinder. The beans grinder dispenses the dosed and tamped grounds to the portafilter after. To extract the flavors, you place the portafilter into the group head, and coffee starts to pour into your cup after the milk frothing.
The secret to delicious coffee does not depend only on the type of coffee beans you used, whether it’s a Volcanica Yirgacheffe or the Morning Breakfast of Grounds and Hounds. Variable parameters like selecting a drink from the pre-programmed coffee drinks and preheating the portafilter and the filter basket to optimize extraction are indispensable.
Yet, if the full process of making coffee with Oracle Touch still alienates you, worry not. You can even brew a delicious Breville coffee with its pre-programmed coffee drinks. Before the grinding starts, you may select from the five pre-programmed coffee drinks and customize them according to your coffee preference.
Cleaning and Maintenance
The Oracle Touch employs the traditional way of brewing coffee. Meaning, it has dregs containers, where you dump the used grounds, to clean. To maintain the machine, you have to throw the used grounds into the knock bin after each brew cycle and wipe it with a clean cloth. Yet, the device will let you know if it’s time to descale the espresso machine.
Since we’ve mentioned the importance of doing the initial setup and operation upon unboxing of Breville Oracle, be reminded that descaling with Oracle touch is a daunting process. It can take 60 to 90 minutes to finish. That’s a long time relative to other machines. Even so, you can do it without a problem since Breville has an instruction video guide to get you through the entire process of descaling.
Another part of the Oracle Touch that you need to pay attention to is the steam wand. It requires frequent cleaning by wiping the exterior after each use. To clean the nozzle, you only need to push the steam wand back into its place. The nozzle will automatically clean itself through steam forced out of the nozzle’s tip.
In case you encounter a problem with your Oracle espresso machine, we don’t recommend DIY repair. Instead, visit the nearest service centers to have it checked. Every Breville espresso machine has a 2-year Repair Warranty, so getting it fixed won’t be a hassle.
Accessories and Add-ons
To ensure that you’ll be able to brew a delicious coffee the Breville way, Oracle Touch includes the following accessories:
- Mini Grinds Bin.
- Full Stainless Steel Portafilter (58mm).
- Single Wall Filter Baskets (1 cup & 2 cups).
- Stainless Steel Milk Jug (480ml ).
- Steam Wand spare parts.
- Cleaning Kit (includes grinder burr brush, grind outlet brush, and magnet for tamp removal).
- Water Hardness Test Strip.
- Water Filter Holder and Water Filter.
These accessories can be stored in a storage tray located beneath the Oracle’s drip tray. To get and keep the tools, just pull out the drip tray.
Specifications
- Capacity
- Bean Hopper: ½ lb
- Water Reservoir: 84 oz
- Construction Materials: Brushed Stainless steel and Stainless Steel Dual Boiler
- Dimensions: 12″ x 15″ x 14 (WxDxH)
- Over-Pressure Valve: Utilizes the 15-bar Italian pump pressure to prevent bitter flavors for each shot.
- Power: Uses 1800 Watts
- Pre-Infusion Function: Water pressure is gradually increased to expand grinds gently for an even extraction of coffee beans
Settings:
- You can set the five pre-programmed Café favorites through the touchscreen operation.
- Create, save, and name the eight customizable coffee settings.
- Adjust the ground control.
- It allows the programming of milk temperature and texture.
- Choose between one or two Shots.
- Boil Water for other drinks like tea.
Timer: An espresso shot clock displays flash on the LCD screen to guide you with your coffee’s extraction consistency.
Triple Heat System:
- Has a steam boiler with an integrated Heat Exchange to aid thermal stability.
- Integrated with espresso boilers with Digital PID control to deliver the precise water temperature for coffee beans extraction.
- The heated group head – PID-controlled embedded element is responsible for maintaining the Oracles Breville espresso machine’s thermal stability.
Voltage: Uses 110-120 Volts.
Warranty: Has a 2-Year Repair Warranty which you can use in any Breville service center near you.
What You Need to Know Before You Buy?
Does Breville Oracle Touch brew coffee as promised? The Oracle Touch users have something to share that’s worth considering before you decide to buy a Breville appliance.
- The Oracle Touch is hard to beat when it comes to quick but tasty Americanos.
- Breville’s Oracle Touch can brew great-tasting coffee if you set it up properly.
- Grinding below 20g of coffee grounds is not feasible with the Oracle Touch unless you run it in manual mode.
- If you want to be adventurous with your espresso, adjusting the tamp back to its default 22g dosing and the dose in your hopper can get you the feel of a pro.
- Breville’s 58mm portafilter baskets are unique, which makes them incompatible with E61 machines.
- The Breville Oracle is convenient to use and has an amazing double boiler system, a perfect latte frother, and a big reservoir. However, the biggest setback is the grinder because it isn’t consistent with its grinds.
- The Oracle Touch often produces weird noises. If this happens, you need to descale the machine and update the firmware.
- Adjust the grinder and tamp settings to avoid channeling coffee in the puck.
- When you use the Oracle Touch, you’ll have limited control over dosing which affects the consistency of the shots.
- For a better-tasting espresso, use clean water appropriate for use in espresso machines.
- Breville Oracle is better to use for milk-based drinks than Jura.
- This espresso machine can produce nice steamed milk for latte art. Yet, it’s incapable of producing a volume-rich froth for a cappuccino.
Alternatives to Breville Oracle Touch
If the Breville Oracle Touch’s price tag feels a bit intimidating, don’t fret, there are plenty of similar machines. Take a look at the following espresso makers when deciding which one to purchase.
Jura E8 Automatic Coffee Machine
The Jura E8 Automatic Coffee Machine can prepare any of the 16 different espresso drinks in one touch. It’s a bean-to-cup brewing machine that utilizes the integrated AromaG3 grinder to grind the coffee beans and the Pulse Extraction Process (P.E.P) to consistently make the perfect espresso you’ll love. If you want a creamy foam for your latte or macchiato, the HP3 Milk Delivery System will prepare it for you.
Please read the full review of Jura E8 to learn more about its other features.
JURA's automatic coffee machine offers a variety of features including individual cup brewing with whole beans for fresh flavor, one-touch preparation for quick coffee specialties, and programmable settings for personalized brewing strengths and volumes. It also boasts a Professional Fine Foam FrotherG2 for high-quality milk foam, enhancing drinks like cappuccinos and lattes. Plus, it's compatible with the J.O.E. app for convenient smartphone operation.
De’Longhi Eletta Super Automatic Coffee Machine
The De’Longhi Eletta is a super-automatic coffee machine for people who love espresso drinks. Its LatteCrema System can prepare perfectly layered espresso beverages with creamy, dense, and lasting foam for any cup with a maximum height of 5.5 inches. The freshness of your coffee beans is within your control, as you can adjust the grind settings anytime.
Read the full DeLonghi Eletta review to know how you can prepare delicious espresso drinks with this machine.
The De'Longhi Elatta offers an integrated burr grinder with adjustable settings for grinding fresh beans, and a second chamber for pre-ground coffee, catering to various preferences. It features the LatteCrema System for creating espresso beverages with dense, rich foam, and allows for customized brewing, including temperature, strength, and milk-to-espresso ratio. The machine also boasts easy cleaning and maintenance, with a compact and extractable brew unit, and dual heating elements for optimal temperature control for both espresso and milk.
Jura S8 Automatic Coffee Machine
The Jura S8 is an automatic coffee machine for people who want an instant caffeine fix that can be done with a button touch. It can prepare 15 barista-quality gourmet coffee consistently. It has a timeless aesthetic design suited to any kitchen interior design. Best of all, it comes with a 5-year warranty so you can expect years of making delicious coffee anytime you like.
Please read our full review of Jura S8 to learn how its one-touch brewing system works!
The JURA S8 automatic coffee machine offers a range of features for coffee enthusiasts, including individual cup brewing with freshly ground beans for optimal flavor, and one-touch preparation for various coffee specialties in under a minute.
It is programmable and adjustable, allowing for personalized brewing strengths and volumes, and it has an advanced milk frother for perfect milk foam in drinks like cappuccinos and lattes. The machine also boasts a high-resolution touchscreen display with 8 programmable positions and is compatible with the JURA Operating Experience app for remote operation.
You can also read our list of 10 Best Automatic Espresso Machines in 2024 that can make you delicious coffee at home anytime.
The Breville Oracle Touch Verdict
The Breville Oracle Touch is a fully automatic espresso machine for two types of people. First, for people who love to drink different espresso beverages in the easiest way possible. Second, it’s for people who have a lot going on in their lives and coffee is the only beverage that makes their day more productive and enjoyable. Why make brewing coffee difficult when you can do it consistently in 3 easy steps?
We’ve come up with these reasons as to why the Oracle Touch is designed explicitly for these people. The features outlined reveal an intuitive brewing system that makes brewing coffee and preparing barista-quality espresso drinks as easy as using an iPad. Whether you’re fully awake or half-awake, you can never go wrong with the coffee you’ll be making with this super-automatic coffee machine.
The Breville Oracle® Touch is a super automatic espresso machine that simplifies coffee making through its automated touch screen operation.
It features a dual boiler heating system, a professional 58mm stainless steel portafilter, and a fully integrated conical burr grinder with 45 grind settings. It also includes hands-free milk texturing capabilities, an easy 3D interactive setup, and customizable settings for up to 8 different coffees.
- Dual boiler heating system
- Built-in conical burr grinder with 45 grind settings
- Customizable settings, up to 8 different coffees
Other Breville Machines That May Interest You
Espresso Machines:
Breville Espresso Machine Comparison Guide: A Must-Read Before You Buy
- Breville Oracle Touch Review: Best-in-Class Automated Coffee Machine
- Breville Oracle: A Revolutionary 3-in-1 Fully-automatic Espresso Machine
- Breville Dual Boiler: A Satisfying Espresso Drinker’s Tool
- Breville Barista Touch: 3rd Wave Espresso at Home
- Breville Barista Pro: Precise Espresso at Home
- Breville Barista Express: The Ultimate All-In-One Espresso Machine
- Breville Bambino Plus: The Ideal Entry Level Espresso Machine
- Breville Bambino: Starter Espresso Machine with Superb Coffee Quality and Value
- Breville Infuser: Can it Brew the Perfect Espresso?
- Breville Duo Temp Pro: Is it Worth the Hype?
Coffee Makers:
Grinders:
- Breville Smart Grinder Pro: An Intelligent Grinder for Coffee Beans
- Breville Dose Control Pro: THE Smart Coffee Grinder
Milk Frother:
