The brand new Breville Luxe Brewer is designed for decent espresso. It makes glorious, refined, scorching drip espresso. However it additionally does one thing that just about no different fancy espresso maker available on the market achieves. It makes actual chilly brew espresso—the candy and mild stuff, the cool elixir of clean summers and milky heaven.
The Luxe is a part of a brand new era of drip espresso makers that has helped rework drip espresso from bitter workplace gasoline right into a topic for connoisseurship. The Luxe’s predecessor, the Precision Brewer, was one in every of solely a handful licensed by the Specialty Espresso Affiliation to brew drip espresso in response to slim benchmarks on temperature and extraction. The Luxe, although not but licensed, brews in response to these identical exacting standards.
The Luxe achieves this feat via an entire lot of technical sophistication. This implies PID temperature controllers, tightly managed circulate charges, programmable algorithms for various water volumes, and the identical thermocoil heating know-how and pump you’d use to make espresso.
However the Luxe makes chilly brew, blessedly, by leaving it alone. Actual chilly brew is made solely with espresso, water, and time. Messing with this components, or hurrying it up, by no means fairly provides you the actual factor. The Luxe provides you the actual factor—holding room-temp water and occasional grounds in suspension for so long as 24 hours earlier than releasing it right into a ready carafe. In a world of espresso makers determined to screw up chilly brew, leaving it alone quantities to wild innovation. I haven’t seen this operate in any espresso maker not made by Breville.
The machine isn’t excellent, in fact. There are some quirks. However the Luxe is a formidable machine that retains Breville within the dialog in terms of the perfect drip espresso units on the market.
The Quick Drip
{Photograph}: Matthew Korfhage
Earlier than we return to chilly brew, let’s speak drip espresso. It’s good. The Luxe is a good-looking machine, and likewise a giant one: It makes 12 cups of espresso in a batch, as huge as the most important workplace brewers however way more mild and exact in the way it brews big-batch espresso.
The machine is programmable in most of its particulars. By clicking the settings choice, espresso geeks are free to create their very own customized standards, modulating the brew temp to an accuracy of a single diploma. Different settings regulate the dimensions and time of a pour-over-style bloom, and the circulate charge of espresso via a shower-style brew head.
However most individuals received’t trouble. If you happen to press the “brew” button, the machine will sense the quantity of water within the detachable water reservoir and brew accordingly. For small-batch espresso beneath 20 ounces, you’ll use a conical basket insert and conical paper filters. For bigger batches, you’ll use flat-bottom filters and the default flat-bottom brewing basket.
