Review: Breville Luxe Brewer

The new Breville Luxe Brewer is designed for hot coffee. It makes excellent, subtle, hot drip coffee. But it also does something that almost no other fancy coffee maker on the market achieves. It makes real cold brew coffee—the sweet and gentle stuff, the cool elixir of smooth summers and milky heaven.

The Luxe is part of a new generation of drip coffee makers that has helped transform drip coffee from bitter office fuel into a subject for connoisseurship. The Luxe's predecessor, the Precision Brewer, was one of only a handful certified by the Specialty Coffee Association to brew drip coffee according to narrow benchmarks on temperature and extraction. The Luxe, though not yet certified, brews according to these same exacting criteria.

The Luxe achieves this feat through a whole lot of technical sophistication. This means PID temperature controllers, tightly controlled flow rates, programmable algorithms for different water volumes, and the same thermocoil heating technology and pump you’d use to make espresso.

But the Luxe makes cold brew, blessedly, by leaving it alone. Real cold brew is made only with coffee, water, and time. Messing with this formula, or hurrying it up, never quite gives you the real thing. The Luxe gives you the real thing—holding room-temp water and coffee grounds in suspension for as long as 24 hours before releasing it into a waiting carafe. In a world of coffee makers desperate to screw up cold brew, leaving it alone amounts to wild innovation. I haven’t seen this function in any coffee maker not made by Breville.

The device isn’t perfect, of course. There are some quirks. But the Luxe is an impressive machine that keeps Breville in the conversation when it comes to the best drip coffee devices out there.

The Fast Drip

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Before we return to cold brew, let’s talk drip coffee. It’s good. The Luxe is a handsome device, and also a big one: It makes 12 cups of coffee in a batch, as big as the biggest office brewers but much more gentle and precise in how it brews big-batch coffee.

The device is programmable in most of its particulars. By clicking the settings option, coffee geeks are free to create their own custom criteria, modulating the brew temp to an accuracy of a single degree. Other settings adjust the size and time of a pour-over-style bloom, and the flow rate of coffee through a shower-style brew head.

But most people won’t bother. If you press the “brew” button, the device will sense the amount of water in the removable water reservoir and brew accordingly. For small-batch coffee below 20 ounces, you’ll use a conical basket insert and conical paper filters. For larger batches, you’ll use flat-bottom filters and the default flat-bottom brewing basket.

The Breville brews quite well on default settings. According to my wireless thermometer, the brewing temperature curve looks like a broad butte. The shower wets coffee grounds evenly. And the result is smooth, aromatic, tasty coffee—coffee that brings out a lot of the subtle aromatic notes in light or medium roast coffee.

Courtesy of Breville

But Breville by default brews a bit fast—less than three minutes for batches less than 4 cups. This is great for convenience, but you may need to grind finer to get fuller-bodied coffee. Still, the beans are lovely and evenly extracted, without off notes or harsh bitterness or astringency. On flavor, it'll put most other coffee makers on the market to shame.

In all of this, the Luxe is similar to the previous generation Precision Brewer. If you’ve already got that one, there’s little reason to upgrade your whole machine if yours is still working. But for the record, these are the big upgrades.

The biggest deal is that the water tank is now removable for easy filling, excising the most annoying quality of the Precision Brewer. The new thermal carafe—which Breville says keeps the coffee warm for two hours or more—fixes some small issues with leaks in the previous generation device, and is compatible with previous-gen Precision machines. The warming plate for the glass carafe can now be turned on and off at any time.

Also, the interface has been simplified: Only the SCA-recommended “gold” brewing option is now available among preset options. The somewhat confusing “strong” and “over ice” settings from the Precision have been nixed, as was an unnecessary “fast” setting. Those who want to tinker with strength and speed will have to do so through the custom brew menu, which is pretty intuitive.

Not a new feature, but worth noting that the Luxe Brewer lets you program your coffee up to a day in advance. So can start up for you in the morning and brew a pot of coffee that’ll be ready when you wake up.

Cold Comfort

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

For me, the setting that sets the Luxe apart from the competition is the cold brew. It’s smart, but also simple. The brew process is a lot like the cold brew made by our top-rated, extremely low–tech Oxo Compact Coffee Maker ($35). You put up to 20 ounces of water in the reservoir. Then you put about 100 mg of coffee in the flat filter basket. This'll make five ounces or so of concentrate, which you can dilute to about 12 ounces of drinking-strength coffee.

The difference is, with the Breville, you get to set a brew time. The machine will hold the coffee in suspension until the appointed hour, and then slowly let your room-temperature cold brew dispense into the waiting carafe. This removes the annoying jujitsu of calculating exactly when your cold brew will be done steeping, so you can be there with a catcher’s mitt 16 hours later. I’d slept on this feature in the previous Precision brewer, but the Luxe’s is even more flexible, allowing brew times of up to 24 hours to accommodate lighter roasts.

Just note you’ll need to take the lid off the carafe before placing it under the brew chamber. The lid is designed to release the flow valve—and so if it’s on the carafe, the water will just flow through the grounds and straight into the carafe.

The Finicky Business

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Here’s where we get down to some odd persnickety points with the Luxe Brewer. As mentioned previously, the Luxe brews faster by default than some other high-end drip coffee makers of its caliber. For dark or even medium roasts, huzzah! Faster coffee. But for very light roasts and small batches, you'll need to grind finer. And you'll still struggle do as well with the lightest roasts as with the infinitely programmable Fellow Aiden, or the rich-extracting Ratio Six Series Two ($359).

The other point of annoyance: The water reservoir. I love that it’s removable—and that it has helpful little measuring gradations on its side. However, these markings assume you use the carbon filter that comes with the Breville Luxe, and which must be replaced every six months. If you take the filter out, the markings on the reservoir will be wrong by an ounce or two.

The Luxe also leaves a bit more than an ounce of water (40 to 50 milliliters) in the tank after brewing. This keeps the pump from running dry, and is accounted for by the tank markings. But if you're the sort who weighs your water for ultimate precision, you'll need to account for this unused 50 ml. It’s an odd quirk for such a precise device, but will matter not at all if you brew big batches.

These are mostly tetchy complaints. The Luxe is a very customizable machine that also brews well straight out of the box, one that wakes itself up in the morning to brew excellent small or large-batch coffee. It also makes real cold brew, and lets you change its brewing temp to account for lighter or darker roasts. It is a lovely beast, one that nonetheless requires a small bit of taming.