Breville Barista Touch Impress review: The best of both worlds

At the bare minimum, a coffee machine needs to be able to make espresso to your taste palate. Everyone has different preferences, some which are catered to easier than others, and for myself I’ve found it difficult to dial in to that perfect shot of espresso with other machines. Breville’s setup process tackles this head on.

The Touch Impress runs you through an A/B test of sorts in order to tune the machine to your liking. Starting at a baseline level 15 grind, you’ll run a single shot and the machine assesses the flow and length of the brew. On the touch screen it then makes suggestions based on its assessment, prompting you to try a different grind size, or temperature. It took me four passes to find the espresso shot that tasted right for me, and likely would have taken more time (and beans) without the prompts.

Many a coffee machine has passed through my home, and this was by far the most practical set up process. Even though it does grind through beans quite quickly, I wasted far less coffee and time finding the exact brew for me. What's better is that you can double back to this process anytime you want through the settings menu. For households with wildly different coffee tastes, or if you’re experimenting with new beans, this feature can save some heartache. Plus you can save your custom brews to take the manual effort out of it - if you’re into that sort of thing.

For your day-to-day brewing experience you can choose your own adventure - manual, or automatic. Both brew a great cup of joe, even if neither are quite what they say on the tin.

The grinding and tampering process sits somewhere between both worlds. You’ll start by choosing from the four baskets, and inserting the portafilter to the holder beneath the grinder. From here if you want to be more manual you can dial in your grind size from 1-30 by rotating the ‘slower extraction’ or ‘faster extraction’ dial on the left of the machine. Otherwise the machine will automatically choose your preference for the coffee type you selected from the menu. Once ground, you’ll need to pull down the lever to tamper the coffee flat - if there is too much, or not enough grounds in the portafilter the machine will let you know and prompt you to grind “a bit more” or scrap off some of the excess before tampering again. Once this is perfect, you lodge the portafilter to the grouphead and keep on brewing.

When you get to the milk steaming stage you can either choose to let the machine automatically steam your milk to the set temperature, and froth level, or you can take the wheel and do it yourself. On the automatic front the Breville can handle dairy, soy, almond, and oat milk, although only the dairy milk created microfoam properly. Each plant based milk ended up with a nicer consistency than other automatic frothers (bar the DREO BaristaMaker), but they weren’t up to the dairy standards.

From turning on the machine, to cleaning it up, the whole process takes around 4 minutes and 30 seconds including milk frothing. Without milk, you’re looking at around two minutes and 30 minutes instead. With milk this is much longer than other machines, but for a quick espresso it is just about on par. As someone who enjoys the ceremony of making a cup of coffee, the longer brewing and clean up time isn’t an issue. For my partner however, who doesn’t want to mess around between meetings, the full process isn’t his cup of joe, but brewing a long black in a couple of minutes is fine.

No matter which way you go about it, you’ll need to stay on top of cleaning the Touch Impress. Since it uses a manual portafilter, you’ll need to bang out the coffee each time, and it doesn’t have an automatic cleaning cycle for the group handle. The frothing wand flushes itself out into the drip tray, and coffee grounds do tend to get stuck to both the tamper and the group handle. To prevent any mould issues, you’ll want to give the machine a wipe down and clean out the drip tray at least every couple of days. Compared to a fully automatic machine which just needs a wipe down, and the grounds container emptied every now and then, this machine is demanding.

Once again the Barista Touch Impress seems to be teetering between two opposing ideas when it comes to design. Aesthetically it is a gorgeous stainless steel, or black machine that looks like the ideal espresso machine. The large frothing wand, the sleek, rounded edges - it is the classic coffee machine with a large modern touch screen on the front.

Rather than having a handful of pre-programmed buttons, this touch screen controls the entire machine. In this day and age when screens are ubiquitous this makes for a simple user experience. It is responsive, has wonderful colour balance, and is entirely intuitive to navigate. Plus it has adorable animations that also provide useful cues, like a timer for how long extraction is taking, and a temperature monitor for the milk frother.

Cuteness aside, a touch screen is near-imperative for this kind of machine, or at least for those who want to use it as an automatic. Once you’ve run a coffee cycle you can quickly save the previous settings to a custom drink, and navigate back to it at any time with a couple of swipes and taps. Without the screen this would be significantly more difficult to keep track of, if not impossible. I do miss buttons from a tactile perspective though, but hey at least it has the tamper crank.

Keep in mind that the Touch Impress is a slightly larger machine than most, so if you’re light on bench space you’ll want to take some measurements.

The Touch Impress is, in many ways, a wonderful middle ground. A meeting point of business and leisure, where you can take that little bit more, or that little bit less control. Not quite an automatic coffee machine, not quite a manual, but the best of both.

There are benefits to this system of course. The set up teaches you more about the brewing process which can be a solid stepping stone for the budding brewmaster. Since you need to bang out your coffee grounds after each cup, you don’t end up with a container full of moist grounds inside your machine, growing mould. And finally it can be a mostly hands-off process once you’re in the swing of things. On the flip side you do need to be more proactive about cleaning the machine, the manual elements have limitations, and brewing a coffee requires a longer time commitment. Still, the positive features outweigh the drawbacks. The Barista Touch Impress gives you just the right amount of guidance balanced with the right amount of freedom to let you experiment and learn about coffee. Whether you’re looking to step up your at-home brewing, or wanting to cut back on the labour of it, the Touch Impress has got you covered.