Jason Kottke's been blogging at kottke.org for 25 years.
It's an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since I experienced that "thunderbolt that completely changed my life" — it's now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses and organizes an ever-growing share of human information and activity. As a web designer in the 90s and early 00s, I helped companies figure out how to use the web for business, but the core of my own personal experience of the web has always been self-expression and making websites for individual humans to read & experience.
Busted from above: Spy camera that trapped $105m fraudster
She ate. She swore. She bitched about family and colleagues. She helped steal $105 million from the ATO. But Lauren Cranston had no idea there was a hidden camera watching her do all of it.
At last, a coffee machine that gets it just right
The Barista Touch Impress hits a sweet spot in the middle of Breville’s line-up
This is the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Or maybe it’s the story of golden oats and the three coffee machines: papa machine, mama machine and bambino machine.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the story of Breville’s newest coffee machine, the Barista Touch Impress, and how it won a place in our hearts through its not-too-fancy, not-too-cheap but just-right approach to coffee making.
And it’s the story of cholesterol, and how my very own doctor just last week told me I need to get my levels down pronto, making the Barista Touch Impress’s focus on creating non-dairy coffee drinks like soy lattes, almond cappuccinos and oat-milk flat whites very timely indeed.
The Barista Touch Impress adds non-dairy milk to its list of settings.
Did you know oats can lower your cholesterol? I’m sure I’m going to come out of this week with my doctor’s stamp of approval, what with all the gross oat-milk coffee I’ve been forced to drink to write this review.
(Though, I must say the oat milk is growing on me.)
The Barista Touch Impress is what you might think of as the top end of the middle segment of Breville’s now extensive lineup of machines.
In the top segment there are the Oracle Machines, including the Oracle Touch we reviewed a few years ago. They tend to have near cafe-grade features, like dual boilers and industrial-sized portafilters.
In the bottom segment there are the Bambinos, including the Bambino Plus we reviewed with the Oracle. They tend to be bare bones that still make very decent coffee for their price, but lack more advanced features such as customisable settings and automated coffee grinding.
And in the middle segment are the Barista machines, which tend to borrow features from above and below, as well as introducing nifty features you won’t even find in the more industrial-grade Oracles (such as the non-dairy “MilQ” system introduced in the new Barista Touch Impress, or the Impress Puck System introduced in the Barista Express Impress)
Like the more expensive Oracle Touch, the Barista Touch Impress has a big touchscreen that you use to operate the machine and tweak its settings to your tastes, though to differentiate it from the Oracle, Breville has limited the granularity of some of the settings.
You can use the screen to set automatic milk frothing temperatures in 5 degree increments, for instance, whereas on the Oracle Touch you can set them in degree increments.
The Barista Touch Impress also has a milk thermometer more akin to the one you’ll find on cheaper Bambinos, which measures the temperature of the base of the milk jug, rather than at the tip of the steam wand like in the Oracle Touch.
These two design choices surprised us somewhat, given the Impress’s focus on non-dairy milk, which can be very temperature sensitive and break apart or curdle at the drop of a hat.
But, it turns out, we needn’t have worried: the thermometer has proved to be reasonably accurate even though it’s not in the milk. Set to 60 degrees for heating oat milk, in our tests it consistently heated it within a degree of that.
The 5 degree increments don’t appear to have impeded us either, though it does seem a little mean-spirited to impose them on a $2299 coffee machine that, as far as we can tell from our tests, ought to be accurate enough for more granular settings that would allow non-dairy coffee drinkers to make drinks that are as hot as possible without the milk breaking apart.
Temperature isn’t the only thing the machine adjusts. Apparently the MilQ system also adjusts the amount of air it pumps into milk to create foam. While we have no means of testing that claim, we can tell you that the Barista Touch Impress does produce very good, silky-smooth micro-foam with oat milk, light milk and full-fat milk.
(We did not test soy milk because, while we’re fairly dedicated to reviewing products scientifically, there are some tests we are simply not paid enough to undertake.)
One of the things we most like about the Barista Touch Impress doesn’t have to do with its milk heating system, however.
Where the Oracle Touch takes a very hard-core approach to brewing coffee, pulling a shot of espresso exactly as you have described it in the machine’s settings even if that means the end result is utterly undrinkable, the Barista Touch Impress takes a much more forgiving approach known as “volumetric”.
It measures the amount of water going into the group head, and adjusts the brew time to ensure your coffee always has the right amount of liquid in it, meaning it’s usually going to be drinkable even if it’s not spot on.
(In contrast, the Oracle Touch will always brew for the time you set, meaning you could end up with far too much or far too little coffee to actually drink. Volumetric machines will always produce the right amount of liquid, even if liquid itself is under- or over-brewed.)
At the end of the brew, the Barista Touch Impress then tells you whether the brew time was too short or too long, so you can adjust the grind of the coffee for the next shot.
It’s a less precise system than the Oracle’s, but it does make it dead easy to keep your brews calibrated (you don’t need to weigh shots to see how over or under your grind settings are, and unlike other volumetric machines you don’t need a stopwatch to time your shots) and it does mean you get to drink more of your shots.
The other thing we like about the Barista Touch Impress, compared with the bigger, more expensive Oracle Touch is that the Barista uses a narrower portafilter basket (the little basket you put ground coffee in) which is more forgiving for non-standard shot sizes.
My ideal shot, for instance, is 15 grams of coffee brewed for 30 seconds to produce 30 grams of liquid coffee. That’s too much coffee to fit into an 11-gram, single-shot basket that comes with Breville machines, and it’s not enough coffee to fill a 22-gram double-shot basket that comes with the machines.
Using the 22-gram basket on the Oracle, it’s devilishly hard to brew my ideal shot consistently, because the basket is so underfilled the shallow puck is very prone to channelling.
But the basket on the Barista Touch Impress has a slightly narrower diameter (54mm on the Barista versus 58mm on the Oracle), which means the puck is a little deeper even when the basket is under-filled, giving me much less channelling and much more consistent results for my ideal shot.
Of course, Breville could solve this problem by simply selling their machines with medium-sized baskets (or indeed, by selling medium baskets as accessories) as well as small and large baskets. Why they don’t do this is a mystery.
Until that happy day, perhaps this is simply the tale of Goldilocks and the Two Baskets, in search of the mama basket that’s not too big, not too small.
