Making Coffee on a Breville Barista Touch Home Espresso Machine

The Breville coffee machine isn't something that we sell or even endorse however we do understand they are popular with many home baristas some of whom use our coffee so we definitely want to see them getting the best out of it.

Here, Jimmy gets his hands on a Breville home espresso machine and goes through his process of dialing it in to get the best results out of it. In this video he's using the Breville Touch and Jimmy puts into practice some of the processes he would normally employ in a commercial environment like weighing in and out his dose and yield.

One interesting thing Jimmy finds is that it's very easy to single dose beans into the inbuilt grinder to help standardize his extractions. He found that the grinder didn't retain much coffee and the 'popcorning' effect was minimal due to the less powerful motor in the grinder so single dosing worked really well.

Hope you enjoy watching the video! 

 Video Transcript

The million dollar question is, is there a standardized recipe for your home revel machine? We recently got a question through our Instagram for one of our subscribers. He asks "in the Breville Barista Touch, could you please do what number to put the grind setting on? How long to grind for with each cup size in each porter filter and how long to brew for each". Thanks for the message Kobe. We're gonna try and answer that for you today. Stick around.

Hey guys, I'm Jimmy. Welcome back to the Artisti YouTube channel wher we guide you through all things coffee. If you haven't already be sure to subscribe to the channel, hit the like button and the bell icon so you don't miss out on future videos. Today I'm here in the Artisti roastery and we're playing with a Breville or a Sage, you might call it.

And this isn't a machine that we generally endorse. We don't even sell them, it's just a machine that we're fully aware that heaps of people have in their homes and we get so many questions about the best recipe and how to use them to get the best flavor coffee. Now, I'm used to using the La Marzocco because I'm used to using commercial machines and when I get on a home machine, I just have to make some adaptions to make sure that I can expect what I can truly expect out of a machine. You can't expect the highest quality, best version of that coffee, but we can do our best and teach some tricks. Today, I'm going to use our Champion house blend here at Artist medium roast. Really easy to work with. Very versatile. I've set up my own little recipe in this particular Breville touch.

You know, there's a few different variations of these machines. So, but I've got my settings in there right now. I have my grind setting to six. I've got my grind set to a nominal amount of time because I'm going to teach you how to minimize the variations between your grind. So they are not dictated by having a hopper fall and just how however much coffee lands in your basket. I've also got my through time setting to 30 seconds. Now, I'm not even sure that that's the right time because I'm gonna slightly manage that manually. So I've got it set to 30 seconds. It's really the most time I'll do. But I'm going to weigh my yield. I'm also going weigh my dose. I'm going to bring in some of the commercial things that we teach.

And there is some other videos on that. You can go back and you can listen to see the videos that Luke talked about time in extractions. They'll be really helpful to you at this stage. I am going to use the single wall basket. I'm not going to use this duel wall there's a whole other video that we've got on which basket to choose. We put all the links below the relevant videos, in the description below.

I went through their guide, I checked it out to see how they teach you. They do introduce this razor tool. I'm not going to use that one because it really questions how much dose you've got in your basket. So and I will spin some milk. So let's get started firstly dose. One variable that I can maintain is my dose and a little trick that I do with this so that I'm not filling up my hopper and kind of guessing and whatever time I put in there, mostly it's gonna do a single dose straight on the top.

And then I'm gonna grind straight into my basket and let all of that grind out. Once I select jimmy. So that's gonna grind out the 18 g that I've weighed in there. Now I've done some tests and I'm pretty happy. This grinder doesn't have a lot of retention. So that was pretty impressive for me. This means that I can weigh in. You can see by the clumping in my grind, I'm quite fine. That grind setting of six is quite fine. You're, you're changing the grind settings on the side but you can change even more settings. So I changed more settings up in the chamber by taking out the burrs. I haven't done that. I'm just going off factory settings. So I've got it set to six.

I've got my 18 g in there, potentially less because it made a bit of a mess. I'm going to use their little tricky tamp here. A little bit of pressure, not too much. Little spin off and we're good to go. So what you are going to need is a decent set of scales because this is really going to dictate your flavor. Now I will mention that I did lots of, ran lots of tests. I did so many dose in, dose out and pretty well worked out that 18 grams is the most coffee that I can fit in this basket where it's not, I've got enough room for expansion. I'm not under dosing and that's giving me the optimal amount of coffee in my basket to get a good flavor.

Now I drank every single one of these coffees, some of them were horrible. Some of them were so hard to drink. I just wanted to know What each flavor was like. So I landed on 18 grams of coffee which gives me a good amount of coffee to work with and it can handle the pressure especially once you don't want to just keep going finer and finer. You want to work with your dose as well. So let's get that up there, chuck that in. I'm gonna tare off my cup. I'm gonna start my brew. Now My recipe that I came to was 20 seconds. So we're heading up we've got a couple of seconds in. We should see that drop. Now I definitely found the best flavor part of this shot was always in the first start of a shot. So when we talk about Normale and we talk about a 1-2 ratio, I found that was somewhat too much coffee in my baskets.

I really want 30 g of yield, which means I kind of need to stop that brewing early and you'll see that roll up to that 30 g. It took me 25 seconds. So my next adjustment because I got 25 seconds, the one that I tasted earlier that I was most happy with was more like 20 seconds. I find that whenever I use domestic home machines, I just can't get the same extraction time that I do commercially. They don't have pre-infusion., don't have good, no pressure control in my heads. So as you find that will tend to run faster shots more than slower ones on the home machines. You'll find that the flavor is better for that. So there we go. We've got to 25 second extraction, 31 g of coffee. It's not bad at all. And I can taste the nuances that I'm used to tasting in Champion, those sweet flavor profiles and has a good body there.

Trying to get that balance is maybe a bit of a high acidity and bitterness there from going what I would say over extracted if my recipe is 20 seconds and I got 25 seconds. So I'm currently on six. Next one I'm going to speed up that extraction. So I go slightly coarser, just one click coarser, run another shot. I'd keep my 18 g of basket, 18 g of coffee into my basket. I'd still weigh my shot out so that I know I can turn that off when I get my 30 g of yield and once I know that I've achieved that in 20 seconds, I could change this setting to be a 22nd brew so that tomorrow I could pretty well chuck that in, do the same thing, hit my brew and walk away and I'm going to pretty well nail that 30 g of yield in the cup again.

And that's what these machines are good for. Their built for not necessarily consistency to zero is always variations in coffee but they're built for automation and speed and they just make your life easier. So if you want to make the best version of coffee, of course, upgrade to a an even better home machine, go duel boiler going to the more nitty gritty but you'll find that they become more manual because you're needing to be more hands on and and the more you learn about coffee, the more videos of ours you watch and you see lots of great, you just learn more about coffee. You'll find that you want to break outside of the pre settings and the manual, the way that they come out of the box and you've got to learn you've got to play and you've got to drink it all.

So, let's also just do some milk. Now, this is one thing that this is totally out of my area is automation on milk. So I'm gonna chuck that in there, I've got enough for my small cup, hit that button and this is nice. I just feel like I'm cheating a little bit. It goes against everything I teach and stand for. I did put a thermometer in early one and I was pretty impressed that the temperature was good. And this is where if you're new to the home barista area, this is gonna this is potentially going to help you make them more consistently well, heated milk and froth. But again, you're not learning that skill as a barista and if you if you want to do that as a career or really improve your skills or just show off to your friends. This is not how to do it.

So, let's have a look. Yeah, there is our milk. Of course, we've got to give that a clean. Self purging. To be honest, I'm pretty impressed with that milk. I gotta say, I've seen a lot worse on some other machines, I've seen a lot worse out of some baristas. So let's have a look how she pours. She's pretty frothy. I didn't I did put it on a latte setting. Yeah. Helps if you can pour a nice little pattern there and that is a latte. If I got up in the morning and I got to make a coffee on that I'd be impressed but I'm not necessarily going to get that cafe experience that in my flavor that you might be chasing. Because I didn't get that for 1-2 normale ratio I'm a little bit lighter on.

So I would find that you'll really struggle to get a really strong cup of coffee out of a domestic machine because you don't have the dose to play with. Commercially we're working with 22 a half grams of coffee, remember? So you've gotta you're missing out a lot of punch and and body there but I'm not here to review the Breville. I'm here to give you some tips on how to make better coffee at home If you've got any questions about this particular video or you've got a Breville if you've got any tricks that you think are helping you make better coffee, put them in the comments below, we read them all, we like to reply. If you've got any anything else DM us like our other subscriber has to ask any questions you've got and you never know. We may make a future video out of it.

Guys I hope this helps you make better coffee at home. I'm looking forward to seeing all of your comments below. If you haven't already subscribe to the channel hit the Bell icon, because they're already always doing new videos all the time, every week and be sure to like the video, and I'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye