A real review of the Sage Barista Touch Impress

First off, I have no connection to Sage/Breville and they haven’t given me anything in return for this review (unfortunately!). Also it was entirely written by a human (me) not an AI, which may be a good or bad thing! 😀

I’ve had my Sage Barista Touch Impress for just over a month now (Jan 24) and it’s pretty good at helping you make excellent coffee without the in-depth barista training but it does have a few minor issues.

It comes well packaged and is certainly an exercise in how to get as much as possible into the smallest space. I hope I never have to return the thing as I will never be able to get it all back in the box! It’s a bit tricky to remove from the box but there is a technique to do it on your own – open the large flap on the top and roll the box to make sure the flap is flat on a table near the edge so it butts up against your body. This anchors the cardboard box in place and allows you to pull out the polystyrene package nice and easily. 

The machine comes with everything you need to get started including cleaning bits, multiple baskets for the portafilter and the sage Razor tool. It doesn’t however include a knock box (a box to dump used grounds after making a coffee) which is a bit stingy considering the cost of the machine. 

Once you’ve found everything (some bits are in the drip tray) and picked up all the bits of polystyrene that are now everywhere just follow the simple instructions to put it together. The manual has the info but there is also a built in setup guide as well that pops up when you turn on the machine for the first time, although I found it quicker to just skim through the manual. Talking of the manual it’s a bit lightweight and you will benefit from watching some of the videos on the Breville YouTube channel. In case you are not aware Breville is called Sage in the UK as they sold the trade name here ages ago for some reason.

I’m not going to go into extreme detail on how you do everything with the machine, just give you an overview and highlight good and bad bits.

My one is the stainless steel version and it’s very stylish looking and feels weighty and well put together. It’s easy to wipe down and doesn’t seem show fingerprints or anything but the drip tray cover does scratch very easily. It doesn’t take up huge amounts of space but it can be a bit cramped on the tray to fit a mug and the milk jug (which has to sit on the temp sensor) at the same time but it’s doable.

When you turn on the machine it makes a bit of a noise for a few seconds and then it’s ready to go. It gets up to temperature incredibly fast which is very useful so you don’t need to bother leaving it switched on during the day in case you want to brew a cup. It has a useful range of pre made ‘recipes’ for different types of coffee as well as hot chocolate and tea. You can manually override settings for each drink (e.g. milk temp or coffee volume) and if you want you can then save these as a new drink. Unfortunately you can’t save the changes to the original drink but have to create a new one. 

The thing that sets this machine apart from other machines is the amount it will guide you to achieve an excellent cup of coffee. If you’ve ever tried another manual or semi automatic bean to cup type machine you know you can spend ages (and a lot of coffee) trying to get the grind and pour size right. This machine has step by step guidance to help you select the correct basket to go into the portafilter (the age of your coffee beans decides this) and then it works out how much coffee to grind to get the correct extraction time. This may involve several attempts as you adjust the grind size, using the manual dial on the left of the machine, and it then creates an espresso. It basically times how long it takes to feed a certain amount of water through the ground coffee – to fast and the grind size is to large, to slow and the grind is to small. Once you tell it you’re happy it then remembers how long it took to grind the beans and the grind setting (although you can manually override this when making a drink). It’s worth running this process each time you change beans. Once the coffee is ground you then tamp it using a large lever on the side of the machine. This applies the correct amount of pressure to squash the grind into the portafilter and also performs a small twist to polish it. It requires almost zero effort to do and is a great idea to get consistency. There is a sensor that is used to determine if enough coffee has been ground and if not it just guides you to grind some more. If to much has been ground it asks you to use the razor tool to remove some.  

The automatic milk texture seems to work really well (I’ve only used oat milk) and has different settings for the different style of drinks which come out pretty similar to that made by a coffee shop. You can play about with the settings as well but I tend to leave them as-is. Despite it producing great milk I’m still completely rubbish at latte art 😂

It’s all very easy and is a great step forward as it helps non coffee nerds (i.e. me) achieve a great cup of coffee with very little effort. Could you improve on the results by spending hours fiddling, weighing beans, buying expensive scales, stopwatch timing the pour, praying to the moon? Probably but, unless you are a coffee expert with a palette to go with that expertise, I doubt you will ever know or care. In short it makes top coffee to rival most coffee shops with little effort on your part. Big win. Note this may result in friends ‘just popping round’ for a coffee more often 😀

If you get a regular coffee bean subscription and it consists of more than one type of bean that highlights one annoyance with the machine. It can’t save settings for more than one bean type so you have to go through the guided process each time you change beans. I make a note of the grind size for each type which means I can get it setup pretty quickly but it’s still a bit of an omission. 

Be aware this is not a quiet machine when grinding beans and frothing milk so if you have it in an open living space it might get annoying.

Don’t bother trying to make black tea with it though as the temperature is far to low – only about 70 degrees celsius. I don’t know why they bother with the option to be honest. You can use it for green tea though. Also note the hot chocolate option, which is basically hot milk, needs to be increased to 70 degrees from the default of 60 which isn’t quite hot enough. I’ve not found a problem with the coffee itself though, that’s usually hot enough although it can help by pre warming the portafilter under a hot tap. It can make an americano (or long black) and you can adjust how much hot water is used but be careful of the mug you use as the hot water tends to splash a lot. 

It has a decent sized water tank (2 litre) and drip tray which doesn’t need emptying to often although this will depend on how you use the machine. If you run hot water through the portafilter before making a coffee (to pre warm it) and/or run water through the machine after making coffee to clean the shower screen (that’s the grill that sits above the location you lock the portafilter into when making the coffee) then you will be filling the tank and emptying the drip tray a bit more. I usually warm the portafilter under a tap and wipe the show screen with a damp cloth afterwards.

It’s very easy to keep clean and doesn’t need a huge amount of maintenance.  It will auto clean the milk wand every time after use and you just have to wipe the outside which is not onerous and I also clean the shower screen after each use. Compared to a fully automatic bean to cup machine I’d say this is easier to maintain as there is no brewing unit that needs constant cleaning. 

There’s no avoiding the fact that this is a very expensive machine but it feels well made and looks professional and, most importantly, makes excellent coffee with little effort. 

I’ve not covered every aspect of the machine so if you want to know anything then just ask.