Breville Precision Brewer Review

This top-ranked coffee maker offers exceptional brew quality through its customizable settings. The Precision Brewer is our top choice for those who appreciate the flavor profile of a pour-over coffee but want the convenience of a machine. More than anything else, the complete adjustability of the Breville Precision Brewer distinguishes it from the other brewers.

Performance Comparison

Brew Quailty

The Breville Precision Brewer excels at producing the best flavor profiles over any brewer in our review. Its supreme brewing quality is mainly due to the adjustability of water temperature and flow rate. Although it's best to brew with filtered water, Breville designed the Precision Brewer to automatically adjust brew settings according to your water quality.

The Breville Precision Brewer is a Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) approved brewer that reaches industry-standard brew temperatures of 195 to 204 degrees. Brew temperature is essential to proper coffee extraction, aka coffee brewing. Therefore, this coffee maker's precise and adjustable temperature controls are crucial to producing top-quality brews.

The preprogrammed and customizable brew settings on the Precision Brewer provide excellent parameters for any of your brewing needs. The Precision has brew modes from a single cup pour-over to a 10-hour cold brew cycle.

The first brew modes on the Precision Brewer's menu manipulate water flow. For example, the Strong Brew setting slows down the brewer's pump creating a longer brewed coffee. In contrast, Fast Brew speeds the pump up. The general rule of thumb is that the longer a coffee brews, the stronger the caffeine content will be.

The Cold Brew function is a no-heat setting that slows down brew time to 10-20 hours, different from the Over Ice function, calibrating for ice and cream dilution. The Gold setting reaches the SCA's Gold Cup standards for brew temperature and total brew time.

Finally, Breville appeases the coffee nerd in us all with the My Brew feature. This setting allows for complete customization over bloom time, temperature, and flow rate. My Brew introduces our favorite customizable element of Precision Brewer, the Pour-Over feature. You can automate your favorite pour-over device by using it in place of Breville's brew basket and carafe in this mode. Just pop into place the provided adapter, and you can brew with a v60 or Kalita brewer.

User Friendliness

Leading the way in user-friendliness, the Precision Brewer outperforms other coffee makers in this metric. The controls and features of the Precision Brewer are simple enough to navigate. Still, Breville includes informative manuals leading both the expert and newbie into specialty brewing and the unique features of this brewer.

The Precision Brewer's large interface and knob/button selector offer a very intuitive way to navigate the menu options. We find that Breville takes the cake for convenience paired with quality.

The Precision come with all the necessary brew baskets and attachments for the various brewing modes. Breville suggests using the cone filter basket with a no.4 filter for single pour-overs and half batches. For larger batch brews, a gold-tone reusable filter is provided. A small adapter is also provided to convert this coffee maker to brew using your favorite v60 or Kalita brewer.

Let's face it, grinding your coffee right before brewing will always be the best practice. However, the automatic brewing feature on the Precision Brewer could be your best friend for those mornings when you need to dash out the door. With a total capacity of 60 ounces in about 6 minutes, using the Precision Brewer is more efficient than manually brewing 12 cups of coffee.

Brewing 20 ounces or less activates the small cup volume setting. Under this setting, The Precision Brewer determines the proper flow rate depending on how much water is in the reservoir. Breville suggests using the cone filter basket to provide a better extraction rate if you're not brewing the total capacity. The reservoir lid is entirely removable, making this chamber easy to fill.

The Precision Brewer comes with either the insulated carafe or a glass carafe option with a heating plate. In terms of quality, we strongly recommend the insulated carafe. Although this carafe is a little heavy, it does a great job keeping the coffee warm. In addition, the carafe lid locks in place and regulates the pour speed.

Ease of Cleaning

We found that the Precision Brew was relatively easy to clean but could be made easier. Overall, the pour-over style brewer makes sanitizing pretty straightforward.

The carafe and brew basket detaches from the brewer, and the opening of the carafe is big enough to clean inside. The easiest to clean is the removable silicone shower head. The flexible material makes it simple and fun to clean by hand.

The only drawback we discovered in cleanliness was that the sneak-a-cup feature produces some backsplash. Although the brewer components are not dishwasher friendly, it is quite simple to wipe down and keep clean.

Consistency

We made five pots of coffee one after the other and measured extraction results to test the consistency. The Precision Brewer had decent temperature consistency, meaning there wasn't too much of a temperature difference in these back-to-back brews.

The Precision Brewer performed quite well in flavor retention. In order to measure this, we calculate the difference in pH between the initial brew and two hours after for this metric. This model had one of the slimmest differences in pH in our lineup.

Value

The Precision Brewer is somewhat of an investment for your home brewing setup. We think it's an excellent choice and worth every penny if you enjoy endlessly chasing that perfect cup of coffee.

Conclusion