New Breville Luxe Brewer is designed for hot coffee. It can be made into high-quality, subtle hot-drop coffee. But that also does something that is hardly anything else on a fancy coffee machine. It makes for real cold brew coffee – something sweet and tender, a cool elixir of smooth summer and a milky paradise.
Luxury is part of the new generation of drip coffee maker that helps transform drip coffee from bitter office fuel to a connoisseur theme. Precision Brewer, the predecessor of Luxe, is one of only a few certified beers from the Professional Coffee Association, which brews drip coffee based on temperature and narrow benchmarks of extraction. Luxury, while not yet certified, is brewed according to these strict standards.
Luxury achieves this feat through many technological achievements. This means PID temperature controller, tightly controlled flow rates, programmable algorithms for different amounts of water, and the same thermosetting machine heating technology and pumps you use to make espresso.
But luxury makes it lonely to make cold beer brewed. Real cold beer is only made with coffee, water and time. Message this formula or hurry up and never give you something real. Luxury offers you something real – hold the hanging room temp water and coffee floor and release it into the waiting glass bottle. In a world of coffee machines desperate to tighten cold beers, alone constitutes wild innovation. I haven’t seen this feature in any coffee machines made by Breville.
Of course, the device is not perfect. There are some quirks. But luxury is an impressive machine that keeps Breville in conversation, thus keeping Breville in the best drip coffee rig there.
Quick drip
Photo: Matthew Korfhage
Before we go back to cold water, let’s talk about drip coffee. very good. Luxury is a beautiful device, and a large device: it makes 12 cups of coffee in batches, as big as the largest office brewer, but is gentler and more precise in how it makes large batches of coffee.
The device is programmable in most of its details. By clicking on the Settings option, Coffee Geek can create its own custom standards for free, adjusting the brewing temperature to a single degree. Other settings adjust the size and time of the pour-on style flowers, as well as the coffee flow rate through the shower-style brewing head.
But most people won’t bother. If the Brew button is pressed, the device will feel the amount of water in the movable reservoir and brew accordingly. For small batches of coffee below 20 ounces, you will use a conical basket insert and a conical paper filter. For larger batches, you will use flat bottom filters and the default flat bottom brew basket.
