Breville Barista Max Espresso Machine With Grinder

The Barista Max is a bean-to-cup machine for people who want to make quality coffee at home. It won’t be the perfect machine for people who want zero-effort coffee, and it won’t appeal to hobbyists who want a machine that they can tinker with and modify.

For the rest of us, I’d say it’s the best of both worlds: you can use fresh beans and get a delicious espresso and there are enough settings (grinding fineness, water temperature, infusion profile) to play around with to get a really great extraction. But fundamentally, this is a reliable, easy to use machine that delivers consistently good coffee. And for its price point, it’s superb.

Because the Barista Max has an inbuilt coffee grinder and milk frother – and comes with a tamper, milk jug and porta filter – you won’t need anything else in your coffee-making kit. That’s a good thing because this is a big machine (31 x 31 x 33cm) and the trade-off for its high-quality coffee is that you’ll need to give up a correspondingly large space on your kitchen counter.

Don’t even think about putting it in a cupboard when you’re not using it. This is a machine that should be used daily – it’s too heavy (as it should be) and cumbersome to be dragged out on special occasions.