by Beezer on Tue May 24, 2011 11:49 am
It certainly looks like an excellent deal for the money, assuming it works as well in the real world as it looks on paper. It seems to offer the same or better features as a Vivaldi, Izzo or VBM for a lot less money. Plus, I think it looks beautiful. It would be a much easier sell to the significant other than many of the other prosumer dual boilers.
The quality and reliability is the big question mark, in my mind. There are a lot of things going on that machine that have the potential to go wrong. Also, will Breville offer the same kind of customer support as Chris or Jim? I doubt it. But the long warranty and obvious amount of testing and thought that went into the design are encouraging.
The electrically heated, PID controlled group is very cool, and may offer better temp control than an e-61 or even a saturated group. If properly tuned, I doubt it would even need a cooling flush. So the lack of an e-61 group is not a bad thing, and actually shows to me that Breville is taking this seriously and designing the machine from the ground up for performance, instead of just reusing parts that have been around for the last 50 years.
I also like the fact that you can control so many parameters from the main computer menu. Not just the brew boiler PID, but the group PID, preinfusion time, preinfusion pressure, shot time, etc. I assume that you can also dial in the brew pressure from the front panel, though it wasn't clear to me from Mark's article.
Anyway, I'm very curious to hear the early reports from people who buy the machine to see if it's as good as it promises to be. If so, it's a real contender for my next machine.
Lock and load!