The new Breville Luxe Brewer is designed for hot coffee. It makes excellent, subtle, hot drip coffee. But it also does something that almost no other fancy coffee maker on the market achieves. It makes real cold brew coffee—the sweet and gentle stuff, the cool elixir of smooth summers and milky heaven.
The Luxe is part of a new generation of drip coffee makers that has helped transform drip coffee from bitter office fuel into a subject for connoisseurship. The Luxe’s predecessor, the Precision Brewer, was one of only a handful certified by the Specialty Coffee Association to brew drip coffee according to narrow benchmarks on temperature and extraction. The Luxe, though not yet certified, brews according to these same exacting criteria.
The Luxe achieves this feat through a whole lot of technical sophistication. This means PID temperature controllers, tightly controlled flow rates, programmable algorithms for different water volumes, and the same thermocoil heating technology and pump you’d use to make espresso.
But the Luxe makes cold brew, blessedly, by leaving it alone. Real cold brew is made only with coffee, water, and time. Messing with this formula, or hurrying it up, never quite gives you the real thing. The Luxe gives you the real thing—holding room-temp water and coffee grounds in suspension for as long as 24 hours before releasing it into a waiting carafe. In a world of coffee makers desperate to screw up cold brew, leaving it alone amounts to wild innovation. I haven’t seen this function in any coffee maker not made by Breville.
The device isn’t perfect, of course. There are some quirks. But the Luxe is an impressive machine that keeps Breville in the conversation when it comes to the best drip coffee devices out there.
The Fast Drip
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Before we return to cold brew, let’s talk drip coffee. It’s good. The Luxe is a handsome device, and also a big one: It makes 12 cups of coffee in a batch, as big as the biggest office brewers but much more gentle and precise in how it brews big-batch coffee.
The device is programmable in most of its particulars. By clicking the settings option, coffee geeks are free to create their own custom criteria, modulating the brew temp to an accuracy of a single degree. Other settings adjust the size and time of a pour-over-style bloom, and the flow rate of coffee through a shower-style brew head.
But most people won’t bother. If you press the “brew” button, the device will sense the amount of water in the removable water reservoir and brew accordingly. For small-batch coffee below 20 ounces, you’ll use a conical basket insert and conical paper filters. For larger batches, you’ll use flat-bottom filters and the default flat-bottom brewing basket.