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If you want the convenience of bean to cup machines but the cup quality of traditional espresso machines but without the usual skill requirement, the Sage Oracle is a solution unlike almost any other.
The oracle will give you great consistency jug after jug, which won't make learning to pour latte art any easier, but it'll make it less difficult in terms of removing texture consistency which is one of the biggest hurdles to learning to pour latte art.This is key for getting consistent and hot results time after time. You also get a weighty-feeling 58mm portafilter (Sage’s cheaper models use smaller 54mm ones) which means you can swap in a 58mm portafilter from any number of professional-class machines. There’s a decent-sized 480ml stainless steel milk jug included in the box, too. All you need to add is coffee beans. And milk, depending on your tastes. The answer is, now that I know so much more about espresso machines, and now that I've had so much more experience with them, I'm even more impressed with the Sage Oracle than I was the first time around! A benefit of the Touch over the standard oracle where milk texture is concerned, is that you can save the milk texture setting for each drink. So let's say you create your own perfect personalised flattie, with a custom milk temp and texture, the next time you select that drink it'll remember the milk temp and texture level.
An old-school single boiler machine like the Rancilio Silvia, certainly is easier to repair, more standard parts, and less bits & bobs likely to go wonky over time – so definitely a benefit of going super old school is durability, less to go wrong, easier and cheaper to maintain. It’s basically a boiler, a group head, a pump & a solenoid valve, so not much to fail – and all fairly standard and relatively inexpensive parts if they do.I first wrote my Sage Oracle review several years ago when Sage Appliances very kindly sent the Sage Oracle to me on loan for a couple of weeks. This post has been completely rewritten now that I know so much more about espresso machines and coffee in general. If you're thinking of buying a bean to cup coffee machine for around a grand to fifteen hundred quid, and you're wondering if it's worth spending a few hundred more on the Oracle, personally I believe that the overall cup quality (espresso quality and milk texture quality) is going to be better with the Oracle and Oracle touch than with any bean to cup machine on the market. The Barista Express Impress is Sage's first “assisted” coffee machine. It does more or less the same job as the Oracle (only on the coffee side, though, not on the milk side) but it does this via assistance, rather than automation, and it's based on the Barista Express, so it's a much more affordable option. One thing it isn’t, however, is entirely automatic. It’s up to you to ensure the coffee is extracted at the right speed – as in not spurting forth nor dripping slowly – and to do that you need to adjust the grind size to fine-tune the results. It’s also essential to adjust the brewing time to eke the most flavour from the coffee. Sometimes just a second or two longer or shorter can make a big difference to the overall flavour.
Is there any other machine on the market that offers the same cup quality and convenience? Not quite, but see my notes below on the Barista Express Impress. Inveterate coffee tweakers will be pleased to see that you can fine-tune the brew temperature from 86c to 96c in one-degree increments – something Sage proudly claims the Oracle can maintain with +/-1℃ accuracy. However, you can’t tweak the amount of coffee used for each shot. You can have a 22g double or an 11g single, and that’s it. I’ve read online you can subtly tweak the dose by taking the automatic tamping hardware to pieces and reassembling it but this isn’t exactly the last word in on-the-fly adjustability. Sage Oracle Touch review: VerdictYou’re comparing a traditional old-school single-boiler espresso machine with a state-of-the-art, super high-tech bean-to-cup machine, and there are pros and cons for both. What you’re referring to are some of the cons of going for a machine like this – vs a machine like that – it’s not a Sage issue. A very common question I'm asked is, is it worth splurging the extra money on the touch version, or is the Oracle just as good as the Oracle Touch? The reason I say “freshly roasted” is that these kind of machines are really made for freshly roasted coffee beans, as they come with standard espresso baskets. Some domestic espresso machines come with pressurized filter baskets, which give the appearance of crema, and give the illusion of a well-pulled shot of espresso regardless of the age or quality of the bean.
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