The grinder is one of the other most important pieces of the puzzle where espresso quality is concerned. But the interesting thing is that while I'm the same Kev, several years later I'm a very different person where espresso machines are concerned. If anything, it’s a bit obsessive. The Sage manual encourages you not to use pre-ground coffee, although there’s no reason you can’t. We tried it, and the Oracle didn’t suddenly shut down. However, you need to be more careful about tamping the grounds to achieve the crema you’ll get more or less as standard when using beans.

the Oracle™ Touch | Sage (UK) - Breville

With the touch on the other hand there's the additional step of telling the machine what drink you want each time by selecting it on the touch screen before it'll let you start grinding, and that's just one little step that I found unnecessary as the only person using the machine.

Recent Posts

Getting the ratio of ground coffee to brewed coffee is easiest with a small set of digital scales – as a ballpark figure, you should generally aim for a ratio of grams of espresso in the cup to ground coffee of around 2:1), but we managed to get very drinkable results just by eyeballing the process and using familiar espresso cups. This made it easier to gauge how much coffee was being produced with every extraction. The Oracle is a dual boiler machine, it has a brew boiler for the espresso and a separate steam boiler. The fact that it is a dual boiler is partly responsible for its exceptional temperature stability which is one of the things that ensures great tasting espresso. If you are trying my coffee beans, I'd highly recommend the blends, Chocolate Brownie blend, Fruitcake blend, Fruit & Nut blend & Classic Italian blend. Traditional home espresso machines are based on professional, commercial espresso machines you'll see in coffee shops, only they're smaller, and they usually are tank fed vs being plumbed in. The Sage Oracle is the world's first automatic manual espresso machine that brings third wave speciality coffee to your home without the barista. The Oracle has automatic grinding, dosing, tamping and milk texturing, automating the two most difficult parts of manual espresso. It's like there's a barista inside.

SAGE the Oracle Touch SES990 Bean to Cup Coffee - Currys SAGE the Oracle Touch SES990 Bean to Cup Coffee - Currys

So, no, the Sage Oracle isn't going to make pouring latte art easy, but it will give you consistent milk texture, and that will make it easier to learn. 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.

Speciality coffee at home...automatically.

The Oracle’s design is closer to the manual espresso machines you see in high-street coffee chains. This is because, unlike machines such as the Philips Saeco HD8751, the grinding and brewing processes don’t take place in a single unit. When I say “almost fully automated”, it's automated where it really matters, which is dose, tamp, and milk texturing (you can steam manually but it does a brilliant job of texturing on auto). You could save some money by buying Sage’s Dual Boiler espresso machine along with a separate grinder, but the Oracle is a far neater solution. For coffee shop-quality coffee without the queuing, consult Sage The Oracle coffee machine. Sage has worked with their coffee boffins late into many nights fuelled only by, you’ve guessed it – coffee, to come up with this commercial-quality machine. The Oracle coffee machine from Sage delivers café quality coffee in your own kitchen. In a world first, it automates several of the processes that are usually done manually to make it easy for you to achieve coffee perfection every time. With automatic grinding, dosing, tamping and milk frothing, the Oracle guarantees the best flavour from your coffee beans, and does all the thinking, so you don’t have to.