Breville Bambino Plus Review

Who it's for

Ask a hundred people why they want an espresso machine and ninety of them describe a milk drink. A flat white before work. A cappuccino instead of the café one. Almost nobody describes a solitary ristretto. And yet the hard part of making those drinks at home is not the espresso — it is the milk, which is a genuine manual skill that takes weeks to learn and which is where most people quietly give up.

The Bambino Plus is the machine that removes that. You pick a milk temperature, you pick a foam level, you press the button, you go and find a cup. It textures the milk hands-free, stops itself, and purges the wand afterwards. It is the only machine in Breville's range at this level that does this, and — this is the part that catches everyone — it is not the expensive one.

So: buy this if you want good milk drinks at home starting tomorrow, with no skill acquisition, in a kitchen that does not have much counter to spare. Do not buy this if you want one purchase that covers everything, because there is no grinder in the box and there is no version of this machine with one.

Specs

The automatic milk, and what it costs you

Breville's spec sheet is unusually plain here. The Bambino Plus is listed as automatic, hands-free milk texturing, with three milk temperatures and three foam levels, and an automatic purge of the steam wand when it's done. The Barista Express and the Barista Pro are both listed, in Breville's own words, as manual milk texturing.

Now the honest half. Automatic milk texturing is a floor, and it is also a ceiling. The floor is high: your first cappuccino will have properly integrated microfoam rather than the stiff bubble-bath foam a beginner produces with a manual wand, and it will still be good six months later on a morning when you are half awake. That consistency is genuinely worth paying for.

The ceiling is real too. Nine combinations — three temperatures, three foam levels — is the complete extent of your control. You cannot chase the glossy, wet, paint-like texture that latte art demands by adjusting your technique, because you have no technique to adjust. If pouring a rosetta is the thing you are actually after, an automatic system will hold you back and you want the manual wand on a Barista Express or a Barista Pro instead. We would rather point you away from this machine than sell it to you for the wrong reason.

There is no grinder. Read this part.

This is the sentence most Bambino Plus buyers skim past and then discover in their kitchen: the Bambino Plus does not grind coffee. There is no burr set, no hopper, no chute. It is an espresso machine, full stop.

And a 54 mm basket, PID temperature control and low-pressure pre-infusion cannot compensate for a bad grind. Nothing can. Grind is the single largest variable in whether espresso tastes like espresso or like sour, thin disappointment — pre-ground supermarket coffee is both too coarse and too stale to make a good shot on any machine, and the Bambino Plus is not an exception to that rule. If you buy this machine and feed it a bag of pre-ground, you will conclude that home espresso is overrated, and you will be wrong.

So plan the purchase properly. The grinder is not an accessory to this machine; it is the other half of it, and it usually deserves a serious share of the budget. Read the best grinder for the Breville Bambino for the specific picks, and machine or grinder first if the total spend is tight and you are trying to work out where the money should go.

Here is the compensation, and it is a real one: because you are choosing the grinder yourself, you can choose a good one. A proper standalone grinder out-grinds anything built into a machine at this level — including the 16-setting grinder inside a Barista Express. The Bambino Plus is not the machine with the missing grinder. It is the machine that lets you pick a better one.

Three seconds, and why it changes things

Breville states, on the product page and in the manual, that the ThermoJet heating system reaches ideal extraction temperature in 3 seconds. That is their figure, not ours, and it is the same figure they publish for the Barista Pro. They publish no heat-up time at all for the Thermocoil-heated Barista Express.

A three-second heat-up sounds like a spec-sheet flourish and is actually a behavioural change. A machine that needs a warm-up becomes a machine you plan around: you switch it on, you go and do something, you come back. A machine that is ready before you have finished picking up the portafilter is a machine you use on a Tuesday when you are in a hurry, which is most Tuesdays. The espresso machines that end up unused are almost never the ones that make bad coffee. They are the ones that make coffee slowly.

You should still pull a blank shot through the group and warm the portafilter before your first coffee — the water is at temperature in three seconds; the metal it is about to run through is not. That is true of every machine in this class and nobody says it.

The footprint

7.5 inches wide, and about 11 pounds. To put that in perspective, the Barista Express is 12.5 inches wide and the Barista Pro 13.5. The Bambino Plus is not a scaled-down espresso machine so much as a properly-specified one that happens to have been packed sensibly — it keeps the PID, keeps the pre-infusion, keeps the 54 mm portafilter and a 1.9 L tank.

Where the size does cost you: a small machine is not the machine for making six drinks back-to-back at a dinner party. The tank is modest, and steaming and brewing share one heating system, so a queue forms. For one or two people in a normal morning, it is completely untroubled.

How it compares

• Bambino Plus vs Barista Express — the choice nearly every Breville buyer is actually making: automatic milk and no grinder, against a built-in grinder and manual milk. It is not a "more money, more machine" decision at all.
• Bambino Plus vs Gaggia Classic Pro — let the machine do it, or learn to do it yourself. Two opposite philosophies at a similar price, and the answer depends entirely on which kind of person you are.
• Bambino Plus vs De'Longhi Dedica — the two small machines. One automates the milk; the other is narrower and does cold brew. Notably, De'Longhi does not publish a portafilter size at all.

For the whole range in one view, including where it stops making sense, read our Breville brand guide.