There’s nothing to complain about in terms of the finished product. The crema was nice and oily, with a fine texture without bubbles, and it lasted for a couple of minutes after pouring. I measured the espresso temperature at 55ºC, which is just a little on the cool side. The Sage Bambino Plus is a great machine for those wanting to start brewing espresso at home. Delivering quality performance, the 54mm portafilter can extract 19 grams of ground coffee when used. The automatic steam wand allows you to adjust the milk temperature and texture to suit your taste. Delivering quality micro-foam that enhances the flavour of the coffee and is essential for creating latte art. If you're looking for a pain-free espresso, and are happy to pay a little extra to ensure high quality every time, you'll be right at home with the Breville Bambino Plus. The same is true even if you're a beginner who wants to learn and experiment, with the default temperature settings yielding a smooth extraction process straight out the box, ample instructions on grind sizes and which baskets fit each one, and an automatic milk frothing system. The only hitch here is that the drip tray is a little too small to keep up with the additional water coming through the milk frother cleaning system. That means you'll be washing it out fairly regularly - I found myself draining it nearly every other day when brewing around four drinks a day with milk. Breville / Sage Bambino Plus: Performance

Brew Performance between the Breville Bambino and Bambino Plus is very similar. Both have the same heating technology and portafilter design. Additionally, both use Digital Temperature Control (PID), making it a pretty forgiving machine. Although the steam wand purges automatically, you can remove the tip and wash this in the sink. Sage also provides a handy tool to unclog the spout should it become crusted with milk. Final thoughts With the double shot unpressurised baskets, Sage recommends a dosage of between 18g and 22g – I started with around 19 grams of ground coffee and aimed for shots around the 38-40ml mark which is a fairly standard 1:2 ratio. From my experience, that’s a tad on the high side: it wasn’t until I dialled down the dosage to nearer 17 grams and went for a slightly coarser grind that the Bambino really started to deliver the goods.The Bambino Plus is also a good value for money, offering more milk-frothing features. Finding another compact machine that makes such excellent and reliable milk texturing is hard. However, besides advanced frothing features, the other benefits of the Breville Bambino Plus don’t seem attractive enough to pay that extra money. For our tests we used the same good-quality ground coffee that we’ve used to make hundreds of cups of coffee with a French press, but we found that the Bambino Plus surpassed our expectations, and gave us a smoother and tastier cup of coffee. Note that you won’t be able to grind beans with this machine as you can with Breville’s pricier Oracle Touch machine.

Steam is delivered at a constant velocity with a slight delay between starting and stopping. Even so, I could get the jug at a good angle to swirl the milk, creating neat milk with fine micro-bubbles and a silky-smooth appearance. At the rear, an amply-sized 1.9l water tank clips easily and securely into place. Unlike some machines that require you insert the tank from above, the Sage’s design hinges from the bottom so you can remove and refill it without having to slide the machine out from underneath a kitchen cabinet. That’s a huge help in smaller kitchens.

The Breville Bambino Plus is designed for those who take their coffee-making seriously. Included with the coffee machine are four filter baskets for different types of coffee grounds, a tool called the Razor, which helps you expertly level off your coffee grounds so that you can make the smoothest espresso possible, a milk jug, cleaning tools, a removable portafilter, into which you clip the coffee basket before inserting it into the machine, and even a water filter to help improve the taste of your coffee. Contrary to many mid-range espresso machines with this level of customization and additional features, the Breville Bambino Plus uses its simple design to offer an impressively straightforward operation. There's almost no learning curve to get over here before you're pulling high quality shots and topping them up with perfectly frothed milk - simply push a button and you're off. More experienced at-home baristas, however, will also have plenty to play with, from the professional grade single walled baskets not usually found in machines at this price point to the customizable pre-infusion settings. Each machine also has a low-pressure pre-infusion feature that ensures maximum flavor extraction. The Bambino Plus even has a feature that dampens coffee grounds before pulling the espresso shot, which is usually only found on more expensive espresso machines. The Breville Bambino Plus steam wand is better than the Breville Bambino’s because it replicates the control and accuracy of prosumer and commercial machines. The Breville Bambino offers a basic performance with some milk-frothing capabilities that are good enough for convenience-oriented home baristas.