The Bambino Plus and Encore ESP bundle buys the grinder you were about to forget
Buy this pair if you want to learn espresso properly and would otherwise have spent every dollar on the machine and nothing on the grinder; it is not a walk-away machine, the bundle price is close to what the two boxes cost separately, and the Bambino Plus starts wobbling on temperature by the third drink in a row.
Based on 37 owner ratings, 9 owner discussions and 10 other sources. We have not tested this machine ourselves.
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Who should actually buy this
Buy it if you have decided to learn espresso, you know that means a scale and a few weeks of mediocre shots, and you would rather have the grinder question settled than research it. That is a real group of people, and for them this box is the shortest sensible path from nothing to a proper cup, with the milk half of the job handled while you concentrate on the harder half.
Do not buy it if the appeal was the word bundle and the promise of simplicity, because simplicity is the one thing it does not deliver. Do not buy it if you want three flat whites in ten minutes for guests. And be honest about the ceiling: the owner who asked the internet whether to buy a Bambino ended up with a two thousand dollar machine instead, precisely because he suspected he would upgrade within a few years, and plenty of Bambino owners do exactly that. The counterweight is that this is a cheap, small, resellable way to find out whether you are that person, which is more than can be said for the machines further up Breville's own range.
Buy this pair if you want to learn espresso properly and would otherwise have spent every dollar on the machine and nothing on the grinder; it is not a walk-away machine, the bundle price is close to what the two boxes cost separately, and the Bambino Plus starts wobbling on temperature by the third drink in a row.
Best for: It is shelved next to the push-button machines, it is nothing like them, and whether that ruins the purchase depends entirely on what you thought you were buying.
Amazon has this bundle sitting inside its super-automatic espresso machine listings, and that placement is the first thing to correct. There is nothing super-automatic about it. You fill a hopper, grind into a dosing cup, level the bed, tamp it, twist the portafilter into the group head and press a button, and if the shot runs fast you change the grind and do it again tomorrow. The only steps Breville has taken off your hands are the milk texturing and a rough shot volume. If you arrived here after typing some variation on whether Breville builds a bean-to-cup machine, the honest answer is on our page about what Breville actually automates, and the short version is that this is not it.
What it is instead is the single most-recommended first setup in home espresso, sold as one carton. In a thread of a hundred replies from someone with a couple of hundred dollars and no idea where to start, the top comment by a wide margin was Bambino plus a Baratza ESP grinder, named together, before anyone knew a bundle existed. The original poster's reply is the reason this product has a market: they had not thought about a grinder at all, and asked whether a decent one could be had for sixty dollars. It cannot, and that gap between what beginners budget and what espresso needs is the hole this box is built to fill.
The pairing is not a marriage of convenience between two brands either. Breville owns Baratza, which is why its recent machines carry Baratza burrs, and why a buyer choosing between the Bambino Plus with Breville's own Smart Grinder Pro and the same machine with the Encore ESP got a unanimous answer in favour of the Baratza, including several owners of this exact combination saying it had been right for a year or more. Espresso Den's read is that the bundle is Breville quietly conceding that its cheap built-in grinders are the weak link in its own range, which is a point worth holding onto when you look at the grind-and-brew all-in-ones a rung above it.
Key Specifications
Two boxes, one price, and one of them has a shorter warranty
The Bambino Plus is a compact single-heater machine built around Breville's ThermoJet element, which the company says reaches extraction temperature in three seconds and draws up to 32 percent less energy a year than the older thermoblock design, a figure it attributes to its own internal benchmarking. It runs a 54mm stainless portafilter, does a low-pressure pre-infusion before settling to nine bar, and offers three milk temperatures and three foam textures on an automatic wand. The marketing promise of at least a million microbubbles per millilitre is not something anyone outside Breville can check, and Espresso Den suggests you ignore it and judge the milk by the photographs owners post instead.
The grinder is the reason to be here. The Encore ESP has 40 settings, with the first 20 given over entirely to the espresso range, which is what separates it from the plain Encore and from the 16 steps you get on a Barista Express. It ships with a 54mm dosing cup that drops grounds straight into the portafilter, a brush, and a shim kit for burr calibration, that last item being Baratza's tacit admission that some units need adjusting before they reach the fine end of their own range.
| Component | What it does for you | Warranty on the bundle spec sheet |
|---|---|---|
| Bambino Plus (BES500) | Heats in seconds, pulls the shot, textures the milk without you touching the wand | Two years |
| Baratza Encore ESP | Grinds fine enough and finely enough spaced to dial a shot in properly | One year |
That asymmetry is worth naming plainly, because nobody reading a single price expects two different coverage periods inside one carton. Breville's own pages are not perfectly consistent about the machine either: the bundle listing gives a wattage that the standalone Bambino Plus page contradicts. It is a trivial discrepancy, but it is a reminder to trust the behaviour owners describe over the numbers in a spec block.
One more thing in the box matters more than it sounds. Alongside the single-wall baskets, Breville includes pressurised dual-wall ones. Use those and you have wasted the grinder entirely, because the basket manufactures crema through a restriction rather than through extraction. An owner who ran dual-wall for months described exactly the trap: good-looking crema that collapsed almost instantly, flat flavour, and no adjustment that made any difference. If you buy this bundle and take one instruction from this page, make it that one.
Strengths & Limitations
Strengths
- It solves the mistake that ruins most first espresso setups by putting a genuine espresso-capable grinder in the same box as the machine.
- The Encore ESP devotes half its 40 settings to the espresso range, which is finer control than any Breville with a built-in grinder offers at this level.
- The automatic steam wand produces microfoam that reviewers with no reason to flatter Breville describe as café-grade, and anyone in the house can operate it.
- ThermoJet means the machine is ready in seconds, so nothing about your morning depends on remembering to switch it on first.
- The slow pressure ramp before extraction makes the shot forgiving of a grind setting that is not quite right yet, which is exactly what a beginner needs.
- Keeping the grinder as a separate appliance means one failure does not take out both halves of your setup.
Limitations
- It is sold among super-automatics and it is not one, so anyone expecting to press a button and walk away has bought the wrong machine.
- The bundle costs roughly what the two components cost separately, so you are paying for the decision rather than getting a discount.
- Owners consistently report it losing its composure by the third drink in a row, and it cannot brew and steam at the same time.
- Espresso arrives cooler than it should because the group head and the part-plastic portafilter stay cold until you deliberately flush them.
- The drip tray is small and has to be kept dry, because the milk sensor the automatic wand depends on sits on it.
- The grinder carries a shorter warranty than the machine, and it is the half of the bundle with almost no independent testing behind it.
- The pressurised dual-wall baskets in the box will quietly waste the grinder if you use them out of habit.
What it is actually like at seven in the morning
The milk is the part nobody argues about. Serious Eats went in sceptical of automatic wands and came out convinced, noting that the machine injects air directly into the milk as it heats and that you simply pick a temperature and a texture. Coffeeness measured milk at around 144°F and got close enough to pour latte art with it. Wirecutter, comparing it against other automated wands it had disliked, called Breville's result basically indistinguishable from a café. The recurring caveat is that the microfoam tends to sit as an island in the middle of the jug, so you still swirl before you pour. If you are weighing this against a carafe system, our piece on which milk system you will actually live with covers the trade in full.
There is a real counter-argument, and it comes from people who owned both Bambinos. One kept the cheaper manual version specifically because the automatic sensor punished a sleepy user who kept setting the jug down off the sensor and overflowing it, and because a couple of dozen lattes of practice beat the automatic result. Against that, the strongest case for the Plus in a beginner bundle is that it removes one of the two skills you are learning at once, and that anyone else in the house can make a drink without a tutorial. Both things are true. Which one matters depends on whether you want espresso or a hobby.
The shots themselves are well documented and generally good. Serious Eats found it forgiving, crediting the slow pressure ramp for widening the range of grind settings that work, and a three-year owner clocked a double at 25 seconds, auto-steamed milk at 60 seconds, and a finished latte from cold in about two minutes. Coffeeness got full-bodied espresso out of it at 18 grams in and roughly two ounces out in under 30 seconds, but graded it down for arriving in the cup too cool, which they said cost the machine more than anything else in their evaluation.
The cool-cup problem has causes you can do something about and causes you cannot. ThermoJet heats water almost instantly but does not warm the group head or portafilter, so a cold portafilter is your default state until you flush hot water through it. The supplied portafilter is also part-plastic with no metal spouts, and it locks in high above the drip tray, so the espresso falls a long way and picks up air on the way down. A standard or bottomless 54mm portafilter is the cheapest meaningful upgrade anyone recommends, and it doubles as a diagnostic tool while you are learning.
Then there are the limits nobody in the marketing copy mentions. It cannot brew and steam at the same time, because there is one heater. Owners describe two drinks back to back as comfortable and the third as where it starts to fall apart, and one long-term owner who still recommends the machine to beginners is blunt that after eighteen months he finds it wildly inconsistent, poor with light and medium-light roasts, and unreliable by drink three even after a warm-up flush. Another owner in the same thread reports doing fine with light roasts lately, so treat this as a genuine disagreement rather than a settled fault, but the mechanism is plausible: a single flash heater that has just made steam has very hot water sitting in it when you ask it to brew.
Two smaller irritations that show up over and over. The drip tray is tiny, and on the Plus it matters more than usual because the milk sensor lives on it and has to stay dry. And the machine is light enough that unlocking the portafilter can drag the whole thing across the counter. Neither is a reason not to buy it. Both are things you will do something about in week one.
Is buying them together the right way to buy them?
The premium this bundle charges over the Bambino Plus on its own is close to what an Encore ESP costs by itself. That means the bundle is not a discount, it is a decision made for you, and you should judge it on that basis. What you are buying is the certainty that you will not do the classic thing, which is spend the entire budget on a shiny machine and then feed it supermarket pre-ground. The loudest consensus across every source Espresso Den read is that at this end of the market a better grinder does more for the cup than a better machine, a point made in the highest-voted comment on a video watched nearly eighty thousand times and repeated almost word for word by other creators. Serious Eats put it in its cons list without softening it: you have to buy a grinder too.
The honest competition is not another bundle, it is the version of this you assemble yourself. One review site recommends the plain Bambino with an Encore ESP as a genuinely capable first setup for meaningfully less than this box costs, and the difference you would be giving up is the automatic milk wand and the three-way valve that lets you pull the portafilter out without a puck sneeze. Our Bambino against Bambino Plus comparison takes that decision apart properly.
| Route | Your morning | What you can change | Where it lets you down |
|---|---|---|---|
| This bundle | Grind, dose, tamp, lock in, press, swirl the milk | Grind, dose, ratio, milk temperature and texture | Third drink in a row, and any bean you have not dialled in yet |
| Breville with a built-in grinder | Same steps, one less appliance on the counter | Fewer grind steps, and the grinder heats up with the machine | If the grinder fails you lose the machine too |
| A true super-automatic | Press a button, walk away | Strength, length, temperature within limits | You never touch the variables that make espresso good |
What the bundle does not do is remove the learning curve, which is exactly what the phrase "the perfect pair for simple espresso at home" implies it might. In one seven-month stretch, Espresso Den counted four separate help threads on r/espresso naming this precise machine and grinder combination in their titles, running to dozens of replies each, all of them variations on "why does this taste wrong". That is not evidence the pair is bad. It is evidence the pair sells to beginners and that beginners need help. The recipes they land on are consistent enough to start from: 18 grams in and about 36 out is the default, and owners drift a gram or two down and a click or two finer once they can taste the difference.
Budget for the rest of it too. The near-universal shopping list around a new Breville is a scale first, then a better tamper, then a bottomless portafilter, with a dosing funnel and a distribution tool for those who catch the bug. Only the scale is genuinely non-negotiable. And beans matter more than any of it: roasters advise grinding somewhere between ten and thirty days off the roast date, and treating a bag that carries a best-before date instead of a roast date with suspicion. A precision grinder fed stale supermarket beans is precision applied to nothing, and if you plan to run dark oily blends through it, our notes on which beans wreck grinders apply here as much as they do to bean-to-cup machines.
If the honest answer to "do you want a hobby" is no, stop here and buy something else. A one-touch machine will make you a better latte on a Tuesday than an unused portafilter machine will, and our roundup of the best super-automatics under a thousand dollars is the right next page. The De'Longhi Magnifica Evo is the most sensible landing spot for someone who wants coffee rather than a craft, and the case for and against that whole category is worth ten minutes before you spend anything.
What wears out, and what happens when it does
The maintenance is real but not heavy. Coffee grounds never enter the machine's internals, so the enemy is limescale rather than mould: rinse the portafilter and flush the group after every use, wipe the steam wand immediately, and pull the basket, tray and shower screen for a proper scrub every few days. The machine counts shots and blinks at you when it wants a backflush, and flashes differently when it wants descaling, which a long-term owner reports arriving every two to three months. If you have never done either, our cleaning and descaling guide covers the routine in the same terms.
The most reassuring failure story in the whole record is a non-failure. A three-year owner woke one morning to a machine making intake noises and delivering nothing, assumed the pump had died, and fixed it entirely by running a descale. That is the symptom most people panic-sell over, and the cure is a sachet of powder.
Breville's wider reliability record is genuinely mixed, and the mix is informative. An Australian consumer review site carries hundreds of ratings averaging under two stars, dominated by warranty and service complaints, with repeated stories of thermostats, touchscreens and grinder assemblies failing on expensive machines after a couple of years. A US owner of a bigger Breville describes a service process that required a video call to prove the fault before a return was authorised, a repair that came in at several hundred dollars, and then a second failure a few months later. Set against that, other owners report four and five year runs with a single service, a Wirecutter staffer has repaired hoses and corroded contacts on a decade-old Breville, and parts are readily available.
Here is the part that favours this particular machine. Almost every serious failure in that record belongs to a part the Bambino Plus does not have: no touchscreen, no motherboard-driven interface, no built-in grinder to seize, no dual boiler. It is the Breville with the least to go wrong, and buying the grinder as a separate appliance means a dead grinder does not take the machine with it. The one flag pointing the other way is the grinder half of the bundle. One owner reports an Encore breaking at six months, being repaired, and breaking again, and a separate owner of a new Breville machine fitted with a Baratza grinder reports it jamming on the third drink out of the box with no foreign object inside. Two anecdotes are not a pattern, but they point in the same direction as the only owner comment about this bundle that Espresso Den could find anywhere, a review on Breville's own site surfaced in search saying the machine is making nice coffee and the grinder has been a major letdown.
Which brings us to the thinnest part of the evidence. When we read the pages, this bundle carried a rating on Breville's own store built from a handful of reviews and sitting well below the score the Bambino Plus alone carries from over a thousand of them, and the Amazon listing had ratings numbering in the dozens rather than the hundreds. Espresso Den could not find a single independent test of the Encore ESP itself in any of the material gathered for this page. The machine is one of the most thoroughly reviewed espresso makers on the market; the grinder you are paying the premium for is not, and you should know that before you spend.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the fully automatic Breville that people go looking for?
No, you grind, dose, level, tamp and lock the portafilter in yourself, and the only automated steps are the milk texturing and a rough shot volume.
Does buying the bundle save money over buying the two separately?
Barely if at all, because the premium over the machine on its own is close to what the Encore ESP costs by itself, so what you are really buying is the decision being made for you.
Should you use the pressurised basket that comes in the box?
Only with pre-ground or stale coffee, because using it alongside a real grinder throws away the exact capability you paid extra for.
What dose and ratio should you start with?
Start at 18 grams in and about 36 grams out in roughly 30 seconds, then adjust a gram or a click at a time once you can taste which direction it needs.
Can it make two milk drinks back to back?
Two is comfortable, three in a hurry is where owners report the temperature going astray, and it cannot brew and steam simultaneously because there is one heater.
How long should you expect a Bambino Plus to last?
The evidence we found is thinner than it should be, with owners describing years of daily use rather than decades and most of the alarming Breville failure stories attaching to the bigger machines with touchscreens and built-in grinders.
Is the automatic milk wand worth paying for over the plain Bambino?
It is if you are learning two skills at once or sharing the machine with someone who will never learn to steam, and it is not if you are happy to practise for a few weeks and pocket the difference.
Sources (11)
- Amazon listings and customer reviews — Breville Bambino Plus Baratza
- Owner reports across r/espresso, r/BrevilleCoffee threads
- Owner and reviewer video, 3 channels
- Breville — Article — www.breville.com
- Seriouseats — Article — www.seriouseats.com
- Coffeeness — Article — www.coffeeness.de
- Nytimes — Article — www.nytimes.com
- Tasteofhome — Article — www.tasteofhome.com
- Thingtesting — Article — thingtesting.com
- Ca — Article — westernliving.ca
- Au — Article — www.productreview.com.au