Sage Precision Brewer Review. The Best Batch Brewer in 2024?

I first bought the Sage Precision Brewer a couple of years ago initially to see what all the fuss was about, after all it's just a filter coffee machine, right, or “batch brewer” if you're more familiar with speciality coffee speak, how amazing can it be really, and is it really worth the cost?

You may find this surprising, but I'm going to answer these questions for you right now, in the second paragraph, truly breaking the mould for how blog post reviews usually go. So if you don't want to read this detailed review post, and you literally just want a quick answer from someone with a couple of years of experience of using the Sage Precision Brewer, here you go! 

I think it's amazing, and yeah, I believe it's really worth the cost – in fact, I think it represents really good value for money, especially if you sit on your hands and only buy it when it's on offer, as you can grab it for a bargain occasionally.

To quickly explain how I've come to these conclusions:

I've had it for over two years, and although I don't use it all the time as I'm more into espresso than filter, whenever I do use it it just makes me smile. It's so easy to use, and importantly, it's so easy to make great tasting filter coffee with.

Everyone who I've ever recommended the precision brewer to, including friends and family, has raved about it. I'm yet to hear from one person who bought it who doesn't love it.

If you go to a coffee festival, you'll see that a big percentage of the roasters who're batch brewing their coffee to give samples to attendees, are using this brewer. There are masses of other brewers they could use including commercial brewers, the fact that so many roasters opt to use the precision brewer is very telling!

James Hoffmann sang the praises of the precision brewer after two years of using it, in his review video. If you're  not sure who I am and whether you should be listening to me, that's fair enough, I'm just Kev, a home barista turned coffee blogger and YouTuber. James Hoffmann is ex UK and World barista champion, and is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced coffee pros in the world, you can listen to him!

So that's the very short review for anyone who just wanted a very quick answer to questions along the lines of “is the Sage Precision Brewer any good?” and “is the Sage Precision Brewer worth it?”. But for anyone who wants a bit more detail, and who wants to hear about any potential pitfalls of this machine as well as all the positives, here's my in depth “warts ‘n all” user review:

Sage Precision Brewer Review – 2 Years Later

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Features

• Big max brewing capacity of approx 1.75L
• Very easy to use dedicated auto start button for coffee ready when you want it
• Stainless steel insulated carafe (with wide opening, so you can get your hand in to properly clean it).
• Customisable brew settings and pre-set brew settings, including cold brew
• Ability to use with your favourite pour-over filter
• PID temperature control
• Cold brew function
• Steep & release technology
• Small cup detection & single cup brewing
• Flat bottom and conical filter brewing

My Observations

So as I've said, I've had the precision brewer for just a couple of years at the time of writing. I don't use it as my daily driver, as I'm more into espresso than filter, but I've used it a fair amount over this time, purposely using it a lot in the run up to my initial YouTube review, and then I've just naturally reached for the precision brewer after that whenever I've needed to batch brew.

Just a quick note about batch brewing, if you're new to coffee geekery, you may wonder what I'm on about when I say “batch brew”, this is simply the speciality coffee term for brewing with a filter coffee machine vs manual pourover brewing.

Batch brewing is done with more care and attention than is typically given to standard filter coffee machine brewing, and it would usually involve freshly roasted, freshly ground coffee beans and not supermarket “mainstream” coffee, so it's different in that regard, but to all intents and purposes “batch brewing” is just the term used in specialty coffee circles for using a machine to brew filter, instead of using pourover.

Most People Love The Precision Brewer

In case you're concerned at this point that I'm just a Sage fanboy, and I'm just going to waste the next few minutes of your life droning on about how amazing this machine is, fear not, I write warts ‘n all reviews, even when I don't experience negatives myself, I do my best to try to see what may be seen as negatives to others, so we will get to the “not so amazing” stuff a bit later on.

Some of the machines I review are machines that tend to divide people, in fact I'd say most machines do this, in other words there are some people who love the Sage Bambino Plus, there are some who love the Gaggia Classic who think anyone who buys the Sage Bambino Plus needs their head testing. There are people who love bean to cup coffee machines who think anyone who uses a traditional espresso machine is a nerd with too much time on their hands ;-).

But so far, everyone I know of who has used the precision brewer has been hugely impressed by it – and it's very uncommon to hear any negativity about it, even from the people who wouldn't buy one themselves.

Yes it's true that similarly to Sage vs Gaggia, there are people who prefer more simple old school machines who would prefer the Technivorm Moccamaster – and I've heard more old school filter coffee machine users saying they wouldn't want to move away from their old school looking and simple Moccamaster.

There are definitely people out there who don't like the Sage look and what it represents, Sage make machines that fit very well in modern kitchens and that have the kind of creature comforts that most modern coffee machined users would want, and not everyone wants that. 

Some people prefer slightly menacing looking older school machines that stand out more, and don't want coffee machines that blend in nicely with other kitchen appliances. Some people are not bothered at all about user friendliness and convenience, and would prefer more simplicity, and machines without complex electrical componentry that may be a challenge to fix if there's an issue a few years down the road.

But the majority of “normal” coffee drinkers who I know, who've ended up with the precision brewer, and most of the speciality coffee lovers I know who have it, absolutely love it. 

Whenever friends & family ask me what coffee machine I think they should get, if they're “normal” every day coffee drinkers who tell me they “just like a cup of coffee”, I'll often recommend the precision brewer. 

Often they're expecting me to recommend an espresso machine, bean to cup coffee machine or pod machine, but in many cases I think the precision brewer is the best option. 

If you're someone who wants to wake up to a really nice pot of brewed coffee, and/or you're someone who likes to start their working day with a big pot of coffee on their desk to get them most of the way through to lunch time, and/or you're in an office where a handful of people need a pot full of coffee waiting for them at set breaks, this machine is hard to beat.

I'm saying “this machine” and not filter machines in general, because there are things about other filter coffee machines that just don't quite fit the bill. The Precision Brewer is a different type of brewer than the normal (usually much cheaper) filter coffee machines, which is why it's such a great option for so many circumstances. 

Traditional filter coffee machines all tend to share these issues:

• Relatively small maximum brew volume
• Relatively slow brewing time
• Little or no control over brewing parameters
• Glass pot of coffee being kept hot via a hotplate

It's for these reasons that filter machines have become less popular, and have been overtaken with options which seemingly offer more flexibility and convenience, and often this is pod machines.

There are many small offices and home offices these days that once would have used a filter coffee machine, that now feature a pod machine instead. In my opinion, most people who just “like a big mug of coffee” aren't really well suited to pod machines.

I think the precision brewer beats most pod machines, hands down, for most situations, including convenient great tasting coffee in home offices and small office kitchens, being able to wake up and pour yourself a big travel cup full of coffee to get you to work, and just about any other situation I can think of. 

Pod machines definitely have a place, there are people who pod machines are perfect for. For example if you like a small, espresso style coffee in the morning and you want ultra convenience, then just being able to drop a Nespresso or Nespresso compatible pod into your pod machine and press the button, is a great option.

Yes there's an argument about sustainability and the environmental issues pods represent, but many of the Nespresso original line compatible pods these days are fully compostable (there are no compatibles at the time of writing for the new Vertuo line), so I do see Nespresso original line machines and compatibles as a very valid option, especially given the huge range of pod choice these days.

But when we're talking about people who just want big convenient cups of coffee on their coffee break for example, or a full pot of coffee brewed and waiting for them when they wake up, I think the precision brewer is hard to beat.

Go To a Coffee Festival

If you've not been to one of the coffee festivals before, I'd highly recommend giving it a go, in my opinion it's a brilliant way to spend a few hours, you'll be able to taste loads of coffee, free, you'll probably come out with loads of other freebies too, and they're usually really good fun.

If you to your local event, I'd be very surprised if you don't find that (unless it's an event sponsored by a rival brand) a lot of the roasters are using the precision brewer. So if you want to be sure, just ask as many of them as you can what they think, is it worth it, is it brilliant, or is this Coffee Kev bloke full of crap ;-).

I went to the Manchester Coffee Festival recently, which was brilliant by the way, if you're anywhere near Manchester I would hugely recommend it. I thought it was really good last year, but even better this year, a bit more going on, a more interesting mix of exhibitors. Anyway, the one thing that I couldn't help but notice was that most of roasters who were batch brewing to let people sample their coffee, were using the precision brewer. 

I did notice one or two using commercial brewers, but the majority were using the Precision Brewer. Given that roasters are literally there to let people taste their coffee and hope that they love it and buy it, that's a huge vote for the Precision Brewer, as no roaster is going to use a brewer that they think isn't going to make their coffee taste good.

OK you could say that perhaps roasters use this brewer because it gives so much control, maybe they can brew great coffee with it because they know what they're doing, and that's fair comment, but most people will probably find that simply opting for the gold setting is all they need to do, and if not, tweaking the my brew setting really isn't difficult, it's just a case of playing around until you're dialled in.

The Stuff I Love

Timed Brewing

One of the great things about this brewer, for “normal” coffee drinkers, meaning people who just want a great tasting convenient cup of coffee and aren't into all the coffee geekery (as there are various other features about the Precision Brewer that will be more exciting for these folk) is how easy the timed brewing is to use. 

The machine has a dedicated “Auto Start” button, so you don't need to go into any menu or anything like that. So what this means is that the next time you're setting up a brew, all you need to do is add the ground coffee, add the water, press the auto start button and select the time. 

Without fail (as long as you set the clock correctly and the power didn't go off in the meantime or something) the machine will start brewing at that time.

So, for example, let's say you're someone who works from home. You want a big pot in the morning for you and your family, and then at 10 AM you want half a litre to give you a couple of cups of coffee to get you through to lunch time.

All you'd do is set the brew up at night to be ready in the morning, and then when you've finished your morning coffee, rinse the jug, put in 15-16g ground coffee, put 500ml of water into the tank, press “auto start” set it for 9:55 am, and then go about your day, by 10:00 you'll have your next pot of coffee waiting for you.

This is one of the reasons I think the Precision brewer is a particularly good option for small offices. 

I recommended the Precision Brewer to the firm I used to work for  (before I slipped through a wormhole into another dimension where it's possible to make your hobby your “job”) to keep the team caffeinated, and they told me recently that it works perfectly for them.

Lets say you have a small company, and there's usually maybe five or six people at a time needing coffee at set brew times. This doesn't mean there can be a max of 5-6 people using the machine, I just mean that this would be the ideal for one machine at one time. 

In other words, you'll get approx 1750ml from one pot, enough for 6 x 10 ounce cups (a normal “builder's mug” is about 10 ounce). So if you had a team of 10-12 coffee drinkers, with staggered breaks for example, the brew could be setup ready so that the first full pot was ready at 10 for the first group, and then if one very nice member of the team could just spend a couple of minutes prepping the machine for the next break at 10:20 let's say, their full pot of coffee will be waiting for them too. 

In bigger offices serving 20+ people, you're probably going to be better off with a commercial filter brewer, but there are many smaller businesses that I think the Precision brewer would be perfect for, at a very small cost in comparison to bigger volume commercial filter coffee machines.

Single Cups

I've spoken a lot about brewing bigger volumes, and as I've said you'll get up to about 1.75L (the blurb says 1.7, but I've tested it and you'll get just over 1.75L max), which is enough for 5-6 proper sized mugs, you could say up to 12 cups if they're smaller old school filter coffee style cups.

What about single cups though, will the precision brewer work? Yup. 

You can brew full pots, you can brew a single pot in a cup, or you can brew a single cup directly into the cup. There's a single cup line on the tank, and the machine will detect when you're brewing a single cup & will adjust the settings slightly with the pre-set brews, or you can use the “my brew” option to completely customise the brew.

So you can just slap your travel cup on instead of the carafe, put in the correct amount of water for your travel cup, and that means no having to wash out the carafe before you grab the travel cup, put the lid on and go off on your merry day to another fun packed day at work.

Pourover

If you want to, you can replace the filter basket with your favourite pourover device, V60, Kalita, Orea etc., and simply put it onto the Pourover setting. It's important you do put it on the pourover setting if you're doing this, by the way, or the drip stop leveller will kick in, which will tilt your pourover device.

Many people who're into pourover will be confused about the idea of using a machine for pourover, and I get that, but the customisation you can do (bloom time and volume, brew temp and flow rate) and the fact that there's nothing stopping you from doing manual agitation, does make this an interesting thing to play around with if you get one of these for batch brewing.

Pre-sets

The Precision Brewer gives you control over brew temperature, bloom time, bloom volume and flow rate, in the “My Brew” and “Pour over” settings, and gives you control over the total brew time with the cold brew setting. There also three pre-sets, gold, fast & strong.

The gold brew pre-set is really the only one that would interest me, as this one is pre-set to the SCA standard settings in these areas, so if you just want what's probably going to give you the best results from a pre-set, I'd go with gold.

It's worth pointing out that you'll only get the full gold brew settings including the bloom, at brews of 1L – 1.2L, and if you have the Breville version outside of Europe, you'll need to go into settings and ensure that you set it to use the cone filter, to use the gold setting. With the UK Sage Precision Brewer you don't have the option to tell the machine whether you're using the cone or basket brewer, it just assumes from the volume of water that you'll be using the cone brewer with up to 1.2L of water in the tank.

Strong brew will slow the flow rate down and deliver a stronger coffee, by all means try it, depending on your tastebuds and the coffee you're using, it may be perfect for you, but my main concern with this setting would be potential over extraction. 

Fast brew will brew as fast as possible, and again try it and see what you think, but I'd think there would be potential for under extraction here.

Cold brew also uses pre-set settings except for the brew time, it'll let you choose any brew time from a minute (interesting…) up to 24 hours, with a max of 450ml.

My Brew

While the gold setting is my go to with this brewer when I just want fast coffee at up to 1.2L, it's really the “My Brew” functionality that gives this machine so much scope where speciality coffee is concerned. 

We all have different preferences, different taste buds, we're all using different coffee and brewing in different volumes, so it makes sense for us to be able to customize the main variables in order to perfect our own “my brew” settings for each coffee, to really allow us to dial in for our coffee and our taste.

With the My Brew setting, you can brew at any volume, up to the full tank size, and you can tweak the variables as follows:

Bloom Time: 0-1 minute in 1 second increments, and then up to 5 minutes in 10 second increments.
Bloom Volume: From min to max in 6 settings.
Brew Temperature: From 80 – 98C in 1C increments.
Flow Rate: From min to max in 3 settings.

You Can Get it Free… (kind of)

Sage Appliances have a coffee beans subscription called Beanz.com, in which they offer a coffee subscription involving some of the UK's leading speciality coffee roasters. 

Currently they have a cashback offer which gives you up to a maximum of £200 in cashback over a 2 year period.

The Precision Brewer is £260. But, let's just say you're a member of someone's mailing list and you emailed them for a discount code… I would think this could, possibly, result in that price dropping to around £221.

This would mean that if you did go for the cash back offer and claimed the maximum cashback over the 2 year period, eventually it would mean that you'd paid £21 for the precision brewer, if you take the cashback amount off what you paid for it. 

Occasionally they have the precision brewer reduced to around £199, so of course when this is the case you could say that you're getting the machine for even better than free, especially if you have a discount code for Sage Appliances.

The catch with the cashback is only that you're basically forced to buy some really decent coffee ;-), and that they only sell it in 250g bags.

So if you're someone who was going to buy high quality speciality single origins, and you were going to buy it by the 250g bag anyway so you can try as many different coffees as possible, then I can't see there being any catch here, as we're talking about coffee from the likes of Dark Woods, Ozone, Hasbean, Kickback, 200 Degrees, Assembly, Dear Green & Old Spike – and at the same cost as buying directly from the roaster.

To get the max cashback, if my maths is right, you'll have to buy just under 4 x 250g bags per month on average, over up to two years. So, yes, you'll be spending at least £640 over this period to get £200 cashback, so it's only really a good deal if you'd have been spending that kind of money anyway. So if you were going to be buying at least 4 x 250g bags of high quality speciality beans costing a minimum of £8 per bag anyway, then this might be a deal worth considering.

Stuff I Love Less

As promised, while most of the review has been ultra positive, there are a few cons worth mentioning. 

Noise

The main thing you'll hear when it comes to negative, is that the Precision Brewer is loud. I've heard a lot of people saying this, and I suppose it depends on what you're comparing it with. It's quiet compared to something louder ;-).

I'm use to espresso machines, and I'm very familiar with the Sage Espresso machines, which have the exact same vibration pump that is responsible for the majority of the noise the Precision Brewer makes, so that's probably why it doesn't seem loud to me.

In my experience, it's fairly quiet throughout most of the brewing process, but has the occaisonal louder section particultly at the end of the brew when the tank runs out of water, but these louder sections of the brew are only a few seconds.

On the plus side, the slightly noisy pump is the reason you get control over the flow rate, which you wouldn't usually have with the other, quieter filter coffee machines.

Maybe the fact that I'm a drummer and I really should wear ear protection more often ;-), so I've used a decibel meter, all the way through the brew holding the device about a foot away, it's at about 50 decibels, and I'd describe this as a similar noise to most fridges when you get close to them, so not particularly loud. 

Towards the end of the brew, though, it gets loud for a few seconds, and at this point it just pushes the needle up to 70db, which is about the volume of many vacuum cleaners, so yeah, not quiet, but this is only for a small amount of the brewing time.

Level Markers

The tank is marked by the 150ml, so instead of having a 1L marker, it has a 900L mark. Given that most people are basing their recipe on Litres, and even Sage themselves give the recommended recipe in terms of Litres, 60g per Litre, I'd have thought it would make sense to mark the water tank based on Litres, maybe every 250ml for example.

It's really not a big deal though, you can guess roughly at a litre or half a litre based on the indicators, or you can fill a water bottle that is the desired capacity, for example if you do 1L brews, fill a 1L water bottle and pour that into the tank. 

Water Tank Isn't Removeable

Some filter machines do have removeable tanks, some don't, but Sage usually give the user just about every convenience they could ask for, so the fact that the water tank isn't removable did come as a bit of a surprise when I first used the machine. It just means you have to fill something else and then fill the tank, instead of being able to take the tank off and take it to the sink. Not a big deal, but I'd prefer it if the tank was removeable. 

No Internal Battery

I'm being a bit picky here ;-), but I just can't help but think it would have been an immensely useful feature to put a small battery inside the machine so that you only ever have to set your time and auto brew time once.

If the power goes off or there's someone in your home who goes around turning every flipping socket off ;-), you lose the time and the auto brew setting. If I'm someone who relies on my Precision Brewer to have coffee waiting for me every morning, and I know that many people do that, but the power went off over night and came back on again, there's going to be disappointment in the morning!

If they gave it an internal battery which powered the clock, if the power ever went off  over night and then came back on, or if someone turned the socket off by mistake and turned it back on again, it wouldn't interrupt the auto start.

Conclusion – Is The Precision Brewer Worth it in 2024?

To conclude, in my humble opinion the Precision Brewer is a brilliant batch brewer, filter coffee machine, or whatever you want to call it, and I'm yet to see any other brewer on the market that has the same set of features. 

I think most “normal” coffee drinkers will be amazed by it, in terms of how simple it is to use, how easy it is to set up the next auto brew with the dedicated auto start button, how well the gold brew setting works, and how easy it is to weak the other brewing variables. 

I think most speciality coffee lovers will also be amazed by it, and will find it an immensely enjoyable brewer to use, and for the price (especially if you're patient and hang around until it's on offer) I think it's amazing value for money.  

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