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If you've ever ordered a pour-over at a fancy coffee shop, you know it can make an exceptionally flavorful cup. The slow, controlled pour gives the coffee grounds time to bloom and extract more evenly, often producing a richer, more balanced brew than a standard drip machine.
The downside? The process can feel tedious, which may explain why automatic pour-over coffee makers, which do the heavy lifting and eliminate guesswork, have become so popular. Brands including Cosori and Coulée have jumped on the automatic pour-over bandwagon, and more recently, Breville has entered the space with the Spiral Luxe Auto Pour Over. At the Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen & Cooking Lab, we've tested coffee makers for decades, so as a contributing analyst, I put the Spiral Luxe to the test to find out whether it's worth the $600 investment.
How does the Breville Spiral Luxe work?
The Spiral Luxe, with its removable water tank and built-in grinder, brews a single cup or a full carafe of pour-over coffee at the touch of a button. Add a paper filter to the cone-shaped dripper, insert it into the machine’s carriage, then turn the display dial to select your coffee's strength and size. The Spiral Luxe automatically grinds and doses coffee into the filter, then slowly swirls hot water onto the grounds, pausing several times to let them bloom and drip into the mug or carafe below.
What makes it unique?
One benefit of the pour-over method is that you can tweak variables like the grind size, coffee-to-water ratio, water temperature, bloom phase, and pouring technique to suit your taste. Though the Spiral Luxe has presets that make brewing a no-brainer, you can customize your pour-over formula by choosing coarser or finer settings on the grinder’s dial or using the app or display to adjust how much water the machine uses, how hot it brews, and how slowly it pours over the grounds. The display guides you through everything step by step, as if you’re a barista in training.
How we tested
Using the Spiral Luxe’s Mild preset, I brewed three 8-ounce cups of coffee with freshly ground, medium-roast beans. I then measured the brewed coffee's temperature and volume and evaluated its consistency and taste.
How it performed
The Spiral Luxe was relatively quiet during operation, even when grinding beans into the filter, so you don’t have to worry about waking up the household when preparing your morning brew. The resulting three cups of coffee were hot (averaging 144°F) with a smooth, slightly dark, and nutty taste and no acidity. Since I like a bolder brew, I’d use the Strong preset or adjust the settings to match my ideal flavor profile. I also appreciated that cleanup was so simple. I just removed the dripper, tossed the filter and spent grounds into the Lab’s compost bin, and then gave the dripper a quick wash with warm, soapy water and a sponge.
Pros
- Easy to assemble and set up
- 40-ounce water tank has clear cup markings and can be removed to fill
- Can brew one 8-ounce single serving directly into a mug or up to 20 ounces in the included glass carafe
- Uses beans from the built-in grinder but has a bypass option for preground
- Display features a guided brew system showing step-by-step instructions
- Includes Mild, Medium, and Strong presets, but brewing parameters can be customized and saved to favorites
- Heats in seconds
- Produces a single cup of hot, balanced, flavorful coffee in three and a half minutes
- Sleek, compact design
Cons:
- Full user manual must be accessed via app or online
- Machine may stop mid-brew to alert that the water tank needs to be refilled rather than before or after brewing
- Costs considerably more than similar machines on the market
- Dripper is made from BPA-free Tritan plastic, but we’d prefer glass for the price
What other pour-over machines are there?
Besides Breville’s Spiral Luxe, I also tried two other pour-over machines, running them through the same tests to see how they performed.
- Cosori Juni Automatic Pour-Over Machine: Juni’s automatic pour-over requires a little bit of a learning curve. I got a few error messages during testing, but I fixed them quickly. Each cup took more than four minutes to brew and came out warm (averaging 126°F), not hot. The taste was subtle and might have been more nuanced if I’d adjusted the brewing ratios via the touchpad or app. If you like your coffee piping hot, this might not be the best fit. But if you appreciate pour-over coffee and like to experiment with brewing parameters, Juni does the trick.
- Coulée Swirl Mini: The Swirl Mini has a glass reservoir and a metal system that delivers hot water to an all-paper filter. I made coffee with our favorite medium roast and Coulée’s prefilled filters, which contain the brand’s own medium roast. Both were hot (averaging 143°F) and brewed in about three and a half minutes. I preferred our favorite roast over Coulée’s coffee, but it needed more depth. Since the Swirl Mini only has a start button and a brew button, I’d add an extra half-tablespoon of grounds to the filter to bring out the coffee’s boldness.
The bottom line: Is the Breville Spiral Luxe worth it?
The Breville Spiral Luxe brings the hands-on feel of pour-over brewing to an easy-to-use machine. It brews an excellent cup of coffee right out of the box thanks to its helpful presets, but it also gives you plenty of room to tweak the settings and experiment as your coffee skills grow. At $600, it's definitely a splurge—but if you’re someone who swears by the pour-over method or is serious about coffee, it’s a worthy investment.
Why trust Good Housekeeping?
Mark Marino is a writer, food editor, and product tester with more than seven years of experience in digital food media. An iced coffee lover, he has experimented with and reviewed different coffee maker styles throughout his career. Since becoming a contributing analyst in the Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen & Cooking Lab, he has tested multiple automatic single-serve pour-over machines.
Nicole (she/her) is the senior director of the Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen & Cooking Lab. She oversees all content and testing related to kitchen products, food, and recipes. She has worked at GH since 2019, and is a trained cook, published recipe developer, and seasoned product tester with nearly 15 years of experience. She has worked in test kitchens for national magazines and kitchen appliances brands, where she also helped develop products for the home cook. She earned a degree in journalism from SUNY New Paltz, graduated with a Grand Diplome in Classic Culinary Arts from the French Culinary Institute, and studied culinary nutrition at the Natural Gourmet Institute (both now part of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City.)
