So you’ve gone to make a coffee on your and your Breville Oracle is making flat milk. It heats up, but it’s probably making an awful high pitched screaming, and it’s flat. Coffee with flat milk just doesn’t have the mouth feel, and just feels wrong!
I’ll start by pointing out that this is mainly on the Breville Oracle, be it the BES980 or BES990, and it’s usually one of 3 things.
- Air Pump
- Venturi Valve
- Steam Wand
- Air Pump – This is a very small pump, actually a fish tank pump. This “breathes” air into the Venturi Valve. I use this terminology as it’s not a powerful pump, sometimes failing, or not able to open the venturi valve
- Venturi Valve – This is the highest probability for the Breville Oracle making flat milk. In the Venturi Valve there is a small plastic nub on a spring. This gets blocked up with scale, the nub gets stuck on the roof, and the pump cannot open it. As such the small air pump cannot create the aeration for the froth. I know what you’re thinking, open it and clean it! Nearly every time i do this, regardless of how clean it is, it manages to re-stick to the roof, and the milk goes flat again. If you’re doing this job on your own machine, go ahead and do it, but order the part and replace it, it’s not expensive and it’s going to happen again. Alot of the time you don’t need to replace the whole assembly, just the Venturi itself.
- Steam Wand – This is our last resort, sometimes we get a failure in the Steam Wand itself. It could be the pipe inside that has a tiny split, it only needs the smallest of leaks and it won’t froth. But always replace the Venturi Valve first.
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