The "Lexus" of Juicers
By MW (Miramar, Florida United States)
We owned a refurbished Waring JEX328 juicer for about two years and my wife used it to make juice for our children and me almost every day. It held up fairly well and we paid almost nothing for it at the time (around 30 bucks, I think), but it finally cratered a couple of weeks ago. We debated for a while whether or not to replace it with this Breville model or the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro. We finally decided on this one because it had so many five star ratings and because it is an appliance we use so often, thus we thought it made sense to get the best one we could find, even with its steeper price. While I can't compare it to the Hamilton Beach model, I can compare it to the Waring model, and it beats the Waring model hands down.
As soon as you unpack the Breville you know you have a top quality piece of equipment. It does an outstanding job at juice extraction (the pulp is dryer than what the Waring produced, and the Waring actually did pretty well) and the clean-up is far easier. When cleaning the Waring, you had pulp caked up within the machine itself and it was a pain to clean it out, partially becaused it had a higher moisture content but also simply because of all of the nooks and crannies in this catchment section of the juicer. Although this section detached, it was still difficult to clean nonetheless . The Breville puts the pulp in a separate container off to the side, and as others have mentioned, if you line it with a plastic bag there is nothing to it. The only "pain" is cleaing the filter device, which is going to be difficult with any juicer you buy. The brush they provide does make this a little easier, however.
Now for the biggest difference: the noise produced when the machine is turned on. With the Waring, you had to pause the television, stop talking, cover your ears, and hope the neighbors didn't phone the cops on you for disturbing the peace. The Breville is FAR quieter. Don't get me wrong, it is not "whisper quiet" or anything like that, but it probably makes one third of the noise the Waring did.
Is it worth the higher price as compared to the Waring or Hamilton Beach? Hard to say. Like I mentioned, we got the Waring for practically nothing and it was a good introductory machine for us for juicing, but SO LOUD!
I can't really find any flaws with the Breville at all (we have run it for about a week now). Considering, however, that it costs almost three times what you can get the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro for (I would chose this one over the Waring purely from my experience with it and from reading the reviews for the Hamilton), whether or not you want to go with this "ultra juicer" version boils down to sheer personal preference. How often you will run it and what variety of recipies you might want to put through it should probably be your driving factors, along side the price difference, of course. The main differences I found with the Breville as compared to the Hamilton were a slightly higher wattage (900 versus 800) and the variable speeds instead of only one, single speed. From our perspective, though, we have had no regrets in spending the extra cash for this top model.
UPDATE: Just thought I would mention that since this review we bought the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Pro as a gift for my wife's mother, so we had a chance to directly compare it to the Breville. It did a good job, but it was louder and not nearly as solidly built as the Breville. After this comparision, we are even more satisfied with our decision to spend a bit extra and get this model. The varible speed on the Breville is something you will definitely miss should you go back to a model that does not have this feature. Hope this helps!
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