as someone who fell deep into the espresso hole over the past 8 years (from an $800 saeco to a $3000 profitec with a few in between), i see several problems with this.
First, CO2 -WILL- enter the brew. There is no way to stop it. This will create carbonic acid and elevate the pH. Which absolutely will impact the flavor. Part of the extraction "dialing in" process is determining the dose, temperature, grind, and duration for a new bean (and as it ages). The last thing you want it so add more acidity to the flavor. Some people do like sour espresso, I do not, and I think I'm in the majority.
Second, consistency of pressure. A CO2 canister output pressure changes with temperature and volume. An espresso machine uses a pump (and some a PID) to regulate this.
Third, this thing will probably explode after a few weeks. You can't subject plastics to this type of pressure. But OP did suggest using metal in the next version.
Fourth, health. Plastic + hot water is bad, add extreme pressure and it is even worse. Kick it up a notch using 3D printed plastic, which is a nowhere near food safe. I'm not too far into the "don't eat out of warm plastic" group, but i'm close. This would concern me.
I think it is a cool build. But a Bialeti is sufficient if you don't want to drop thousands on espresso machinery. Also in the running, the early Nespresso designs, not the rotary one. Both will get you into "americano" territory.
> A CO2 canister output pressure changes with temperature and volume
Temperature yes, volume, not really. The CO2 is in liquid state, maintaining its vapour pressure. Although if the starting volume is low, then the liquid could substantially cool down during the extraction and lower the vapour pressure that way.
All of this is irrelevant though, as the pressure is regulated down to espresso extraction levels during the extraction. It looks like it's done by hand by eyeballing the pressure gauge, pretty wild.
Also not much CO2 enters into a hot liquid, CO2 solubility is drastically down at this temp, as the article notes.
>Fourth, health. Plastic + hot water is bad, add extreme pressure and it is even worse. Kick it up a notch using 3D printed plastic, which is a nowhere near food safe. I'm not too far into the "don't eat out of warm plastic" group, but i'm close. This would concern me.
It doesn’t look like the coffee or water touches the plastic, it goes into a metal Cafelat Robot basket then is tamped with a metal screen on top.
The screen in between the filter and the chamber top is to prevent grounds from entering up into the chamber, but boiling pressurized water absolutely does flood the entire chamber including the plastic region. (It's not just a wall of pressurized water in nice straight lines, it's a mixture of solids liquids and gasses.) Eg: When I clean my E61 group head, I have to remove a fine mesh filter to get to the brass outflow fitting, and it is still covered with oils from the coffee.
bummer. it can be dialed out, it just takes tame, and sadly the vast majority of baristas use a computer controlled grinder and machine and just push-shots all day long. if you find a place with someone in their 30's with weird facial hair or tattoos pulling shots, they're likely to invest more of their personality in understanding espresso, which is better for your. tell them to pull the shot "lungo" (longer) so you get more of the bitter tail. or tell them increase the boiler temp.
I would pump up the tank to ~130PSI, getting my morning exercise in. I would exhaust it through the coffee. If I wanted to get fancy, I might have an extra intermediate stage so I can use fresh air, rather than air which has been through my bike pump.
I'd like to be able to buy something like (any) of these. My requirements:
- Cheap
- Reliable
- Makes good coffee
Nice-to-haves:
- Compact
Anti-requirements (which should make this possible):
- Fast to use and practical in a fast-paced environment.
I make one cup of coffee a day, and it's a ritual. I'm okay with this taking a while, needing to work a bike pump, or whatnot. Slow is okay.
It's an espresso machine that's fully manual. You create pressure by using a lever. Water is manually poured in.
Cheapness is hard to have in a product that's big, heavy and involves big chunks of metal, but on the good side a well made one should last forever -- nothing much that can go wrong, and it's a purely mechanical device that can be taken apart.
+1 for a lever! I found a busted up old La Pavoni years ago, replaced all the seals and it’s been good to me ever since. There’s a bit of art to pulling a shot on a lever but once you get used to it, it’s a really fun way to make your coffee every day.
Another happy La Pavoni owner here! I was originally after a totally manual lever machine but found a great deal (~£200) on a second hand La Pavoni in miraculously good condition and couldn't be happier (apart from the occasional burned knuckle). Readily available spare parts and lack of any serious electronics means that hopefully this thing should last me a lifetime. My one recommended upgrade is a compatibly bottomless portafilter + 20g basket.
I live this life too - my La Pavoni has been going strong for over a decade! Multiple shots a day. Maintenance every once in a while. My additional recommended simple upgrade is to add a momentary switch to bypass the sensors, allowing you to quickly increase the pressure for steaming.
Pavoni owner here - they're simple, built like a tank, and you can do basic maintenance on it with a 10mm wrench and a few other small hand tools.
As long as you're willing to invest a bit of effort in the learning curve of literally pulling a shot, it's the perfect machine. I've made 3-6 shots a day on mine for 4 years now, and I know people who have used their machine daily for 20+ years.
Love levers! I have three going on four, they're pretty addictive.
These days you can get a very good one (Flair Flex) for $99! That, some good beans and a bit of knowledge and you'll make coffee on par with any shop out there.
I got a pico around a year ago. It is the best product easily made by them the others are watery sort of thicker normal black drip coffee. Pico when the grounds are grinded to the correct diameter(very small) makes espresso shots almost or in comparison to a cafe shot! It's one of my favorite purchases for 129 on amazon. Needs a scale for sure, I also got an extra Normcore 51mm puck screen to use in it as well. I would say this or the base flair is the best at home espresso that isn't a "machine" Also I can travel with the pico. It's really amazing!
I second the picopresso. My buddy has one and, while the tradeoff of the small size is that it's a little more cumbersome, the espresso it can produce rivals that of the Flair and similar, larger machines. I wouldn't consider any other portable espresso machine.
Recently on prime day, the nanopresso and minipresso had great deals, but not the nanopresso, or I would have picked one up for myself.
I don't know if the reservoir is big enough but some pumps for tubeless tires do come with an integral tank for an initial rush of air to pop the bead in place.
A gotcha that hits me here is that, by using a pressure tank, you will likely run into a cleaning/humidity problem. You need that air to be flawlessly clean and the act of pressurizing and depressurizing the tank would make that difficult.
Additionally, you need to pressurize near-boiling water as well so you'll need a boiler/water mixing tank. Finally, the temperature of the actual brewing environment is important, otherwise the outer edges will be lesser extracted.
You’re ignoring the grinder, which in my opinion is the most important part of home espresso making. Add at least 200USD for a good quality manual burr grinder.
You can find a Baratza Encore used for ~$100. Gives a surprisingly uniform fine grind (not as good for coarser grinds like french press, though).
Out of the box it's not perfect for espresso because the grind level is in steps that aren't short enough to easily dial in. There's a "stepless" mod and that makes it much easier to work with.
You can find the Timemore C2 for 50 to 60 euros and it is a pretty decent manual burr grinder. And for around ~100 euros you can find decent burr grinder from more known brand. If you are going to spend more than 200USD, you might as well buy an electric one.
I don't think C2 or a $200 electric grinder are going to be great for espresso. I have a 1ZPresso JX-Pro I got for like $150 and at the time at least sounded like a much better option vs C2 and cheap electric. I'm happier with it than the C2 and cheap electric I've used.
If you live in a city it's relatively trivial to buy pre-ground from a good roaster. Not the same as grinding in the moment of course but for a week's worth it's generally ok. Especially for the first coffee of the day.
For home espresso you really want the ability to tweak the grind size for each shot. Small variations in grind size can significantly change the flow rate, which dictates the peak pressure & shot time you can achieve. When you buy a new bag of beans it can take a couple tries to "dial in". The appropriate grind size depends substantially on the coffee variety, roast level, age of beans, etc. If the pre-ground coffee doesn't hit the mark then you are SOL for the batch -- including if it is too fine and doesn't flow at all. Even if you hit the mark in the beginning, the shot behavior will change over time as the beans age.
Honestly with a lever machine I just don't notice differences in grind size that much, as long as it's reasonably fine. Could be that my palate isn't that great, but I've pretty much settled on one universal grind size and adjust my pressure profile instead.
You may also like the Espresso Forge, which manages to go even more reductive than what you propose, forgoing the pumping, or any sort of leverage, in favour of a piston for you to push on with a basket on the end.
There's an important extra ingredient that you didn't specify: FEA. He did a proper finite element analysis, which is the only way that I would be willing to be in the same room as a 3D printed pressure vessel.
Temperature was interesting though. I assume it partially because the hot water was mostly in contact with metal rather than plastic. I don't know what he printed it from but ABS's melting point[1] is only just above water boiling point. We've got a UV cured 3D printer at work (projet) which has some much better temperature properties.
[1] Technically "glass transition temperature" if you want be all materials-science about it
Modeling with FEA is great but I wonder if he also did a fatigue analysis. It might not blow up the first time, but will it blow up three years later after the parts have been pressurized and thermally cycled 1000 times?
It’ll probably fail at some point, but the failure mode is probably a crack and a leak, especially on the threaded connections.
That said, making this out of steel would be much safer. Seems like the person that wrote this is pretty uniquely frugal, and doesn’t value their time, so I’m going to wager that will give them a happy chance to redesign the part.
They could have done some contract design work in the time they spent on this and bought a nice espresso machine plus had some money to stick in the bank, but I suppose that isn’t the point.
Similar topic which might be of interest to HN readers is the [Gaggiuino](https://gaggiuino.github.io/#/), an open source project that adds a microcontroller to fairly affordable and mechanically simple domestic espresso machines, bringing them (almost) up to par with machines that cost 5x as much
The site would definitely need a rework based on the input from someone totally unfamiliar with the project.
I cannot know from the opening page, what coffee machines the mod is for, but I can see that an STM32 or an arduino nano and some other parts would be needed.
Not really informative, no pictures on the opening page to show something like before/after, to showcase the benefits, etc.
Yet there is a rickroll...
This is not really sympathetic, but yeah, I can see the begging icon (support paying for a professional technical writer)... but this is also really backwards in my opinion. First you should sell the project to me, then ask for donation.
While the engineering contents might be great, the presentation is very low quality, to put it politely.
I've built one of these based on the instructions and use it daily (and love it!), but the tone of the site is pretty reflective of the project overall. It's definitely a really impressive hack and I appreciate all the hard work that's gone into it, but could really use a little more user-facing empathy.
I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to someone else - and if I was doing it again I'd probably spend a few hundred more (than the gaggia + parts cost) and just buy an off-the-shelf machine with the same feature set.
They recently updated it with an official vendor for a [PCB kit](https://www.peakcoffee.cc/product/gaggiuino-v3-kit-set-gaggi...) that (I believe) includes all of the internal components needed. I did the lego build w/ tons of soldering and ordering parts off Aliexpress. This new kit should make it much easier for newcomers. You still need to know what you're doing and it's not for everyone. A machine with similar capabilities is something like the Decent at $4k.
I'm curious about what off-the-shelf machines you would compare a fully modified gagguino. Granted, I don't have one so I'm only going off the feature set listed on the page, but short of a Decent ($$$$) I can't think of any competitors with features like flow profiles.
Well, there's no cheap competitors with (automatic) flow profiles, but there are competitors with automatic flow profiles. ACS Vesuvius, Rocket R nine one (although IIRC this one is actually pressure profiling, not flow profiling), Synesso es.1, Sanremo You to mention some.
If you're looking at manual flow control, basically any E61 group machine can be outfitted with a needle valve for flow control, and a bunch of machines come with one installed from the factory, like the Lelit Bianca. There's also machines like the Slayer 1 group and La Marzocco GS/3 MP.
Gagguino is very cool, and if you're just pulling espressos and not too many back to back, it should be plenty of machine. If you're doing more than a couple of milk drinks, or pull lots of shots back to back, or want to connect it to plumbing, it's not as great of a machine. The fact that you started out with a small single boiler with a vibration pump starts to show.
I feel the same, as someone who has a Gaggia Classic collecting dust and has long considered splurging on a near-$1000 option because I want all these features...
This is so vaguely written as to seem far more daunting than it probably should, it's unclear how much money or time it would cost me, I don't even know where to start with it. Cool idea, but totally unapproachable to someone without extensive related background.
As someone that's been looking into it, it's not just for the Gaggia. It's also for some Silvia models and they have a small list of others that people have gotten it to work for. The list is, unfortunately, on discord and the discord server has some really petty rules and a lot of superiority complexes.
A bit less DIY but similar functionally is the kit Shades of Coffee sells that also adds PID to the Gaggia classic.
If you're just after the functionality of a cheap espresso machine with PID that takes a lot less effort.
If anybody's interested in a packaged solution, Auber Instruments has been making PIDs and timers for Gaggia and Rancilio machines for a looong time. Their support is also top notch. (I use their PID with my Silvia)
I have one. It’s made my machine so much better. Once you find a grind setting and dose weight that works well for your beans, you get perfectly reproducible shots.
What Grinder do you use? I have a Gaggia as well been using Baratza Encore but it’s not really for Espresso but now they have the Encore Esp for espresso
I've got the Virtuoso. The '586 (?) model with improved burrs. It's bulletproof. I did have to replace a few of the plastic parts that act like mechanical fuses when I tried to grind a batch of coffee that had a pebble in it.
I've been tempted a few times, especially by the fast (efficient) heat up times. But I have a bunch of 58mm tampers, dosing funnels, etc, so the 54mm portalfilter is a bit offputting!
As a Barista express person going 54mm is a regret. 58 is more versatile and compatiable.
But the recommendation was more for budget purchases. Breville also do a dual boiler with 58mm which is more expensive but if you live in Australia is amazingly good value (often $900AU which is about $600US). If you have more money still get a La Marzocco or whatever :-)
My taste is to avoid fiddly things that need too much skill like heat exchangers etc.
Before the $200 grinder, and the ~$200-300 of quality coffee beans in a year.
Meanwhile, one can also get a temp-controlled kettle, a V60, a years supply of filters, and a hand grinder for ~$80.
Skip the temp control and hand grinder and you are down to $30 or less.
It is better than daily takeout, sure..but lets not pretend it is just a randomly affordable purchase for most when brewing non-espresso is far cheaper for good quality. Trust me, I know, I spent the money on mine. Love it, for sure...but is every bit a luxury good.
That might be one of the reasons they're trying to fundraise for a technical writer! I think the docs currently serve more as an installation & troubleshooting manual, and assumes some kind of familiarity.
Lance Hedrick in his latest video (review of Decent XL) mentions that he got the Gaggiuino parts, but haven't got around to building it. I look forward to that video, whenever it comes out.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to his experience. I’ve been on the fence about whether to build a Gaggiuino myself, or sell the GCP and upgrade to a dual boiler machine. I don’t really care for flow profiling, but more stable temps and auto shot timing would be nice to have. And I make a lot of milk drinks so a DB would eliminate some of the wait time and need to flush the boiler.
I've been buying cups of coffee on and off from coffee shops for years. Each cup was 2-4USD. Sometimes i also did pourovers but that shit took forever.
Finally got a used Delongi bean to cup for less than $200 and my god what I've been missing. I also discovered that, for me, reducing the amount of water that passes through the coffee puck for each shot makes the coffee so creamy and less acidic.
This is call a 'ristretto shot'. In some of the starbucks reserve locations you can get a large volume of ground coffee and a ristretto shot, and it is very creamy without as much acid/tannins.
Also, the ristretto shot is often used in flat whites - one of the main differences (the other lesser one being milk texture)
Starbucks is rather bad coffee though, without all the syrups you will notice it more. Honestly I have a bean to cup (Krups, previously also had DeLonghi) and prefer to take a small thermos along for decent lukewarm coffee all day rather than to pay outrageous amounts for mediocre coffee and a throwaway cup. Living in Italy or Portugal I'd probably not need that as there is excellent espresso at every corner, but most other countries it's hit and miss and the Anglosphere generally just bad coffee.
Can't speak for Portugal, but "decent espresso at every corner" in Italy is sort of a myth.
There is uniform espresso at every corner, with quite dark roasts that cover up potential differences in flavor for the beans/crops. That's a side effect of expecting coffee for ~1 Euro, regardless of quality: quality generally goes down.
We Italians are used to that (you could say we don't know better), and dislike any variation from the norm, so that doesn't bother most people; in actual coffee countries you have places that do care about coffee quality and experiment with single-origin, different roasts, etc. In Italy these places are a tiny minority, and for the rest is the same burnt expresso everywhere (and, if you're unlucky, very acid).
It might be different in big cities like Milan, but I doubt it.
Right, but "uniform espresso" is exactly what I mean when I say Italy has "decent espresso at every corner". In the Netherlands, where I live, it's "every place has a different variation of awful slop", except for a handful of good coffee places (that then may suffer from hipster problem of serving sour^H^H^H^H fruity coffee".
So yes, when people praise Italian coffee it's because you're pretty much guaranteed it will be ok.
Heh, I don’t know, uniform could be good if I could pay 2 Euros and get something that is not very bitter, or very sour, or the machine has not been cleaned, or… but uniform in style, doesn’t mean consistent in quality.
I’m also in NL and tbh while it goes sometimes horribly bad (also when visiting people, they offer you a coffee but you end up with a kut senseo…) it’s on average actually quite ok… but I only drink a regular “koffie” here unless it’s a fancy coffee place, so maybe that’s the secret :)
>that then may suffer from hipster problem of serving sour^H^H^H^H fruity coffee"
I learned to appreciate the fruity coffee of light roasts, but it is an acquired taste. If you want bitter roasts that tastes like burnt ash, get any Starbucks.
I’m sure one could learn to appreciate all the different aromas, yes, and hat doing so would be an amusing and interesting pursuit. However, I have enough hobbies and interests already and don’t need another one. I just want coffee that sort of resembles what you can get at every street corner in Italy.
Agreed on Starbucks being roasted too hard, though. I suspect that’s because most of their coffee will be diluted by large amounts of milk and sugary stuff and this way some of the bitter flavor people associate with coffee.
Pretty similar in Milan from what I could tell (traveled there frequently before the pandemic). Although there were a handful of coffee shops that seemed to be accepting a specialty coffee angle where for 5 euros you could get a distinctly non-Italian offering.
This is something I've always wondered about. I _loved_ the coffee in Rome almost universally. Even in Madrid I enjoyed the coffee, although it was totally different than the stuff in Rome. I knew it wasn't the best beans. Sometimes it wouldn't even be freshly ground.
However, in the US, even at the fanciest hipster coffee places, the espresso is incredibly bitter and astringent/acidic. Is that on purpose? Do Americans actually want their coffee to be super bitter and astringent/acidic? The other thing I've noticed is that in Rome and Madrid, most coffee drinkers are just drinking the coffee. But in the US it is rare to actually see someone drink a coffee without milk. So I just assumed that the reason for the bitterness and astringency was because the people making it never actually drank it as espresso.
So - American espresso drinkers - tell me - do you actually prefer that super bitter taste of the thin espressos that you get at supposedly good coffee places like, e.g., Blue Bottle over the rich and frothy espressos of Rome?
As a foreigner living in America, I hate the super bitter taste of the thin espressos in the places that are supposedly good. I've given up on buying coffee in most places, particularly since I tend to drink it black.
Honestly even Nespresso is better than that shit. And Lavazza Blue pods are an order of magnitude better than Nespresso, so that's what I drink daily when I need a quick fix
> the espresso is incredibly bitter and astringent/acidic. Is that on purpose? Do Americans actually want their coffee to be super bitter and astringent/acidic?
Haha, yeah. The new "hipster" coffee I'd tend to say leans more on the side of expressing the acidity of the bean through light-roasts over the chocolate-y flavors from dark roasts.
> But in the US it is rare to actually see someone drink a coffee without milk.
I think this is true with espresso, but not with pourovers. I think the people who like to drink espresso by itself won't go to a cafe to get an espresso since they'll likely get a better shot with their own machine than a cafe's machine.
The reason being is that cafes don't have time to re-dial in their shots midday, and they don't need to be as detailed with their shot-pulling since most customers order milk-based espresso drinks (so most bitterness/sourness from over/under extraction gets masked with milk).
Thin, grassy, acidic espresso is a sign of 'third wave' coffee... the idea that you could roast the beans juuust enough to convert the sugars and keep a bunch of neat flavors in a mild and bright cup. But they walk the line of juuust enough roasting very close, which often results in under roasting especially in copy cat producers. Underroasted coffee is marginally ok in pour over / chemex, but is horrible in espresso.
There is a 'fourth wave' coffee pushing back on this trend that anchors more to big dark espressos sometimes even using robusta beans for extra creama and caffeine.
I grew up in an Italian American neighborhood. I grew up drinking coffee from a moka pot, Italian style espresso and the odd cappuccino here and there.
I'd say you can't generalize who uses milk or not, either. Also the super thin third wave espressos are more acidic than bitter. Read up on third wave or Nordic espresso. I don't think you have a full grasp on that aspect of coffee outside of Southern Europe...
The reserve locations are better seen as flashy celebrations of coffee and basically ignore the entire Starbucks Corporate supply chain, in that way they are:
1: Vastly better quality coffee with actual light roasts available.
2: Absolutely not Scalable.
I'm not saying they aree somehow better than other high-end roasters but
Hmm. I roast my own beans and I feel like I know good coffee when I drink it.
For me Starbucks (I've tested in US, UK, and Japan mainly) provides a) a reliably consistent quality that is b) about 80% of ideal.
To me this is the killer feature of Starbucks, and it's why I'm a stockholder.
When I buy coffee at non-Starbucks coffee shops, it's a total crap shoot what I get. Perhaps 10% of the time I get a stellar cup. But perhaps 40% of the time I get undrinkable crap.
Starbucks solves this problem for me by giving me an experience where I have perhaps a 95% probability of getting a pretty decent cup of coffee.
Disclosure: I drink mostly their Latte drinks with extra shots (depending on size and regional variations in base shot count).
> To me this is the killer feature of Starbucks, and it's why I'm a stockholder.
Well seeing you are a stockholder you may want to know my experience.
I'd say Starbucks at least in my city in Canada has degraded mainly due to the talent or workload of its staff. They got too fancy and also try to make orders too fast. Getting it fast but junk is pointless. It seems to have started when mobile orders became a thing if I had to guess when it began.
I used to like their flat white when they actually made it correctly. They used to bang the pitcher to get out the big bubbles, it had a nice uniform beige with a white dot of milk on the top. It had a nice astringent taste from the ristretto shot.
Then the workers started (told to?) pouring milk ending with a leaf on the top for every cup. I felt like saying who cares or don't worry just pour it and move on to the next person. They don't seem to bang the pitcher to remove big bubbles. The look of it is mostly white not beige as if someone dropped their latte picked it up and gave it to you.
What a mess! And it's 100% time. I ask for a flat white now and then but realize there no way they'll ever make it right again.
This is where Starbucks shines and is impressive. Their coffee isn't all objectively bad and they have options for different tastes. But their best feature is consistency. If you like a particular bean/blend in a particular format it's going to be consistent at pretty much any Starbucks you go to.
I've found Indy hipster coffee shops can rarely deliver a consistent cup at their single location on any two days. I don't know what I actually like from those places. Sure Monday's cup made by Alex in the morning was good but Sam's cup of the same roast on Wednesday was a waste of money.
It's impressive that a chain with thousands of locations can provide such a consistent experience. It's definitely not as bad as most people claim provided you like a roast they sell.
Depends on the market. In Australia it’s definitely the lower quality end of the market (however consistently), while at the same time your chance of getting a very good quality coffee at any nearby independent cafe is extremely high.
Starbucks completely failed the first time they tried here, and are having a second shot (there must be at least a dozen stores in my 2.5M population city now). They seem to be relying mostly on fashion (seeing people with Starbucks cups in the media) - while I don’t like to stereotype, there do seem to be fairly clear demographics of people I see in the one I go past a bit - apart from some that look like tourists, you mostly see the late teens to just below middle age female crowd and a few of their partners there.
I tried Starbucks coffee a few times years ago in eastern Massachusetts and upstate New York. I don't understand how people can drink the stuff. To me, it tastes like hot water poured over charcoal. When they came out with the light roast, it just tasted like thinner charcoal.
> Sometimes i also did pourovers but that shit took forever.
Really? I use the hario switch for my medium roasts and I brew 2 min tops, usually a hybrid immersion/pourover, but I can do just straight pourover in that time.
Firstly I would say that the grinder makes an outsize difference relative to cost so I would strongly recommend you first invest in something like a Mahlkohning Vario (this is what I have as a present from my lovely wife who just by pure coincidence also likes nice coffee).
Then I have a friend who is an ex-high-end-barista and gigantic coffee snob (like coffee snob's coffee snob) and insists that once you have a good grinder it's more important to get a reverse osmosis filter than a high-end espresso machine. Make of that what you will, but if you want to investigate that he swears by this book[1] and having drunk coffee at Colonna and Smalls in Bath (owned by one of the guys who wrote the book) I can say he might be on to something. Certainly every cafe that does amazing coffee has an RO filter.
I have an ECM entry-level machine and it's great. I dont' need (or ever use) the frothing parts unless we have guests but they do the thing they are supposed to and the main coffee bit works great. I wish it could get a bit more pressure but it makes a good cup of espresso if I tamp well and use nice beans (which, you should always use nice beans. There's really no excuse for that one).
In the UK you can get great home coffee equipment as well as advice from Bella Barista[2]. Probably most countries have a place like that but even if you're not in the UK I would look at what they have as being a good starting point.
I’ll check out the book but while I wait for shipping, could you share what you do with the RO water? Do you put your own mineral and salt profile into it, or just use it as pure H2O? I have an RO filter and build my own water profile for my homebrew beer, hadn’t started down that road for coffee yet.
I don't do anything - I just have a regular filter but my understanding is that the people who do this do certain black magic which somewhat depends on the "hardness/softness" and ph of the water as well as other stuff but it's all in that book apparently. I don't know the details.
I went down the rabbit hole trying to learn about this, and it’s actually pretty easy to replicate the recommended water. Home brewing (beer) water is far more complex than this.
I’m going to brew some with this profile and see if I can taste the change, and if not I’m just sticking with my filtered tap water because it’s honestly pretty darn close. Just needs the chloramine taken out.
Assuming you mean the "notify when back in stock" on that website, unfortunately the book is now out of print.
If anyone else has an alternative source for it, I would be interested in reading it, and it seems like it would make a great gift for my coffee-geek friends.
RO is really important (along with remineralization), but you can buy RO water without a filter, so if you're not making several coffees a day, maybe it isn't worth it. If your supermarket has available RO water to fill jugs even better.
I would agree with your friend. I typically do pour over, and getting a nice grinder was a huge upgrade for the coffee flavor. I also only use filtered water. Next is fresher beans.
Frowned upon I'm sure, but for espresso a machine like Nespresso or L'Or has worked fine in a pinch.
I have a Mazzer Mini grinder that's pretty old and I suspect it is the weak link in the chain (paired with Rocket espresso machine). Is there an easy way to tell if the grinder is doing its job well, e.g., some reliable way to examine the grain size?
For me the grinder allows repeatability. I was trying to dial in shots with the grinder on my breville and was quickly frustrated. I could do everything else the same and get very different extraction times for the same volume of espresso, I ran 5 lbs of coffee through it in a row with my laptop and a spreadsheet tracking things trying to get consistent times, and it just wouldn’t be consistent.
I bought a HG-1, probably overkill, but now my mid-range breville puts out coffee that is way way better than most cafes, and it’s dead consistent. I have to adjust a little as my fresh coffee adapts to the world once the bag is open, but that’s it.
I’m sure you could find calibrated screens for espresso somewhere, but my bet is they would cost more than a new grinder. If it’s consistent, tastes good, and you have fine enough settings to adjust your extraction, I’d say it’s good.
I don't own one myself but have seen the Kruve Brewler used, a metal ruler-like device with calibrated meshes drilled into it of varying sizes. They also make the Kruve Sifter, a calibrated sifter set, but that is considerably more expensive.
In that segment, Flair is the right answer. It’s simple, durable and capable of delivering 100% real espresso, on par with high end machines. It’s also not weird, you can actually use it every day and prep the drink in just a few minutes.
Also note that Flair 58 is compatible with regular-sized generic espresso accessories.
The Robot made great espresso, and I was just about to buy one for myself but then the Meticulous Espresso machine (https://meticuloushome.com/) was announced on kickstarter and I splurged on that instead (deliver by end of year, or so they say.)
If for some reason that doesn't work out, I'll get the robot
Think about budget and if your budget is high enough, if you make several milk drinks back to back and need more than a single boiler machine. At different price points, I'd look at Gaggia classic pro, profitec go, profitec pro 300. You'll also have to budget for a proper espresso grinder. Check out https://www.espressocoffeeshop.com/ for the best prices on grinders.
The Kamira appears to be a moka pot, not an espresso machine.
Jura E8 here. Single button cappuccino box, competently engineered. Milk goes through a small subset of the machine which disassembles easily and there's a cleaning tablet option for not taking it apart. I think it could be wifi attached and persuaded to make one as an alarm clock but that's more bother than I've gone to.
That one optimises for minimum hassle per cup of coffee at the expense of up front and running costs. No regrets.
At home I use a Bialetti Venus (moka pot), which makes a pseudo-espresso (longer, with poor crema). Nonetheless I prize this and look forward to it each day. It's about $40.
I find it somewhat cute that according to this article, $500 is "grows on trees" kind of money. In the espresso hobby, $500 is barely enough to get a decent grinder.
For anyone who is discouraged by this (accurate) comment, don't discount the utility of a manual grinder. You can get a 1Zpresso which is a beautiful, durable piece of equipment for a fraction of the cost of an automatic grinder and it takes all of 30 seconds to grind your own beans to perfection.
1Z just issued a recall for the chipping burrs affair on their X-Ultra line. They went for cheaper alloys and people ended up with metal shavings in their cup. Old grinders seem to be fine. I’d wait a hot second before getting a 1Z right now
Although I would like to discourage anyone from getting a Eureka (Silenzio). grind retention is insane on those, and the higher priced models are the same flawed grinder with more LCD screens.
I love my DF64. I found it on sale, and informed my wife that it'd be her Christmas and birthday present to me: totally worth it. Even with a $100 DeLonghi EC155, the difference from the grinder is incredible.
Hmmm. I was a teen in the late 1980’s and I recall vividly a Steam Punk espresso machine I saw at a SOMA art gallery in San Francisco.
It had a volleyball size spherical steam chamber heated by a propane wok burner. I’m fuzzy about the connection to a smallish brew chamber with a foot long lever arm. It was all a play on scale. The whole setup was somehow a unified whole out of a Miyazaki anime.
DIY meets art. Would be thrilled to see that device again compared to my memory palace.
My espresso craving is fully satisfied by the Nespresso capsule machine; the classic type, with capsule patent expired, not the newer Vertuo type. Original Nespresso capsules are 5-6 euro per pack of 10; non-originals from Illy or Lavazza are even cheaper at about 40 cents per shot.
Entry-level machines are as cheap as 100 euro, for 200-300 you will get semi- or fully-auto, plus some features like milk frother. The primary advantage here is reproducibility and ease of use: insert the capsule, check the water level, push the button, and here you go.
Some espresso aficionados with 1000 EUR machines and 400 EUR grinders tried to impress me with their setups. Still, I honestly cannot taste the difference unless they use special Arabica roasts with unbearable acidity, which sadly has become increasingly popular nowadays.
The new spinning Nespresso is a lot worse than the original. Rotary extraction makes a watery americano with foam, not crema. The original is really nice to find in Euro hotel rooms, but most Euro hotels have quality espresso machines in the lobby.
Adventures with manual espresso to improve upon restriction from Fellows Prismo + body weight atop yoga brick (https://youtu.be/OMuDiq-Tvaw):
All 3 methods employ tampering but no WDT, I do subscribe to a bottom paper filter in the basket (https://youtu.be/lPAel26Cw_A)
These 3 gave great satisfactory results as judged by family when compared to cafe bought
1. https://www.joepresso.com/ with pressurized basket + body weight atop yoga brick
Best in terms of short workflow and Americano, love the 'crema', fastest workflow and variety of experiment in and out of basket.
3. https://espressoforge.com/
True excellent espresso, 58 mm baskets, uses more coffee than above methods 19g but clumsy with gasket adjustment, the greasing maintenance and need to preheat :-(, get the stainless steel, American made.
1. Joepresso is the daily driver, the cup is more fuller bodied with increased dwell time, more variety to mix light and dark roasts a la Philz
2. EspressoForge - true espresso, nuff said Weekends or more time = EspressoForge
3. picopresso - more for travel and sometimes not enough to unseat Aeropress Go for work EDC yeah, i gotta go to the office
It is so interesting to me how the marketing of flair and ROK (but mostly flair) drive the amount of coverage they get online in terms of reviews and discussions whereas the Cafelat gets almost nothing. It sure has flaws (the lever hands and the awkwardly positioned pressure gauge) but not needing to preheat the brew chamber is such a big win, it is clearly the better product.
To this day James Hoffman has only one crappy video about the Cafelat, which is not even a polished review and rather a first look. But he has a few highly polished flair videos and discusses their ridiculous electricly preheated pro versions to death. (Without ever really seriously comparing it against the Cafelat)
But that's what marketing and sales are for. The first result for the Cafelat on Google (at least to me) isn't even their own web page. It helps that the Flair is an excellent product too.
This is what marketing, sales, and brand outreach do: they connect customers with products. People get sold Flairs, they like them, they tell others, people consume content for Flairs, Robots occupy the same niche and once you get a Flair you don't really have a reason to go with a Robot.
Hoffman is a joke and is not respected by anyone in the coffee industry, he's a pretentious twat and exactly the opposite of what coffee needs. Most content you see online is pay-to-play so if you spend more money you get more content.
Low-quality comment. Hoffman's responsible for opening up the world of coffee brewing to many more people than might have otherwise explored it, along with other content creators in the space who do the same, and his content is enjoyable to many regardless of what randos think.
Anette Moldvaer who founded Square Mile with him (I think they were a couple) is the coffee person behind it. She is the roaster and coffee person, he is the frontman/salesperson.
Scientists have a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis, this isn't what he does. You want a scientific approach try these guys https://socraticcoffee.com/ they do a reasonably good job.
"not respected by anyone in the coffee industry" is an impossible claim. I personally know people who are in "the industry" who like his videos. He participates in communities positively.
I was thinking how much I'd like a really open and hackable machine... although I'd prefer one for pourover or siphon extraction. It doesn't seem there is any project like that, but there seem to be a demand for it.
I have a huge Rocket espresso machine that I haven't used for 3-4 years, ever since I bought my Cafelat Robot. Honestly, I appreciate the engineering in this post but it's just not necessary given how good the Robot already is.
The manual control makes it possible to do flow profiling with something like a Timamore Nano scale, by adjusting pressure in real time according to the flow rate reading on the scale. I've been making and drinking espresso for a long time and nothing comes close to the flow-profiled spro I've made using this method.
I am an 80% person and I feel that a good quality italian moka pot (i prefer stainless steel) will get you the 80% for espresso. I'm sure this statement will infuriate some people though. I'm the same with with drip coffee. Get a good quality hand or ceramic cone bean grinder and just about any arabica coffee beans and you'll get to the 80% point with fresh ground coffee.
It’s funny, I know it’s a silly idea (I mean, I literally have an ex-commercial espresso machine plumbed-in in the kitchen) but the idea of making my own espresso machine has also always fascinated me. Designing a pressure vessel (as an electronic designer that can find my way around solid modelling CAD well enough) for steam is scary though, although just doing the espresso but wouldn’t be too dangerous.
Yes, he should use a nitrogen charger instead. The Mypressi Twist was a commercially available machine that used nitrogen chargers in a similar design and worked beautifully.
I have a commercially available handheld espresso machine that is no longer in production that has a similar design. I'm blanking on the name of it (edit: found it, the Mypressi Twist: https://coolhunting.com/food-drink/twist-espresso/), it kinda looks like a little black mallet - sphere at one end where you put the ground coffee and water, and the handle is where you insert nitrous canisters (whip cream chargers) for pressure. If I searched for a while on Home Barista I'm sure I could find it - it got great reviews there. You get 4 shots for each charger. It's really a fantastic little device!
To the original author of this post, I'd definitely recommend using whip cream chargers instead of CO2. They're usually cheaper, and you don't have to worry about the acidity concerns you bring up in your post.
Yes, you just add boiling water: once to preheat it, and then once to pull the shit. Espresso is normally pulled around 200 F, so it ends up being right around the appropriate temperature.
There's a lot of worrying, not just in this article, about parts of the system that are largely incidental to making espresso. The important parts are the filter that allows the coffee through at the right pressure and a way to keep everything at consistent temperature. There is not much difference between a $100 pump machine and the expensive cafe machine except that the expensive one has metal water jackets to keep everything warm. They also clean easily and produce consistent steam for milk.
To me, the lever machines are really neat. It was the lever machine that started the trend in Italy, and the moka pot that made "espresso at home" a thing.
Still, extraction is only one variable. The time a person spends agonizing over temperature and pressure could also be spent learning how to select, blend and roast beans, which can be done cheaply at home using a hot air popcorn popper.
> There is not much difference between a $100 pump machine and the expensive cafe machine except that the expensive one has metal water jackets to keep everything warm
i couldn't disagree more. there are many many differences between a cheap (100$ is cheap) machine and an expensive one. first of all, what is important is the pressure at the portafilter, not on the pump, you would say that those are the same, but they are not. second, it's important for that pressure to be stable.
other things that are important:
- temperature stability. even small things like a colder portafilter chan affect this, but what's most important is to control a fixed temperature and deliver that across the entire process.
- the quality of the filter basket (a precision filter from companies like IMS & co). this helps with consistent extraction and minimises the chance for channelling to occur.
- having a way to do a pre-infusion
- being able to change the temperature and pressure in order to accommodate various kinds of coffee and tastes
- etc (i can go on for ages with differences, like dual vs single boiler, milk vs no milk, rotary vs vibration pump etc). it's like saying a ferrari and a ford are the same because both of them have 4 wheels.
yes, you can make espresso without any of those, but saying there are no differences is not true. with skill and an expensive machine you can do a great espresso (or buy a Decent, you can do that without the skill if you don't want mess with changing variables, but still the output is great. with skill, the sky is the limit)
You’re underestimating the utility of the lever machine, namely the precision/accuracy is just as good as you can personally make it. I’ve been fine tuning my Flair technique for over 1000 shots at this point. I know the precise pressure profile I like, and I can make fantastic espresso every single time. Even in the middle of the wilderness on a propane burner.
i'm not denying that, but how much time have you invested into it and how much time do you think the average person can afford to? how much extra time do you spend for each cup compared to a regular semiautomatic machine? do you have the one that heats the brew head, because if so, that's not a 100$ machine, it's a 500$ one ( https://flairespresso.com/flair-58-first-look/ ). if not, how much extra time you add to preheat it?
how hard is for someone else from your household to do a shot with your machine?
by a very simple technique (measuring the time to run a very specific weight of output coffee) you can do great espresso on a semiautomatic machine. doing that on a manual one is much harder, but not impossible.
the sum of all of these small details is what makes the difference in pricing. what i dissagree is to put an equal sign between a cheap espresso machine and a prosumer one (like Lelit Bianca for example). don't get me wrong, i think flair makes awesome manual machines, i've sunk in the espresso rabbit hole a few years ago and i'm still not out of it :), but we have to see that these machines are for people who have this as a hobby and really love doing it.
The full process takes me <5:00 in the morning. I don't know how long a semiautomatic machine would take, but I'm lucky enough to have 5:00 minutes to spare for a generally meditative ritual each morning.
I don't have the heated brew head, but my process involves preheating the brew head while I'm "packing the bowl" (so to speak), so there is no "down time".
I brought out the stopwatch this morning, the general breakdown is as follows:
0:00: Fill up kettle, put on stove
0:15: pour beans into commandante (measure by acquired knowledge of how 15g looks in the device coupled with bag-specific fine tuning)
0:30: Begin grinding
1:15: Grinding complete, begin to disassemble and clean equipment, restore plunger position to top of brew chamber
2:00: Cleaning complete, pack bowl while waiting for boil to finish (main bottleneck/downtime).
3:00: Boil complete, pour water into upturned brew chamber placed on granite slab for watertight seal
3:30: Preheat complete, transfer chamber onto device, begin main pour/press procedure.
4:15: Espresso complete.
As you can see the main bottleneck is the water boiling. If I can get the exact right amount for the preheat and brew it will cut the time down a good bit, but if I undershoot it takes considerably longer to bring new water up to boil. An electric kettle (220v??) would help too, but I want a setup that works off-grid.
The nice thing with this setup is that it's so simple to clean that there's no time at all dedicated to long-term cleaning or maintenance. With the daily washdown which is already integrated into my workflow while waiting for the boil, I keep the machine in pristine condition. Compare that to larger equipment which needs occasional breakdown/descalding/etc. procedures.
Yes you do have to, but I developed a technique to make it pretty easy. The flair videos have you using a bowl of some sort as a water container and submerging the chamber entirely, whereas I just place the brew chamber on a piece of granite. The lapping of each is sufficient to form a watertight seal, and I use the minimum amount of water possible, which is nice because waiting for the boil is the longest component of my process. All in all the preheat probably adds <1:00 between time spent actually preheating and the additional time it takes to boil the extra water needed for preheating.
That said I do prefer more acidity in my brews, so I only opt for a single flush of preheating water. Some people do 2 or even more, which would obviously take more time.
That is a massive oversimplification. There are a huge number of variables that have a very noticeable impact on the coffee. Pressure (over time), temperature (over time), flow rate, composition of the water, puck resistance (and change over time), many ways to change how the water extracts from the puck, pre-infusion time (and temp. and pressure...). This is just the machine side, ignoring beans, grinding, distribution and tamping.
And the effect of a single one of those variables can be the difference between a god shot and something that tastes rather off. I am not saying you need a machine that allows you to control all of this to get good shots, but the effect on the result is still there. Something like a Decent DE1 can actually control a lot of this, a lever machine actually allows a lot of control as well. 100$ pump machine to an expensive espresso machine is a huge difference in many regards. Consistency being probably the biggest one.
So no, I do not thing your assessment on complexity of espresso making is an accurate representation. I concede however, that if you know what you are doing, good espresso can be had on cheap-ish machines, it's just much harder and less consistent.
> There is not much difference between a $100 pump machine and the expensive cafe machine
There is, actually, a lot of differences. Expensive machines have that cheap ones don't:
- multiple (2+) boilers so you can pour 2 caps/pour cap and steam/etc
- a lot less noise
- more consistent temperatures
- preheating
- as mentioned, more consistent steamers, but also precise control over them
- built-in grinder (most of the times mediocre one, but better than none at all, albeit most people who follow this hobby just buy a separate one)
- sometimes they can be controlled remotely
- other smaller things
Most importantly, they're usually a lot more reliable and well-built.
But yes, taste-wise difference will not be substantial, its more like paying for your own comfort if you really want to invest in coffee. Hand lever brewers can be just as good for a fraction of a price if you don't mind to take extra steps. Makes it more fun for some people actually.
I'm a big fan of using a glass french press. Put the milk in and heat it in the microwave (takes some fiddling and a thermometer but once you have a recipe down for you it works great) and then using a technique like this to froth the milk [0]
Yupp! It’s very tempting to try to make this a hobby and then try to perfect it. But coffee is one thing that allows me to force myself out of the house and experience the community around
me. It’s a $4 excuse but it’s a good reason to not be lazy about leaving the house.
It can extract more flavor. The most fruity and sweet brews I've ever had were good espresso shots. The same beans in a pour over are still fantastic, but it's all amplified and more pronounced when made as an espresso shot. There's also a syrupy texture that you really can't get with any other brewing method.
All that said, every day I drink pour overs and aeropress brews--I don't want to drop the $1k+ on a proper home espresso setup.
That is completely up to your personal taste.
I personally like both. Sometimes it's nice having an espresso in the sun.
Other times I prefer taking fifteen minutes for a nice hot pourover
I think so. My daily driver for coffee is a Chemex since I can make enough for two in about 5 mins. I use reasonably fresh roasted beans I grind right before making the coffee. But whenever I get a good espresso based drink I recognize the step up in quality.
It's a different beverage. That may sound precious or twee to you but the flavors of the same beans prepared in these three ways will be different; there's no other way to describe it.
Espresso is going to be more intense, probably sweeter, and stronger.
Pourover is typically brighter and less intense, but obviously you drink more of it. When I make filter coffee, I prefer pourover.
I do not care for Aeropress coffee or its sibling French press; for me, the mouth feel and flavor are inferior to other brewing methods, but obviously this is a preference thing.
It is not comparable. The beverage is quite different. So many people have had badly made espressos in the past they may think they don't like or care for it. Properly made espresso brings out flavors and smells which are not extractable with the Aeropress. The extreme case is the extraction of fruity flavors from a specific class of light roasts. You can not do it with Aeropress. I have a manually operated press as my espresso maker (Espresso Forge) and I only use Aeropress while traveling.
Moka pots don't make espresso, they don't get up to the pressure required for espresso-level extraction. They're still quite good and I prefer them over drip brew for most coffees.
First, CO2 -WILL- enter the brew. There is no way to stop it. This will create carbonic acid and elevate the pH. Which absolutely will impact the flavor. Part of the extraction "dialing in" process is determining the dose, temperature, grind, and duration for a new bean (and as it ages). The last thing you want it so add more acidity to the flavor. Some people do like sour espresso, I do not, and I think I'm in the majority.
Second, consistency of pressure. A CO2 canister output pressure changes with temperature and volume. An espresso machine uses a pump (and some a PID) to regulate this.
Third, this thing will probably explode after a few weeks. You can't subject plastics to this type of pressure. But OP did suggest using metal in the next version.
Fourth, health. Plastic + hot water is bad, add extreme pressure and it is even worse. Kick it up a notch using 3D printed plastic, which is a nowhere near food safe. I'm not too far into the "don't eat out of warm plastic" group, but i'm close. This would concern me.
I think it is a cool build. But a Bialeti is sufficient if you don't want to drop thousands on espresso machinery. Also in the running, the early Nespresso designs, not the rotary one. Both will get you into "americano" territory.