aecletec wrote:I found this, while not that test it is some data
http://breville.brevilleglobal.tplsandb ... ng_A11.pdf

This is great data, thank you. I'm seeing a maximum error on the BDB of +/- 0.9C.

The article mentions that the BDB's stability might be due to their preheated group head. That's my opinion too, as we also electrically (PID) preheat our group head and it adds a lot of stability. In fact, that preheated group head fights us when we do temperature profiling, because water is a lot faster to change temperature than a metal group head.

I haven't seen any Scace numbers yet for the GS/3. Does anyone have a reference? Googling "gs/3 la marzocco scace" doesn't find any raw data.

TrlstanC wrote:I'd agree 100%, some of the best shots of espresso I've ever had were from machines that had notoriously "lumpy" temp profiles. Of course, I've also had great shots from machines that delivered water at a very consistent temperature (although the espresso would've followed a rising temp curve in those cases). I look for a machine that delivers consistent temps, not necessarily flat temps. But it could just be that a flat temp profile is the easiest to make consistent, whether it's the 'best' or not?

I'm currently playing with a slight temperature bump, of about +3°C, from seconds 1 to 5, so as to more quickly heat the grounds to the set point. Because the grounds are closer to room temperature after grinding, a lot of the brewing in the first few seconds of espresso making is well below the water set point.

I wanted to saturate the top of the beans with the water at the set point, then bump the water temperature up. The goal is to avoid "burning" the beans (which I fear would happen if I started at "second 0" with higher water temp), and instead use that "puddle" on water on the top of the grounds to quickly distribute the slightly-hotter water down during the preinfusion step.

My goal is get more of the preinfusion happening at a closer-to-the-water-set-point-temperature.

Anyway, this is just experimentation, but it's fun to do when you have access to a temperature profiling espresso machine.

Trimethylpurine wrote:I believe that temp profiling will be available on the first release. If I am correct we will then be able to find out what effect temp profiling has... I dont think it is available on other machines.

Yes, we have temperature profiling working in the lab, as well as flow profiling. However, we're looking at releasing both those features in a "pro" version of our machine, at a higher price (sorry!).

Do you have an expected release date for the V2 paddle and the Pro version; or will those be the same machine?

Also, as it seems we have become fixated on the details and technology I feel we have neglected a very important detail. Have you compared DE1 and your GS3 head to head in the cup (as you stated you are aiming for the crowd who wants a single boiler slayer or gs3 but cant afford one)? If so can you comment on difference or similarity in body/mouth feel, flavor clarity, blonding time, etc. As you have improved technology are you seeing new dimensions to espresso or new challenges compared with the traditional machines? For example, when slayer devised their needle technology they found that one could grind finer, preinfuse longer, extract longer and still obtain a favorable mouthfeel and obtain sweeter shots. (with many caveats of course). Have you noticed with the DE1 that you can do things you could not do on other machines? For example, I believe your temperature and pressure profiling capability is likely changing your approach to beans and grind settings etc. If so can you share some of your observations?

. I'm seeing a maximum error on the BDB of +/- 0.9C.

At one fixed room temperature. Who knows what would happen if room temp changed +/- 5C.

And if what you want is a flat temperature within the grounds, then it has a huge error (perhaps 10C, mid puck, mid extraction). I think you can beat that.

Cracking into the Extraction: when and where the espresso puck brews.

mauijer wrote:Do you have an expected release date for the V2 paddle and the Pro version; or will those be the same machine?

The paddle feature is a projected future accessory, but I don't know when it will ship, as it is currently being worked on as a lower priority and it's not on our release calendar yet.

Currently, we're projecting an August 2016 ship date for two models, a DE1 ($999) and a DE1PRO ($3999).

The DE1 has:

• * excellent temperature accuracy (worst case of +/- 1.0C)
  * pressure profiling: choose one of 12 pre-set profiles
  * charts that show you temperature, flow and pressure in real time, and also point out technique problems that caused a bad coffee
  * a simple "tap the icon to make this" interface
  * water temp settable between 80C and 99C
  * precise control over the temperature of the hot water tap
  * control over the steam temperature
  * very high quality portafilter basket (equivalent to VST quality)
  * 110V/220V

The DE1PRO adds:

• - laboratory level temperature accuracy (no worse than +/- 0.3C, better still to be determined)
  - calibration equipment (and steps) are provided so that you can regularly recalibrate your machine to achieve consistently accurate results
  - make your own pressure profile
  - temperature profiling
  - flow profiling
  - automatic detection of the end of pre-infusion
  - flow vs pressure priority modes
  - volumetric dosing
  - water temp settable between 20C and 99C
  - real time temperature, flow and pressure control, with on-screen sliders
  - recording and playback of shots
  - later: cloud storage, reviewing and export of all shots
  - later: optional taste analysis storing (using the Counter Culture system)

mauijer wrote:Have you compared DE1 and your GS3 head to head in the cup?

I do love my GS/3 and I'm friends with Bill Crossland, so I'll try to be as fair as I can be!

For a straight 9-bar shot, if my puck preparation technique is perfect on the GS/3, I find that both the DE1 and GS/3 taste almost identical.

I use a 5 second preinfusion setting on my GS/3, as I find that helps me avoid channeling and I get a more even extraction (I use a bottomless portafilter).

If my puck preparation is not perfect, the 9 bar on/off nature of the GS/3 tends to be merciless, and my less-than perfect technique results in a mediocre shot. I am by no means an Barista God, I've never worked in a café, and the number of shots I've made number in the thousands, not 10x or 100x that, which a professional barista would have done.

I find that the slower pressure ramp up of the DE1 (inspired by Nuova Simonelli's "Soft Infusion System") is more forgiving of imperfect technique, and so I'm drinking excellent shots more often with the DE1.

Both the GS3 and the DE1 have excellent baskets, similar portafilters, and accurate water temperature. I wouldn't expect them to be very different tasting.

The GS3 has amazing steam production, and it took me a while to decide on a steam temperature setting that I could control (about 20s to steam milk). Our DE1 in the lab is currently at about 50s to do the same quantity of milk, but we expect to get to 40s. I don't think we'll achieve the GS3's steam capability.

I have never been able to make the "tea" water-temperature-knob work right on my GS/3, and this has always frustrated me as I make a lot of Americanos. With the DE1's ability to set the "tea" water temperature acurately, my Americanos are the right temperature.

mauijer wrote:As you have improved technology are you seeing new dimensions to espresso or new challenges compared with the traditional machines?

In Seattle, I was able to spend an afternoon with Dennis, the brain behind https://instagram.com/kafatek/ and we taste compared his Slayer and Synesso machines. They have very different taste profiles, and I was intrigued by Slayer's very long infusion technique. We were making shots with this same profile last week on the DE1, with a 2cc flow rate during preinfusion, lasting about 40 seconds, and the DE1 would go into a 8.4bar-to-4bar pressure profile when it automatically detected that the puck was fully saturated (I don't think Slayer can do this). The flavor we achieved here was more pour-over like, and definitely reminiscent of the Slayer. Dennis told me he prefers the Slayer for his light roasts.

With my GS/3, I play with brew temperature every time I change roasts. It's a bit slow to change temperature, but it does work. With the DE1, I like that I can change the brew temperature and immediately pull another shot to compare each side-by-side.

The same goes with pressure changes: I can pull two shots, one after another (there's no delay between shots with our espresso machine, but we did have delays in earlier incarnations), and then compare them.

mauijer wrote:Have you noticed with the DE1 that you can do things you could not do on other machines? For example, I believe your temperature and pressure profiling capability is likely changing your approach to beans and grind settings etc. If so can you share some of your observations?

At this point, we don't have a real user interface to our espresso machine (I'm programming it), it's all driven by Ray's laptop, so we haven't been doing so much experimentation yet. Last week, we tried a Slayer profile, this week, we're onto Rao's profile and next week I want to try a bit of temperature profiling.

I hope that our flow profiling feature will yield interesting results, as it's my opinion that people using pressure profiling are actually trying to regulate flow, so why not simply set a flow profile and let the machine choose the pressure that achieves that?

This is the first post I've made describing the DE1PRO. We previously were holding back on these features because they seemed too "edgy" for a home audience, and more "coffee experimenter". My experience is that the DE1 will deliver shots at least equivalent in quality to the GS/3, whereas the DE1PRO is aimed at a much smaller, tinkerer market. The higher price lets us go "whole hog" and put everything we've developed into one model.

Incidentally, today Ray showed me his temperature profiling today, and I made a movie from our conversation:

decent_espresso wrote:Yes, we have temperature profiling working in the lab, as well as flow profiling. However, we're looking at releasing both those features in a "pro" version of our machine, at a higher price (sorry!).

Just for the record, this will go down in HB history as one of the most heartbreaking moments in a thread ever

$4k is not what I expected. I could have sworn that something under $1500 was mentioned at or around coffeefest when the pro was called the +, but maybe that's a different model with some more features but not the whole hog? If they're the same I can see the scope of the more advanced model has obviously increased, so a price increase seems reasonable, but that's a lot of money!

Fausto wrote:$4k is not what I expected. I could have sworn that something under $1500 was mentioned at or around coffeefest when the pro was called the +, but maybe that's a different model with some more features but not the whole hog? If they're the same I can see the scope of the more advanced model has obviously increased, so a price increase seems reasonable, but that's a lot of money!

You're right, and that's because our original ideas for the +version, a year ago, were pretty humble.

A year ago, we hadn't really dug into what was possible.

I just dug up the brochure you probably saw from a year ago, as I think we met at Coffee Fest in Portland (is that right?)

DE1+: price to be announced.
Everything from the DE1, plus gravimetric dosing, scientific mode and real-time pressure control.

That's a pretty humble list of benefits to the DE1+, and as you noticed, we've greatly expanded the feature list of this model.

For example, we weren't using water mixing back then (only simple dynamic control of the heater) and so temperature profiling was not possible. Everything that we've discovered that we can do, came out of doing a year of R&D.

I've been asking professionals if there was any interest in these features we could do, and "no interest" was the answer we got to temperature profiling, flow profiling, the priority modes, and so we were thinking of not releasing those features, and just leaving them in our lab machine for the day when someone expressed interest in them.

As the list of "cool features that the establishment is not interested in" grew, I decided to just do everything I thought was useful, and put it into one high end machine. If people aren't interested in them, no problem. But, I hope that some adventurous types will like what's in the DE1PRO and give it a try.

We're still delivering on our promise of a $999 machine with excellent temperature accuracy, pressure profiling and other higher end qualities (preheated group head, VST-equivalent basket, stainless steel bottomless portafilter). I like to think that is still delivering good value.

Thanks for the updates, John. This is an exciting time for espresso hounds. Lots of innovation and experimention happening with machines and grinders. This is a very good thing!

Sounds like you've researched and thought things through very well. Lots of great features at a killer price point.

If you can deliver this to market, and do it reliably and as intended, you'll have a real winner. I remember early on being critical of the name "Decent" from a branding perspective. I still think you could have a stronger name from a marketing standpoint. But if you deliver what you're promising, the name won't matter that much. The massive bang for the buck factor will drive sales. Look how many grinders Mazzer sold with the name Super Jolly!

Hey, if you need a beta tester in Canada(Toronto area), for international perspectives, I'm happy to help!