Just want to offer a good luck to all the masterclass home barista out there looking to test drive the alpha. I throw rpavlis and drgay's names in the ring, would love to hear their comparisons with home and commercial levers! (Of course I know there isn't really a ring and the likes of Scott Rao are obviously well above any hb users!) really awesome stuff.

A quick note that I've started several other Decent conversations on HB, so that this thread remains exclusively about our espresso machine.

"Making of" Decent video series:
Decent Espresso "Spilling the Beans" [video]

Two other products:
Decent Digital Milk Thermometer
Decent Bluetooth Scale

Conversations:
Making scrambled eggs with an espresso machine
Hole for thermometer in milk jug

John, I can't remember if you mentioned this already. Will the DE1 have a built in on/off timer? To program it to turn on automatically. Or, is it not necessary due to its fast warm up time?

canuckcoffeeguy wrote:Will the DE1 have a built in on/off timer? To program it to turn on automatically. Or, is it not necessary due to its fast warm up time?

The current time from off to "totally warmed up" is 8 minutes. That's faster than traditional machines, but not instant. Most of that time is to heat all the metallic components (group head, valves) so that the shot temperature is precise.

If you make a shot 2 minutes after turning it on, we're currently about 3°C under temperature, however your 2nd shot will then be accurate because pushing hot water through the system heats everything much faster. If you are willing to make a shot without coffee, after waiting just 2 minutes, your 2nd shot can be with coffee and you'll have +/- 1°C temperature accuracy.

Regarding a scheduler: yes, the DE1 will have a software based scheduler, that gives you hour-by-hour (and day-based) control over automatic startup.

Here is what it looks like:

I want to suggest a period of early purchases for hb members:) I can imagine some significant advantages to a decent/sette combo in the mornings...

Sitting here, just across the water from Hong Kong, without espresso at home, having ordered the wrong service kit for my La Pavoni.

I promised myself that I could buy myself a new machine after 3 months quitting smoking, had an Expobar Leva all picked out, knew the online shop I was going to buy it from. Two months or so after quitting I found Decent Espresso. Went to see John and his team in HK and the machine, and he convinced me to wait for his machine.

Today I am 4 months non-smoking and having to go to a coffee shop for an espresso

Have ordered some o-rings from a manufacturer here, but got the wrong material. All food-safe, but too hard. New ones should be here tomorrow morning, maybe.

Want to get onto one of these machines as soon as possible!!!

Please hurry John, but not so much that we get anything less than the best

T

decent_espresso wrote:
If you make a shot 2 minutes after turning it on, we're currently about 3°C under temperature, however your 2nd shot will then be accurate because pushing hot water through the system heats everything much faster. If you are willing to make a shot without coffee, after waiting just 2 minutes, your 2nd shot can be with coffee and you'll have +/- 1°C temperature accuracy.

Do you recommend back flushing? My normal startup routine involves a back flush. Sounds like that might help with heating somewhat as well.

If you wait 8 minutes, there's no need, according to our scace tests. If you don't want to wait, then yes, any step that runs water through the internals will heat things faster.

My assumption is that most non-HBers will not run a no-coffee shot first to warm things up, so we're working to give a reliable first shot with coffee. At -3C, the first shot at 2 minutes is currently "pretty good" (lots of machines have that much temperature error) but the flavor is noticeably different than when the temperature is nailed.

With the tablet, could you not have a self-check and recommend a flush or have a setting for auto-flush?

Our group head design avoids the back flush, because we thought that sending coffee material back up into the machine was a terrible idea, even though it is a common design.

What we do with our espresso machine is have a separate water tube out of the group head, with a valve, used exclusively for flushing. With this design only dirty water goes out this path, and clean water used to make espresso never goes down it. We checked the sanity of our idea by two espresso machine repairmen when we thought of it over a year ago, and they thought we might be onto something.

We'll have to see what you guys make of it, and if you see any problem with this small "innovation".

Since we designed our group head from scratch, rather than using a pre-existing one, we had the opportunity to make improvements where we saw them.