sweaner wrote:Tel me about it Dan. If I had known in advance, I could have "bundled" my espresso equipment into the cost of our new kitchen and gotten virtually any setup I wanted. It would have been a little blip on the radar.

To keep my Elektra T1, I promised a kitchen remodel to my wife (which we did), so you could say my used rebuilt T1 cost a lot more than I was expecting. But it was all worth it, happy wife and happy me.

Mark

Worldman wrote:Huh? How is making espresso at home sociable vs. going to a coffee bar?

"Or... you could come over to my house and I could a) make everyone a coffee; b) let you play with the kit; C) show you the new (fill in the blank)."
Just had eight people in my living room at the drop of a hat with a similar suggestion yesterday. The first ones showed up around eleven, and the last ones left at ten-thirty that evening. It was very social.
Compare that to the empty stares (if they'll make eye contact at all over their book, newspaper, or ubiquitous laptops and PDAs) you get from customers at a lot of places...

zin1953 wrote: Most people, it seems to me, start to make their espresso, cappuccino, or latte at home because a) they don't want to wait for coffee until they drive somewhere, and b) they want to make better coffee than they get outside.

*DING*! That's how I got here...

another_jim wrote:The equipment required to get to the rock solid consistency of Italian espresso bars is not going to fare well in a present value calculation against going to local cafes

You must admit, Jim, that it does depend a lot on your 'local cafes'. There were times when I was KING with a Krups steamtoy. And the local cafe competition was often using equipment that was starting to equal the national debt of small third-world countries. Other times the Krups was the best thing in town because, well, the next best thing was an aluminium percolator the size of a garbage can.