by orphanespresso on Wed Nov 16, 2011 5:44 am
It is sort of a longish story....and with some research it can all be put together on the lever forum posts....but it goes something like this...
Last spring Clint Orchuck got an insanely good deal on his Astoria two group and was rebuilding it and gassifying it to use at the farmer's markets...the more problems he had the better friends we became and the more he shared his developing dream of building an actual brick and mortar cafe. This concept had at least 3 central problems: first, the potential cafe space was a disaster area of major proportions which he had to renovate on his own dime, second extreme lack of funds compounded by new baby on the way and I can't remember the third.
Now, some of us would have just made do and maybe even cobbled together some space out of scrap lumber spit and baling wire, or even scraped up the cash for a mobile espresso van or truck or even trailer to keep doing the mobile business. No, not Clint as his idea is a very classy joint in the spirit of an Italian coffee bar (likely of days gone by or even never really existed in the first place) but definitely NOT some fly by night hole in the wall, which makes the needed $$$$ go even higher. But he is a man with a vision and a willingness to dot a lot of t's and cross a lot of i's in the process...proper permits, handicapped access, all the bells and whistles....a real investment and commitment, not to mention hard work.
Being a savvy guy (after all he married a nurse) and having a lot of charm and the gift of gab, he has managed to slowly get a lot of different people involved...a designer, an architect, some fairly serious backers....and here is where I come in....Clint had decided that the Astroria was not to be the central feature of the cafe....he needs some bling here, a classic espresso machine done up in chrome, a Faema President fits the bill, eye candy and a central focus of the cafe but with all of the other things going on he could not out the cash to just buy it with no actual cafe yet existing. He had done a lot of back and forth with a machine collector in Germany and came to an agreement on the price and charmed ME into buying the machine with the stipulation that IF he gets the cafe off the ground he buys it from me and restores it for the cafe and IF he doesn't get the cafe up and running then it is MINE. OK, he got a pretty good deal on the machine as it turns out so I am fine with it.
That is pretty much it in a nutshell...as Barb and I want to be involved in his cafe vision somehow we are storing the machine to see what happens. We both hope that someday we can drive over to Oregon for an espresso in his cafe pulled on the Faema President that is now sitting in our storage. We will see what happens!
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