I love that video- the guy is amazing at certain points it looks as if the film has been sped up- but the audio remains the same so it is just the barista going into hyperdrive.

The video certainly demonstrates the beauty of the lever.

as to control: who needs it ? The control element is the grind and the tamp. Assuming these are good then the lever can do the rest. How much control do you need? Does the operator have to 'feel' each shot and make on the fly adjustments each and every time? Could that Italian Barista work so quick if he was manually adjusting each shot on a slayer?

For myself I want good coffee- some fun in making it- and an easy to maintain and operate machine. What I don't want is temperature surfing, backflushing and noisy pumps that fail. Hence I love the lever. Also I love old potentially outdated technology: my car dates from 1967, I use rangefinder cameras as opposed to DSLR's I own around 20 levers and have never even used an e61 group... I buy second hand clothes almost exclusively.

Levers are not for everyone- but they are certainly for me.

Jack - no one will ever say it better than that. And apart from owning 20 levers the rest sounds like me. Except for the car. My old Merc is only 20 years old.

duke-one wrote:it seemed all he did after basket prep was to pull the lever down, pause, then let it up, so where does all the control I'm reading about come in?

I'm video-challenged (when it requires "Flash") so I just have to imagine what people are seeing, but what you're describing is a SPRING lever. The spring is an extra component: instead of driving the piston directly, you cock a spring and then it drives the piston. Why? Because you don't want that control, I guess!

I have two, both spring levers, but on the smaller domestic size one, the lever is attached to the piston, such that I can if I wish push the piston down by pulling up on the lever. Handy, if you accept the notion that the spring will normally do a better job than you could of controlling the piston but sometimes may want some extra force to overcome a dose that was too full or too finely ground. I doubt that this would apply to many of the high end machines you'll be likely to be looking at - as a general rule, the higher you go up the scale, the less control offered, so most likely when you pull your lever up, you'll pull only the lever, and exert no force on the piston.

This is not because control is bad for you, but because it's no use to the professional barista, who has no time to take advantage of it. Whether any professional barista actually uses a lever today or not, the contradiction-in-terms "commercial lever" is still the model that we follow, for better or worse.

(My car is a '73.)

duke-one wrote: so where does all the control I'm reading about come in?

I am not sure that anyone has ever claimed a huge amount of control of the main part of the extraction from a spring lever machine. Its more the case that it has a different pressure profile with a slow decrease in pressure as the lever rises, which results in a 'rounder' and 'softer' extraction.

The real area of control is in the amount of pre-infusion when the lever is placed in the fully down position at the start of the extraction.