I want to take a moment to thank all of you who came here before me. For all the sweat equity you put into this hobby and this Web site, and how generous you are with all that you've learned. Thank you for giving away professional tips, tricks, information and expertise that cost you many hours of work (or play). I am so grateful today...

Thank you for making mistakes (especially the expensive and foolish ones) and posting them for me to see and avoid - even going to the extent of photographing your blunders to make sure that I don't repeat these errors on my own gear.

Thank you for taking things apart and watching springs launch out, never to be recovered. And for taking valves loose with the wrong tools, never to get them back together again.

Thank you for taking squirts, bitters and sours from countless malformed, malground, malroasted pucks of espresso so that I will have a clear starting point for a shot worth drinking.

Thank you for experimenting for long hours with gallons of water and pounds of coffee to make my life easier and my path to coffee joy shorter and more achievable.

Thank you for spending small fortunes to purchase and then promptly disassemble expensive pieces of equipment, illustrating their guts and explaining how to tear them apart and put them back together again.

Thank you for asking questions on top of questions, asking for clarification, and then posting all the grueling followup results to your problems so that when I encounter them, they're all nicely organized and searchable by keyword like a giant java jerk's illustrated compendium.

Thank you especially for your patience in answering nearly every new question (which has already been answered at least 20 times) as kindly as if it was the first. It can be really hard to break into a new hobby like this, and it can make or break entry into the segment if the people who have figured it out are arrogant and stingy with the knowledge it takes to get started. Luckily, quite the opposite goes on here. It's like everyone wants you to succeed and make better coffee than they do. It's kind of weird. O.o

All those pictures, all those tutorials, all those posts, all those reviews, they've led me to a very, very special day.

I cried a little today when the first hot water flowed from this artful cube of golden brassy wonder, because I thought about all of you whose posts I read over and over and all the PMs and emails I sent to people, tugging on shirt sleeves until I had what I needed.

I hope you'll feel some accomplishment and pride today for all the help you've given me as I say with great happiness,

Elektra GL1 #1255, Built in 2000 is now mine.

Really she's been mine for a while, but I've been dreading the plumb-in and what might happen when I turned her on. As it goes, the JG fittings are a breeze, and they rotate very forgivingly even under pressure. On with the show!









I haven't pulled a shot with her yet, but it doesn't really matter at this point. You have helped me find and purchase an amazing piece of coffee extracting machinery that I would have never been able to approach without your coaching and mentoring here.

Thanks Dan and all HBers. You're too many to list.

The next big thing over here apparently is going to be SightGlass.

http://sightglasscoffee.com/
http://www.tablehopper.com/2009/06/chat ... -2009.html
http://twitter.com/sightglass

They're not roasting yet, so I can't weigh in. But I'll pick up a pound of something from Ritual tomorrow, and then we'll see what's what with this big brass boiler...

Today, I finished Leonard Mlodinow's excellent book on randomness,
"The Drunkard's Walk". One of Leonards' points is that much in this
world is more a result of random factors and less by experience or
skills. Later I got a lesson of that... I happened to reread the
thread on LM baskets and thought I really had to find that double
basket and try it again (one of the reasons I have a clear memory of
that thread is that Wittgenstein is evoked by Jim S. in the
discussion). When I got home from work, I found the LM basket but to
my horror I had almost none of my favorite beans left. I found some
Indonesian Sidikaland in the freezer and hoped the best for a
combination of a basket and a coffee I had never had any great success
with. An lo and behold a great pour and a great great cup of espresso!
I even got to repeat the success a few hours later.

I should have posted a big thank you to the great writers on HB a long
time ago, but never really had an idea of exactly what to
write... Well, I will have to do with the following; although I do not
post a lot, I read (and reread) HB everyday and I really enjoy it. Not
only do I learn about coffee, equipment, and technique, I also learn
about attitude, testing and much more -- PLUS many posts are written
very well and are a joy to read. Thank you.

EDIT: Dan moved the message to the "Why I love HB" thread, and that makes me want to add, that another reason I love HB is that Dan (and others?) do a lot of work to make this site great: for example moving messages around to create order and answering questions not just with "that has already been answered" but with links to the relevant threads. Outstanding.

Thanks.

I didn't know adding philosopher's quotes made posts more memorable. I'll have to dust off those bookshelves, and shoo off Minerva's owls.