Marshall wrote:One of the great pleasures of visiting Michael and Angelo's parts warehouse in Los Angeles is describing the latest advances in espresso machine and grinder technology to them and (inevitably) hearing them explain how the problems were solved by the Italians 40 years ago.

I want this secret Italian technology.
Nano precise grinder that grinds the beans with room temperature lasers. The machine then assesses the beans and displays the different flavor profiles possible. You then select the flavor profiles wanted and it automatically makes your preferred espresso drink dependent on your mood.
I hope it syncs with my Itunes account.

malachi wrote:And 50% of the time they're not just talking s**t.

Well just been to Sensory Lab in Melbourne and their Slayer is down. Dripping from 2 of the 3 groupheads and 2 of 3 brew pressure gauge needles are bent (up to 90 degrees!)... this is the second Slayer I've seen this on. Apparently a fix has been worked out and will be in place soon to prevent this. The barista did say it was fabulous when it was working and I guess its still having the bugs ironed out.

Had a nice Yirg by Hario and a latte from their other machine, a Linea paddle.

Not a bad morning.

mteahan wrote:Especially problematic when a dual spring San Marco or Cimbali piston lever machine will give you a static low pressure pre-infusion and a two stage regressive pressure extraction curve in half the time.

I run a cimbali lever (m20). When I last had it serviced at the cimbali dealership the technician had a few newer commercial cimbali machines on the bench. In layman's terms he described the newest latest computer-chipped cimbali as trying to replicate what the lever does. An oversimplification, I'm sure, but interesting.

mteahan wrote:Especially problematic when a dual spring San Marco or Cimbali piston lever machine will give you a static low pressure pre-infusion and a two stage regressive pressure extraction curve in half the time.

bgn wrote:I run a cimbali lever (m20). When I last had it serviced at the cimbali dealership the technician had a few newer commercial cimbali machines on the bench. In layman's terms he described the newest latest computer-chipped cimbali as trying to replicate what the lever does. An oversimplification, I'm sure, but interesting.

I, for one, don't regard any of this as surprising. If you go back a few years, when people were obsessing about flat line brew temperatures rather than about pressure, you could dig up many threads extolling the virtues of temperature management and about how this issue, once "conquered," would revolutionize the world of espresso.

This is not to say that temperature and pressure aren't important; they obviously ARE important. This is not to say that using expensive and sophisticated toys to tinker around the edges of espresso extraction won't yield results and useful information. But it is to say that in the end everything we do with these toys is mostly about the coffee, even if we don't act like it is much of the time. This is why the field work of people like Geoff Watts, and the bumbling ineptitude of the Ethiopian Coffee Exchange, are much more important than any of these temperature and pressure pontifications, if in the end what we really care about is end results.

If we could control the quality of the raw coffee we work with, as easily as we can control such machine variables as temperature and pressure, that is when we would start to really make some progress in the field of espresso. Most of the rest of this stuff (in my view) will in the end prove to be little more than a rounding error, when viewed in the overall scheme of things.

ken

gyro wrote:
Had a nice Yirg by Hario and a latte from their other machine, a Linea paddle.

Not a bad morning.

The Yirg is one of my favorites. Have to try it from the syphon next time Im at the SLab

I was looking for some reports about Sublima, the Brasilia newest technology. And I have found this thread, started by my colleague Dsc. In some other threads on HB, I have found only a few words about Sublima, just a suggestion, that it is somehow similar to the Slayer. But it is not, I think. In Sublima the preinfusion is made by means of the gravity only, and then the pressure up to 14 bar is used. I am interested how much is it similar to lever machines?