Fullsack wrote:No argument there, but a disconnect occurs when a seasoned pump machine user with limited lever machine skills, compares his pump machine to a lever machine.

HB wrote:Thanks for clarifying, I think we'll be able to handle it.

What are you going to do, specifically, to make these types of comparisons fair?

http://www.home-barista.com/forum...5176-80.html#61306

Fullsack wrote:What are you going to do, specifically, to make these types of comparisons fair?

First of all, I don't share your concern that the comparisons are unfair. Or more accurately, I'm not concerned that this review is any less fair than those in the past, and I leave it to readers to decide if they're fair.

This review targets a broad range of home consumers, not an elite subset of lever experts. The purpose of the Smackdown isn't to declare an ultimate winner, it's to learn about the unique characteristics of this class of espresso machine and hopefully elicit helpful decision criteria along the way. The information, even if slightly flawed by lever expert standards, will be helpful to those wanting to make an informed buying decision.

Fullsack wrote:...a disconnect occurs when a seasoned pump machine user with limited lever machine skills, compares his pump machine to a lever machine.

Dave has years of lever experience. I have modest experience and will "leverage" Steve as necessary (he has 10+ years of exclusive lever experience). I think that Greg and John will round out the "new to levers" viewpoint. Jim may join in at a later date if his schedule allows. Bottom line: I think we're well covered.

To answer your question more generally, we'll do what we've always done for reviews. Taste a lot, offer and listen to suggestions, observe, experiment, document, theorize... What else would you have us do specifically?

I think Doug has a point, in that all four reviewers probably prefer to use pump machines. All four have enough years of experience, and enough resources, to have chosen a lever machine for their daily use if they had preferred one. Dan and Dave, I believe, both have one, but don't use it as their main machine - is this correct? I seem to remember Dave upgrading to his Elektra pump machine - with equal resources he might have gotten a 1-group commercial lever, etc.

So, whether their choices were driven by espresso quality, ease of use, ability to manipulate brew variables, etc, all the reviewers have chosen pump machines. I have no doubt that the reviewers will do a great job of being objective and calling attention to the pros and cons of the lever machines. I wonder if any of them will end up choosing a lever as their main machine.

PC

HB wrote:What else would you have us do specifically?

At this point, I think we have all laid out our concerns well enough to qualify the Smackdown results. Many thanks to both you and GregS for your responses.

My attention has turned to my old friend, my kids call it tin man (after the pointed boiler topper) but you know him as the Gaggia Factory. The Factory was manufactured by La Pavoni for Gaggia and I have owned it for a few years, I cut my lever teeth (or arm) on it. My unit is the 16 cup version but I have made a modification or two to it. One is strictly for bling, hand turned and finished cocobolo handles, the other is more functional. An adjustable digital thermostat which bypasses the pressurestat so I can adjust temperature on the fly, but more on that one later.



My Factory has the newer millennium group. There are 4 major changes to the millennium design over the older units. Three of those are centered on the grouphead. The millennium design increased the portafilter displacement from 49 to 51mm. They also added a nylon/plastic liner in the group to help insulate the piston from the hot group. The piston is also made of a nylon/plastic; the older units used a brass piston. The piston will unscrew from the shaft, which has happened over time while inside the machine. That can lead to a piston that does not rise enough to pass over the water outlet hole in the group. I have also heard that you can purchase a brass piston to replace the plastic if you so desire. The fourth change is a combination switch instead of two power switches (one for steam the other for brew); there is one switch and the boiler temperature is controlled by a pressurestat.

The machine ships with black plastic portafilter and lever handles, one double spouted portafilter, a single basket, double basket and useless black plastic tamper. The drip tray is black plastic and lifts off the base of the machine and comes with two drip tray covers, one black plastic, which is what I use, and the other stainless steel with holes punched in it. The drainage on the stainless drip tray cover is horrible so I use the plastic cover. Make sure that when you order a LaPavoni you get a proper tamper. I use a flat bottom stainless lava tamper.

Assembly is next to non existent: un-box, put on table, put on drip tray, fill boiler, turn on. That is all the setup required. Unlike most pump machines that need two people to un-box and place, the Factory is relatively light weight and is easily moved around by one person. That light weight also translates to easily moved when pulling a shot. The base on the LaPavoni style machines is small and because of the machines light weight it wants to wiggle around on the kitchen counter. For an easy fix, go to your local hardware store and get a roll of kitchen cabinet matting, or if you are a wood worker get a router mat. This is a spongy and sticky foam rubber mat; you can cut it to fit under the base of the machine and will hold it place while pulling a shot.

The steam wand on the Factory is located on the right side of the machine with the valve on the left rear side of the machine. The steam wand is fixed and non adjustable unless you man handle it and bend it to a new position, but I would not recommend it. It is a little awkward to use being mounted so close the exposed boiler. The acorn nut steam tip is three holed and the large boiler will provide ample steam.


The boiler is capped with a single large boiler cap. Inside that cap is both the vacuum breaker and emergency pressure release. If either becomes sticky you have to soak the entire cap. If one wears out, you have to replace the cap. I have had to do nether and I have had the machine for a few years.



The boiler sight glass does not have minimum or maximum level markings. When filling the boiler pay attention to the water level. You will not want to fill the boiler beyond 3/4 and 2/3rds full. If you go over that the steam tends to get wet. Once you have the boiler filled and the boiler cap installed, just flip the power switch and let it heat.

It takes around 10 minutes for the boiler to heat to temperature but that is not to say it is ready to pull shots. While the machine has a vacuum breaker, I make it a practice to purge the boiler via the steam wand after the initial heating has finished just in case. After that another 5 minutes and it is ready for business. If you want to speed the process you can flush water through the group a couple of times and purge the steam wand. Keep in mind that flushing water through the group could overheat the machine.

The Factory uses a 51mm double spout portafilter. I never split a shot so I removed the double spouts quite some time ago. One thing to consider, the portafilter does not have a retaining spring. The basket just sits in the portafilter. If you prefer to dose and tamp with the basket out of the portafilter then this is a convenient feature. The down side, there is nothing to hold the basket in the portafilter so when you knock out the puck you have to hold the basket in the portafilter with a finger.

The Factory has no cup warmer, unless you place your demi cup upside down over the boiler cap while heating. Before I prepare my portafilter I like to pull a couple of ounces through the group and into my cup to heat it.

The double basket holds 13 grams of coffee by filling the basket to the top and then leveling the grinds off while using no downward pressure. If you wish to dose higher, then a light tap or two to settle the grinds in the basket while dosing will allow you to get 15 grams in the double basket. While dosing changes with coffee, I prefer to start with a 12 gram dose. At 12 grams you will be dosing slightly below the top of the basket rim. When tamping, the top of the side of the piston is just below the top of the basket, the tamped dose fills the double basket around 2/3's full.







The factory has a full manual lever, which means there is no spring or other mechanism to assist in the pulling or raising of the lever. You alone control the extraction pressure which can make a manual lever challenging to use for some. One of the keys to consistent shots is to learn to pull the lever with consistent pressure. The barista can also vary the pressure on the fly to compensate for a slightly slow or fast shot.

One again, there are many ways to pull a shot, the only rule is that the technique you use produces a shot that you enjoy to drink. Having said that, this is how I pull a shot. After the machine has heated I pull around 2 ounces of water into my demi to preheat it. While it sits, I grind, dose and tamp my selected coffee. I tend to grind finer for the lever than my pump machine requires. I find I get a better shot with a lower than maximum dose, fine grind and light tamp.

Once the portafilter is prepared, I empty and dry my cup, raise the lever until water flows then back down just until it stops flowing. Then I lock in the portafilter, raise the lever and allow the puck to infuse for 5-6 seconds before I start my pull. When doing multiple lever pulls, I will pull the lever around a half stroke, usually no coffee has dropped out of the portafilter. If it has it is only a drop. Then I gently raise the handle to the top of the stroke and hold it another 2-3 seconds to allow the chamber to refill. Then I pull the lever to completion. Using that technique I get a 1.5 ounce shot.



In order to generate enough pressure to properly extract the shot, a fair amount of pressure is needed. You really have to put some muscle, or body weight into the lever. If you are having trouble gauging your pull pressure try this simple test. Get your bathroom scale out and put it on your counter, then put your machine on top of it. Zero out your weight, prep you portafilter and pull a shot. Use minimal counter force on the portafilter handle but be very careful. The small base makes the machine tippy and you do not want to pull it over onto yourself. While carefully pulling that shot, look at the scale. You should be exerting at least 30 pounds of pressure. That will put your brew pressure in the 8 bar range. The shots flow rich and crema laden. If you up the pressure it will produce even more crema. My test coffee was Counter Culture Cafe's Twin Cities espresso which delivered some absolutely wonderful shots. Very creamy and intensely nutty with a hint of berry in the finish.

While that multi pull technique works better for me on this machine that it did on the Elektra, I still prefer a single lever pull. While it only produces a one ounce drink, the flavor is more intense, smoother and creamier than what I get from a multi pull shot.

Thanks Dave for the writeup. I especially appreciate the succinct "pulling shots by the number" section.

cannonfodder wrote:If you are having trouble gauging your pull pressure try this simple test. Get your bathroom scale out and put it on your counter, then put your machine on top of it. Zero out your weight, prep you portafilter and pull a shot. Use minimal counter force on the portafilter handle but be very careful. The small base makes the machine tippy and you do not want to pull it over onto yourself. While carefully pulling that shot, look at the scale. You should be exerting at least 30 pounds of pressure. That will put your brew pressure in the 8 bar range.

The question of how much lever pressure is necessary comes up from time-to-time. To tie these discussions together in one place, I've excerpted key posts on the topic below. Steve (approximately) confirmed your measurements in Elektra/Pavoni side-by-side, excerpted below:

srobinson wrote:As I get into some observations about actually making coffee, I've set the stage for the differences between the Pavoni and the Elektra lever mechanisms. The Elektra has the huge spring to do the pull and the Pavoni has....well you. As you may have read from Chris' post on the Pavoni, this can be quite a task:

One thing that has become clear is that this machine is hard to use well if you are very small. You simply don't have the ability to really control the pressure when you're having to work that hard.

This got me thinking about how much pressure it actually took to get a really good pull. Since the wife was out to dinner, I figured I would stage one of those very sophisticated HB tests that women would categorize as a genetic male flaw should they observe it. I decided to do a pull using the bathroom scale.

Now for this task we place the Pavoni fully warmed and primed on the scale to get an initial reading: 11 pounds starting weight.



Now the fun begins to get a full pull underway, trying to maintain form and snap a decent picture: max downward thrust reading was 51 pounds for a delta of 40 pounds required for a good shot.



This is about as sophisticated as I am going to get on the measure, so if any engineers in the audience want to convert that to bars, please knock yourself out. (I am happy to give lever lengths, cylinder dimensions and attack angles) This could be an extra credit question is a future swag contest.

While it is a bit of work, the manual step does give you a decent amount of control over the shot with regards to speed and grind variation. It also gives you an excellent excuse for a second machine by convincing the significant other that it will part of your daily exercise program. You will have at least one killer tricep. With the Elektra design you will hardly break a sweat...cock the handle and release.

He returned to the topic in Olympia Cremina 2002: The evolution of design:

srobinson wrote:There had also been some good discussions on the lever forum with regards to what pressure is actually used during a lever shot, so I convinced Dan to steal a few of his loose parts to see if we can get an idea what pressure is needed on the Olympia and how that pressure varies during a pull.

What we rigged up was an elbow pressure gauge on the bottom of the Olympia portafilter. My wife currently has my digital camera at her parent's house, but I will post some pics of the setup. With a real pressure gauge I hypothesized that I could be a bit more exact on how much downward pressure would be needed to record specific bar pressure on the gauge. Utilizing my handy bathroom scale, that became famous in my Elektra/Pavoni comparison, I was able to plot the following curve:



With this data as my reference curve, I did a rough plot of the pressures that I saw during a good shot at 2 second intervals. To help understand the line, the shot had a 10 second pre-infusion, followed by a first pull...and then you will see the line drop to 0 as I did a second pull until blonding. Take a look:



A couple observations from this data. First, there is very little reference material out there that helps me validate these curves. There have been several posts stating that it takes roughly 40lbs to pull 9 bars, so I was pleased to validate that point. I think the pattern does give you some insight on the unique nature of lever machines. At the start of the pull, infusion is under your control and you can hit the puck immediately with full pressure. There is no ramp-up. Also with these machines, there is variable pressure during the pull. I was using a pulling style of letting the machine do the work and tried to stay with its resistance. The final observation is that with a full manual, I believe that you are able to start at a higher pressure and maintain an overall higher pressure than with an spring loaded machine. Lino had done some tests with an Elektra and I believe he was finding pressure ranges from the high 6s to finishing around 3 for an average pull. By being able to grind finer and keep pressure high, I think you are able to generate the unique mouthfeel that you get with a great lever shot.

HB wrote:So far, my experience with the Lusso is consistent with Dave's, i.e., the extraction quality suffers on a second pull. It's not always evident from watching the pour from a stock portafilter, but obvious from the negative impact on the taste and body. In my limited experience with the Lusso, the visuals of the pour suffer less from the second pull than the Elektra Microcasa a Leva. The taste impacts however are similar. An easy taste test to confirm is a split shot (first and second pull). The second pull tastes dull and thin.

My La Pavoni experience confirms this. (Aside to Dan: don't you get tired of being right all the time?!? )

peacecup wrote:Have any of you three pulled the first and second pulls into different identical demitasses and blind tasted them?

Yep, here's the result:

Can you guess which is the first pull and which is the second?

Let's try that again without preinfusion (no Fellini move):

I swapped cups, can you tell?

This isn't even an interesting comparison. The visual appearance clearly confirms what my taste buds tell me: the first pull makes espresso, the second pull produces thin dishwater.

This test actually favors the second pull, since the first sits in the cup with crema dissipating for an extra 20-30 seconds. No matter, the differences are like night and day.

I do like the Fellini move (light pull until the first drops appear), because I think preinfusion is a Good Thing. But for now, I'm sticking with one pull.

Dave,
You go out of your way to make it clear that the individual user's tastes and preferences are what prevail in the end, and that there is no one right way to go about pulling a shot on a lever machine:

cannonfodder wrote:One again, there are many ways to pull a shot, the only rule is that the technique you use produces a shot that you enjoy to drink.

But then you go on to describe a "proper" extraction, and your prescription is not nearly as opened-minded as you were just a few sentences earlier; you clearly favor the ristretto over the normale, and the lungo might as well be something they make on another planet:

cannonfodder wrote:In order to generate enough pressure to properly extract the shot, a fair amount of pressure is needed. You really have to put some muscle, or body weight into the lever. If you are having trouble gauging your pull pressure try this simple test. Get your bathroom scale out and put it on your counter, then put your machine on top of it. Zero out your weight, prep you portafilter and pull a shot. Use minimal counter force on the portafilter handle but be very careful. The small base makes the machine tippy and you do not want to pull it over onto yourself. While carefully pulling that shot, look at the scale. You should be exerting at least 30 pounds of pressure. That will put your brew pressure in the 8 bar range. The shots flow rich and crema laden. If you up the pressure it will produce even more crema.

Given that the machine with its small base is "tippy" when you press down on the lever with "at least 30 pounds of pressure", do you think the designers of the machine expected that 30 pounds or greater (i.e. translating to 8 bars or higher) would be the typical pressure the home user would apply to the lever?

Regards
Timo

RapidCoffee wrote:Yep, here's the result:
<image>
Can you guess which is the first pull and which is the second?

Let's try that again without preinfusion (no Fellini move):
<image>
I swapped cups, can you tell?

This isn't even an interesting comparison. The visual appearance clearly confirms what my taste buds tell me: the first pull makes espresso, the second pull produces thin dishwater.

This test actually favors the second pull, since the first sits in the cup with crema dissipating for an extra 20-30 seconds. No matter, the differences are like night and day.

I do like the Fellini move (light pull until the first drops appear), because I think preinfusion is a Good Thing. But for now, I'm sticking with one pull.

Again, the second half of a pump machine's extraction (if it is dosed moderately) will be duller and thinner than the first half's product. (Or do you disagree?) This is not a feature peculiar to the lever machine. If you tamp very lightly, the upstroke on the second pull does not fracture the puck and create great rifts for the water to flow through, yielding "dishwater". You only get a fracture on the upstroke when you have tamped so hard that you truly have a "puck" rather than a deformable medium.

Regards
Timo