Day 6:
I forgot to post the tasting notes for the (one) Single Origin espresso I've tested so far. I'll have more notes on other coffees over the next few days.
I pulled some shots of the
Olympia Coffee Roasting Peru Penachi.
Unfortunately, this is not a coffee I've either cupped or tasted from any other espresso machine - so I cannot provide a comparison.
On the other hand - it was a fantastic espresso. I found it to be a bit touchy on brew temp (0.3F made a huge difference with it). Once dialed in, however, I got a lovely shot.
Tons of brown sugar and blackstrap molasses. Cocoa and dark chocolate. Some cashew in the body. Plum syrup. Grape skin and leather.
This is a very sweet and heavy espresso.
Anyway, I've had to do some actual work today (sigh) and deal with doctor stuff. So I have not been able to get a ton of testing and eval in.
I have had time to pull a half-dozen shots of
Stumptown Hairbender and make one cappuccino.
I feel like I've got the hang of the steaming now. Wasn't that hard to adjust after all.
The Hairbender has faded (it's 6 days old now) and on this machine it's starting to taste noticably alkaloid. Of course... it's starting to
look amazing!
It's too bad that espresso starts to look so good just as the flavours get lost. Oh well... the fleeting nature of coffee.
Some other notes that I'd not covered fully in the past.
As I've mentioned in passing, this machine has tons of stainless steel. In particular, as far as I know pretty much everything that comes into contact with coffee other than the portafilter is stainless. That's right... no more brass. To clean the dispersion block you just undo the screw, pop off the screen and use a clean damp rag to wipe it down. No more green scrubbies. No more cigarette ash fish oil dirty machine taste. This is a
very good thing!
I've been working with the naked portafilter so far - but I'm about to switch back to the traditional spouted one for a bit. While I like the taste from the naked, I have a better "sense memory" of coffees from the spouted portafilter and don't want to introduce another variable into the mix.
The wands on this machine are "cool touch" insulated wands. This is incredibly nice. I've finally lost all my Mistral steam wand scars - suffice it to say that I really, really appreciate this feature.
The tip on the steam wand is my personal favorite - the old Marzocco "acorn" 4-hole tip. This is, IMHO, a great tip. But... it's a very high pressure tip. It's a challenge for even experienced baristas to steam a small amount of milk - and I have a feeling that folks who are used to home machines would really struggle. It's probably going to be worthwhile to invest in a 2-hole tip as a sort of "training wheels" rig.
The drip tray is incredibly deep. There have been no incidents of any sort - and you can pretty much forget about it most of the time. It also pulls straight out, away from the machine so you don't need to tip it to remove it - again, minimizing the chances of incidents.
Filling the reservoir is dead simple. You just lift off a metal cover and this exposes two holes into the reservoir. Fill and go. The reservoir is enormous! Again... so far I've never even come close to running it dry.
The machine is very, very quiet. I've never used a machine with an internal pump that is anywhere near this quiet. There is little if any vibration, the only rattling you could get would be from your cups - and even then only in certain circumstances.
by malachi on Wed Nov 16, 2005 4:12 pm 
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