Has anyone noticed that all the makers of the E61 prosumer machines seem to have adapted the same look? It's all this boxy, square-rectangular shape with stainless steel. There's no elegance to them at all. Honestly, I feel like they all look the same, minus a few things here or there, like placement of the gauges. It's almost like they're all made by one company and then the sellers slap their label on the machine at the end.

Perhaps it's a case of function over form. These machines have evolved over decades. While I can appreciate a machine, espresso or otherwise, that is super stylistic, I'm really mostly interested in making good coffee.

ACS Minima looks a little different.

The freak machines do exist!
Take the Orchestrale Nota for example:


I think the problem is the consumers buying mostly the "normal" looking machines.

In order to be an E61 machine, the machine has to have an E61 head... Kind of the distinguishing feature. To be fair, the range of actual E61 machines that Faema has made commercially for the past 60 years include some really beautiful things that don't look a bit like each other except for the E61 head they shared.
E61 style machines have been very popular. If some company is going to make their own copy, they want potential buyers to recognize it as one.

A Dutch builder just finished this: https://www.nakedespressomaker.com/



Makes a Linea Mini a cheap option though.

Nice!

There is also the crazy minimalist E61 machine James Hoffmann presented in one of his videos.

The large E61 group somewhat limits the choice of designs unless you want to make a really large machine. Besides the E61 machines there is an endless list of crazy and unusual espresso machines

They are colloquially known as "E61boxes." Vibiemme, founded by Valenti, the designer of the group, brought out a single boiler, vibe pump E61 for home use around 1995. It was expensive for a home machine, but it simply blew every other home machine away (back then it meant you got an honest to god espresso shot without having to hire a witch doctor to do a rain dance). In terms of shot quality, it was as good as any single group commercial machine at a third of the price. ECM and Isomac soon followed with HX models. The ECM Giotto had a sculpted case, but most of the others were simple boxes.

Since then so many manufacturers have jumped into the E61 box game that while the look has hardly changed, the quality has gone way up. It's hard for me to imagine how the current coffee hobbyist scene could have happened without E61 boxes.

Arafel wrote:Has anyone noticed that all the makers of the E61 prosumer machines seem to have adapted the same look? It's all this boxy, square-rectangular shape with stainless steel. There's no elegance to them at all. Honestly, I feel like they all look the same, minus a few things here or there, like placement of the gauges. It's almost like they're all made by one company and then the sellers slap their label on the machine at the end.

There's more variation in e61's than mandated automobiles...

another_jim wrote:It's hard for me to imagine how the current coffee hobbyist scene could have happened without E61 boxes.

+1

cafeIKE wrote:There's more variation in e61's than mandated automobiles...





+1

Guess we'll agree to diagree. ECM/Profitec, Bezzera, Quick Mill, Rocket, Lucca, Izzo ... they all look very similar, that boxy straight-on look