I guess there's only so much you can do to rehab an abused machine.

I'm sure they could have gotten every last drop out. but cleaning like that takes some serious time....

You can't really see it, but here's one of the shots inside my faema when I got it. The entire frame was coated in many layers of dirty grinds and old milk.



I didn't take a pic of it because it was just too nasty, but I swear the shop that this thing came out of never backflushed. There was caked on coffee in the screen, around the group gasket, etc. It took quite the soaking to get the groups clean.

My grinder also.... ewww. I don't know what it is about used grinders, but it certainly seems that if they're cheap, they're nasty. At some point it was in a smoking environment, so the whole thing reeked. I tried just doing a minimal clean of the doser and burrs, but it wasn't sufficient and I ended stripping it. There was about 1/4" of stale caked coffee & green stuff under the burrs and every bit of coffee that I got out of it stank. Did I mention the odiferous packing peanuts inside the body by the motor? Post deep cleaning though its doing just great.

Now to finish up the faema...

I didn't see this myself, but I was told by my manager.

One of the shopping centre's that we manage, has a cafe in it (which is ordinary at best, like many cafe's are).

My manager went in there one day and noticed a yellowish crust on their coffee machine steaming wand. After a bit of probing, he found out that they used to make their scrambled eggs in a hurry by steaming jugs of whisked eggs.

I had to try really hard not to spew up in my mouth after hearing that story!

oh my dear god! look at what that woman is making with that poor machine!

I cannot imagine what goes through a person's head when they present this espresso to a customer.

When did this extraction go blond?