A new feature was added today for all DE1 owners.

Each step in an espresso making can now have a water volume limit, expressed in ml. Hitting that limit moves the recipe to the next step.

Why use this?
- you might want to put 2x as much water in as your bean dose, to fully saturate the puck during preinfusion
- you might want to define a step in your espresso making (for example, the last part of a Blooming Shot) in terms of total water volume added into the cup
- other recipe ideas on the DE1 have been theorized, that are now easily possible.

This new feature was made available today in our beta de1app, for free, for all customers.

If you don't have a DE1, you can see the feature in our desktop app (Mac/Windows/Linux) freely downloadable at http://decentespresso.com/downloads

Wow I'm excited for the de1+! Many new features coming I see. Hope the de1+ batch is still shipping out this week.

It's 5:30pm on Friday here, and we just this morning finished a run of 50 machines of DE1+ 110V, and this afternoon we've been testing them. A few people are working for double pay tomorrow (saturday) but most of these machines will be finished testing and calibration by tuesday.

The 50x 220V run of DE1+ machines still needs two more days to finish.

So... not this week, but early next week!

Hi John, you mentioned Scott Rao on multiple occasions. Aside from being an expert, he is the founder of Cafe Myriade in Montreal and I have been in one of their locations a couple of times before. Do they have a DE1 machine on location? I may try to connect with Scott somehow

the user interface mockups posted look really good! i think it will improve first impressions of the machine.

decent_espresso wrote:I think the maybe the Oracle has a thermocouple on the steam wand (is that right?), which permits hands free and auto-stopping, which is super cool.

Hands-free, automated steaming - is this something that you envisage doing with the Decent? How difficult is it to do it really well?

In terms of workflow, I tend to use the Oracle's auto-steaming while I manually prepare my espresso puck (clean basket, grind, weigh, distribute, tamp).

GDK wrote:Hi John, you mentioned Scott Rao on multiple occasions. Aside from being an expert, he is the founder of Cafe Myriade in Montreal and I have been in one of their locations a couple of times before. Do they have a DE1 machine on location? I may try to connect with Scott somehow

Rao lives in Los Angeles these days, and writes books https://www.scottrao.com/ and no longer runs Myriade. I don't know what machine that cafe uses, but pretty sure it's not a Decent.

Since cafes mostly own their big machines, they're very slow to switch to other machines. In general, it's small, newly-founded cafes that go with Decent. You can find a lot of them by looking at who tags #decentespressomachines on Instagram.

mooky wrote:Hands-free, automated steaming - is this something that you envisage doing with the Decent? How difficult is it to do it really well?.

It works quite well, especially if you start with a rinsed jug each time (no residual milk) and dose a known quantity of milk. The 3rd party DSX skin uses a scale to adapt the steam time to whatever milk you did put in.

Besides the video I just posted http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJPTzfaP-W0 I have tutorials on how to do hands-free steaming, such as :

10 minute challenge #3: espresso, 1x DE1XL (#3)

After doing two challenges with two DE1, now I'm doing two challenges with just one DE1XL machine. The idea is to see how the slowest setup performs, and then critically evaluate each speedup independently, to see what optimization yield the biggest improvements.

Lessons learned:

• Big surprise: I was almost as fast with 1 DE1XL, as I was with two.
• I made 9 double espressos, instead of 10, in the ten minutes. Just under 1 per minute.
• If I were using a double spouted portafilter, like many cafes do, I'd be making 108 single espressos per hour.
• I'm very comfortable with this setup, because it's what I've had in my home for 4 years. Because of that comfort level, my workflow is smooth, unvarying, low stress, and fairly fast.
• I'm pretty sure that the weighing and grinding process is what's slowing me down the most.
• The "please add water" pause on this model DE1XL slowed me down twice. This has been addressed in a recent firmware update, so that water refilling happens transparently in the background without making the barista wait.
• And so, foreshading a bit.... a few days ago I repeated this same challenge (one DE1XL), but with two Niches and preweighed doses in cups. This hugely sped me up, and I managed 17 double espressos in ten minutes. This equates to 102 espressos per hour.
• The next challenge is making lattes, not hands free on this 1 Niche/1 DE1XL setup.

-john

decent_espresso wrote:It works quite well, especially if you start with a rinsed jug each time (no residual milk) and dose a known quantity of milk. The 3rd party DSX skin uses a scale to adapt the steam time to whatever milk you did put in.

Besides the video I just posted video I have tutorials on how to do hands-free steaming, such as :

Thanks for the quick reply. Coincidentally, I watched the latte challenge video not long after posting my question - and I can see that the open-loop "ghost steaming" satisfies most of my requirement.

I decided to leave my question up anyway because I guess what I meant was closed-loop temperature control & some way of of controlling how much microfoam is created (cappuccino vs heated milk). I was just curious if it was something you'd thought about, because - holy sh** - it seems like you've thought of everything else!