jeffh wrote:Will it support all the Acaia scales?

On the subject of scales, is the Decent scale still going to ship soon?

As Acaia has no public API for Android (you have to sign up for their developer program, sign stuff, and only work through their library) the answer is NO.

This implementation was done by a Decent customer, reverse-engineering the bluetooth protocol that the Acaia lunar uses.

Older scales and the Pearl may not work. The current Lunar works.

I'm still working on the Decent Scale, but hoping to release it to manufacturing in about 2 weeks. We're working out the final issues now.

-john

Decent tea portafilter coming

I've received two tea portafilters and developed a profile that works well with them.

Essentially these are portafilters with an exit valve that opens at 4 bar. With the right DE1 program, we can control that valve opening time.

Here are the advantages of making tea with an espresso machine:
- totally automated 3 minute brew
- works with a teabag and loose tea.
- Easy cleanup even with loose tea.
- different water temperatures can be used for different teas (some teas benefit from lower temperatures)
- concentration (ie dilution) of the tea can be standardized
- multiple pass recipe through the tea bag gets more tea extracted, as clean water is put in each time.
- you can choose to throw out the first extraction, as is common practice with nice tea.
- another benefit of throwing out the first flush is that this serves to warm the basket and portafilter, so that the rest of the brews are at a higher temperature.
- improved tea flavor by getting the timings and temperature exactly as you want them.

I developed a program that makes passes at brewing, ending up with about 250ml of tea in the mug. Here it is:




I fill the basket and exit on pressure, and then hold to brew. I then flush at 4ml/s, and then hold at 2 bar, then once again, and then a final flush.




Our new firmware is doing a fairly good job of getting the tea in the portafilter close to 100ºC.





Here are the steps in the profile:

One thing I don't like is that the rim of this portafilter head is flat, not rounded like a basket. This flat top requires the portafilter to be locked in tighter than usual to form a seal, otherwise there is a bit of leakage.





I made a British tea for Bugs first:
and then ran the program again to make my tea, as I quite like weak english breakfast tea without milk:




I will be evaluating several other models of tea portafilter heads in the next few weeks.

The intent is to have a new portafilter from Decent, as well as a variety of tea recipes, optimized for different kinds of tea.


TALKING TO THE MANUFACTURER:

We spoke to the manufacturer of this portafilter head, and they said "but we don't have a valve in our portafilter!"

They made the portafilter to artificially create pressure in brewing tea-concentrate, and that's how they think of their device, because they only have a 9 bar espresso machine.

Look at this exploded parts image:





The spring on the washer causes water to need about 4 bar of pressure to exit. That causes the tea to extract at pressure.

However, with the Decent we can control the pressure, and also stop water flow, so we can use that spring as a non-electrical open/close valve.

We're not using the portafilter as they intended, but that's fine. You can of course as the Decent to make a 9 bar shot, and then extract tea at around 4 bar, which is about what the the spring resistance gives.


FUTURE TEA RESEARCH

Decent customer Dylan suggested an interesting idea, of starting the tea brew with quick, successive rinses at 2 bar, and then using the flush valve to automatically throw that "first rinse" tea out. I'm going to try that out, and see if it works. If so, that makes the Chinese practice of throwing the first rinse out fully automated, and we can pick the settings that work best.

Cheap Decent machines in the pipeline

Here are the espresso machines we're getting ready to sell at a discount, on our "Cheap Decent" forum.

Private message me with your name and email address if you'd like to be on it. There are currently about 440 people on this forum, so there unfortunately is a bit of competition for each machine.

I hired an assistant on Thursday (he's starting tomorrow) and he'll be helping me run this "bazaar".

Over the next week or two, all these machines will be listed. It's first-to-say "I'll take it" gets it, but people who already have paid for a machine and are thus on our queue, have priority.

ps: apologies for the weird text callouts in this video. I recently bought the mCallouts extension so that I can have text labels move with objects onscreen, and used this video as a training exercise on them.

-john

Next zoom call:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89749384297
Meeting ID: 897 4938 4297

Feasting, thanks to Peter

Canadian Decent customer Peter Middleton messaged me a few days ago that he was so pleased with his Decent Espresso Machine, that he wanted to thank the team that had built it, with a gift. His idea was that everyone involved with Decent would have a special meal.

On Friday, we normally have a special meal anyway (double food budget), but this week we added Peter's HK$1000 gift (about $130) to make the meal super-extra-special.

Chef Michael used the extra money to make:
- roast pigeon
- homemade lacha paratha (https://www.kookingk.com/recipes/lachha ... d-paratha/)
- shrimp wrapped in mushrooms and filo
- Indonesian beef curry
- stir-fried wild forest mushrooms
- homemade french fries
- we still had some money left over so we bought 4 top-end cakes from https://lucullus.com.hk/



We're now up to 25 people here in Hong Kong, with 8 people joining in the past 4 weeks. Car (in boxing) took the photo.

We were able to ship 27% more machines this month, which beats our previous monthly record of 87 machines. There are only 38 machines left in the v1.3 queue https://decentespresso.com/queue (down from 220!), and in two weeks we're building our first v1.4 machines, slightly ahead of schedule. Only 9 covid cases per day in HK, the past 2 days, which is good news. In all this world turmoil, things are going decently well for us.

The cake and food were really appreciated! Chef Michael was really happy for the extra budget to stretch his wings and show off a bit.
And so... thank you again Peter, and everyone who has bought one of our little espresso machines, as you've helped make all this possible!

-john

Hey John,
Do you have any sense on the cost of the tea portafilter and the 1.5 shower dispersion screen?

I'm a tea head as well and can definitely see the use of the tea portafilter. Many people talk about how your pot material impacts flavor (eg clay from different regions), so it will be interesting to compare the portafilter to chinese pottery. In any case this seems like a great approach for gongfu tea brewing, as it involves multiple brews of same tea at different infusion times - set ratio and temperature.

mtbizzle wrote:Do you have any sense on the cost of the tea portafilter?

Likely between USD$120 and USD$160 depending on who I buy it from. It'll be USD$120 if I go with the supplier I already tested. On the other hand, our existing portafilter supplier, who makes portafilters for "the biggest Italian pro machine maker" (take a guess) also makes a version of the tea portafilter. It's about twice as expensive, they've offered to customize the spring for me, and I want to evaluate it. If I go with them the tea portafilter will be USD$160.

mtbizzle wrote:I'm a tea head as well and can definitely see the use of the tea portafilter. Many people talk about how your pot material impacts flavor (eg clay from different regions), so it will be interesting to compare the portafilter to chinese pottery. In any case this seems like a great approach for gongfu tea brewing, as it involves multiple brews of same tea at different infusion times - set ratio and temperature.

Do you own a Decent? Because if not, you'll need to have a machine that can both to variable flow (or variable pressure), and on/off.

A Bianca (manually controlled) or a Mina (with a program), for instance, should work nicely.

mtbizzle wrote:Do you have any sense on the cost of the 1.5 shower dispersion screen?

Not yet, as we don't know what it'll cost to make it, since we haven't finalized the design or material.

-john

And here's the full video of today's Zoom call. There's a factory tour!

My new assistant Ihti will be learning Final Cut Pro this week, to chop this up into separate Q&A videos.

Here's a Decent Espresso Factory Tour I gave in this weekend's zoom call:

Good progress from the Smart Espresso Profiler folks
https://www.naked-portafilter.com/smart ... -profiler/

They're offering a great software program for guiding Decent users through real time control.

Here they're imitating a shot from the Profitec Pro800.

Once released, this software will be free for all Decent Espresso users, though it does require the Group Head Controller, which we launched in January 2020, with our v1.3 machines.
UPDATE: Gabor released a new video, using the DE1 + SEP to imitate the La Marzocco Leva