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My small (~15) person office is moving and the new place has less nearby coffee. Is there a level of espresso machine that is idiot-proof and easy to clean that can still make mediocre-to-good lattes and cappuccinos or is it a fool's errand? The alternative is basically 'gently caress it, I'll just get starbucks on the way in to work', so it's not much of a bar to clear on the taste side.
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Sep 27, 2016 06:33
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:25 |
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Pet peeve: PID's being luxury features annoys me since they're <$5 of parts and a trivial amount of NRE on a multihundred dollar thing
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Oct 22, 2019 05:51
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iospace posted:Have you ever programmed one, as in the behind the scenes code? Yeah, work is medical stuff. There's a bunch of 'dispense this fluid +/-0.5C' or 'hold this plate at +/-0.2C' code:Tuning can be a timesink, but coffee doesn't need to respond to ms timescales, so it can be sloppy and 1950's heurestic methods are probably good enough. The NRE certainly isn't nothing (need to add a PCB and power electronics if it doesn't already have one too), but it's not going to be more than a few people-months/few tens of thousands of dollars. And electronics assemblies are incredibly cheap compared to anything machined for the boiler/heat exchanger/grouphead. But like I said, pet peeve. I totally understand that PID does not a good machine make, it just annoys me when machine vs identical machine with PID option is a +$100 extra. Foxfire_ fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Oct 23, 2019 |
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Oct 23, 2019 05:53
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I'm considering a breville dual boiler and a m47 Phoenix for my quarantine coffee. Anyone want to talk me out of it?
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Mar 30, 2020 19:29
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My thinking was that the internet says it grinds at about 0.5g/s so not a huge proportion of prep time per drink. For adjusting, it's supposed to be stepped at 0.01mm/step, which seemed both small enough and like it shouldn't be that finicky? I liked it better than the lido since I figured the stepless lock ring on the lido would move when tightened/untightened. Steps on it vs steps on a sette didn't seem that different and I don't think I need to blast through really fast grind times
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Mar 30, 2020 20:28
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Abner Assington posted:The finest setting looked borderline powdery to me, and (if I remember correctly) that shot just dripped out. Right now, I have it set to three clicks from 0 (slightly to the left of the second notch). I went ahead and got the bottomless filter since I don't really like using the split ones, so maybe that will allow me to problem solve more easily. If flow is too low at the finest, and too fast where you are now, what does it do in between? Does it abruptly change from nothing to too fast or is there something in between? I can't think of anything the pump could be doing that would cause that.
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Apr 18, 2020 07:50
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I ended up getting a Kinu Simplicity a few weeks ago. Grinding one drink is okay and adjustment is easy. Part of my coffee drinking is "I want to take a break now" so spending an extra 40s grinding isn't really a downside to me. I wouldn't want to grind for multiple drinks back-to-back though.
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Apr 26, 2020 01:52
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For the theoretical platonic 30 second espresso shot time, when do you start counting? Start of flow or when pressure has ramped up? It seems like to get 2.5oz of liquid in 30s, I need to grinder coarse enough to drop brew pressure down to 5-6 bar. If I grind to target 7-8bar, I get lower flow rates (that still end up being tasty).
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May 5, 2020 05:15
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Gunder posted:I think you're meant to start timing as soon as the water hits the puck, so as soon as you start the flow, I guess. First 5s or so is preinfusion, so after that?
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May 5, 2020 17:56
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How does that make sense physics-wise? Isn't the goal to use the time/2.5oz as a measurable proxy for an extraction pressure+flow rate (which is the actual thing you're trying to control)? Counting preinfusion time would mean the extraction part would have to be done at a faster flow to still get to the 30s target. Like if some grind made 2.5oz/30s with no preinfusion, adding a 15s preinfusion @ 1psi/negligable flow doesn't seem like you'd want to switch to 2.5oz/15s grind.
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May 5, 2020 18:32
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I got a Breville BES920XL a couple months ago that I have been happy with so far.
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May 23, 2020 01:55
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Nuurd posted:I keep whole beans at home, but generally have been keeping preground coffee at my desk. I’m definitely not going to be the guy trying to run an electric grinder in an office environment. Different sound, but not louder than a microwave or a filling up a bottle of water at a sink
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Jul 12, 2020 03:50
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A water reservoir in a machine may also not be designed to hold brew temperature water. Dumping a kettle of boiling water into it may melt stuff
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Jul 19, 2020 01:02
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I spent $250 on a hand grinder! The lack of play in the driveshaft and handle is very satisfying. (the coffee is also good)
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Jul 22, 2020 20:57
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It looks like a lot of high-end coffee stuff where it has very little engineering put into it because there isn't enough volume to justify many NRE hours and the market will accept high unit costs. Like it would not surprise me if they're paying $1k per unit for just the visible machined aluminum given that it's in tiny quantities and they look like they're milled/lathed from big pieces of stock. If you're only going to sell 1000 units/year, it's not worth it to spend an extra few engineer-years on figuring out how to make it cheap to build and assemble vs brute forcing it.
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Jul 23, 2020 19:22
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Lord Stimperor posted:On YouTube, AvE took one apart and concluded that the ridiculously overengineered machined components were more valuable than the entire thing combined. That was probably the result of venture capital throwing millions and millions at perfectionist engineers. That's not perfectionist engineering. Perfectionist engineering is a super cheap plastic thing that can be assembled by a robot/minimum wage worker and still meets all of its design requirements. Milling stuff out of huge blocks of stock with a 4-axis mill and saying "all dimensions are +/-0.005in" and it needs skilled assembly labor is easy, improving a design so it can be made fast and sloppy takes time and lots of revs
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Jul 23, 2020 21:47
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Royal Mile out of New Jersey is good and goon owned. They're about $1/oz
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Jul 28, 2020 05:31
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Snowmankilla posted:After re-reading the first post and seeing all the advice, do most people never have a goon approved cup of coffee they made themselves? Specifically the measuring that I have never seen the coffee drinkers in my life mess with. I tend to see people do more scoops then anything else? You said earlier you are a wet shaving person. Fancy coffee people are to normal people like wet shaving people are to normal people. If you have the same driving pressure (same machine) and same particle distribution (same grinder & coffee), the only thing left that can change the flow rate is amount of coffee or how it's distributed in the portafilter. If you have a higher flow rate with everything else the same, there has to be some lower-resistance path through the puck. Maybe the grinder is spitting clumps? Coffee's incompressible, so tamping hard won't affect voids by the edges if you squeeze out all the air in the middle first and the tamp is supported on that.
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Aug 21, 2020 02:29
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Gunder posted:Do you have to recalibrate palm tampers each time you switch coffee beans? I never really thought about it before as I don't own one, but I recently read a comment remarking on the necessity to do so. I was thinking about getting a better tamper and was considering either a calibrated Espro or something like the Push Tamper from Clockwork Espresso, and the need to constantly mess with the Push tamper every time I switch beans would probably tip me over into the Espro choice. As far as I know, there is no mechanism for a fancy tamper to actually do anything. All you're doing is squeezing out the air between incompressible coffee particles and 15 lbs vs 30 lbs vs 300 lbs is not really going to change anything.
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Sep 3, 2020 21:41
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:25 |
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Breville makes a $1500 dual boiler machine that I have and am happy with. I would describe their stuff vs other manufacturers as a engineering vs craftsmanship tradeoff. Most machines seem like low volume products built with expensive parts and skilled assembly labor. Breville's stuff seems like it's had a lot more engineering hours & revisions put into it, aimed mostly at making them cheaper to build. Some things from that are flat out better (e.g. solid state power electronics and PI control are both cheaper and better than a traditional presurestat), sometimes they're worse (e.g. rubber gaskets instead of silicone), and sometimes it's neutral to the end customer (e.g. ease of plumbing the guts inside the chassis)
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Oct 26, 2020 00:07
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