The northlondonhippy

I men­tioned recently that I bought a brand new cof­fee mak­ing rig. It’s true.

Before xmas, I decided it was time to get a proper espresso maker. I’d rid myself of my old mon­stros­ity; a com­bi­na­tion steam dri­ven espresso maker and 8-cup drip pot together in one ugly, black plas­tic casing.

I never used the drip pot and the espresso maker churned out drink­able, yet not quite right cap­puc­ci­nos and lattes and I’m a bit of a cof­fee obses­sive, espe­cially now.

I started doing what I usu­ally do when I’m inter­ested in some­thing, I surfed the inter­net and I found three really good websites:

www.coffeegeek.com

www.homebarista.com

www.toomuchcoffee.com

Each site is chock full of extremely use­ful infor­ma­tion about cof­fee, from equip­ment reviews to bean rec­om­men­da­tions and tips and tricks on how to get the best from your cof­fee. I learned loads, but still have lots more to learn. If you look care­fully, you might even find some posts from me on one of the forums.

Grow­ing up, I wasn’t into cof­fee. My par­ents either drank instant, or weak and watery fil­ter cof­fee and all of it decaf.

It wasn’t until the early 80s that I had my first proper cap­puc­cino. From then, I was hooked.

It wasn’t as easy as it is now to get a good cof­fee, this was in the days before there was a Star­bucks on every cor­ner, you had to look around to find places that made them right.

My Ital­ian grand­fa­ther, my mother’s father, who came from just out­side Naples, used to make espresso using a tra­di­tional stove-top, Moka pot and I can remem­ber my par­ents say­ing that it was far too strong and bit­ter for their taste. I never got to try any, even though I wanted to. They said I wouldn’t like it. At that age, they were prob­a­bly right, but I’ll never know. Grandpa’s been in heaven for a very long time.

I’ve owned a cou­ple of steam dri­ven espresso machines, besides the old one I recently binned. I bought my first one in the early 90s and used it for sev­eral years before it gave up the ghost. Another one fol­lowed and that lasted a few more years, but now, I own a proper machine.

It turned out, before I started my manic online infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing exer­cise, I knew less than did­dly squat about coffee.

For starters, the online cof­fee com­mu­nity refers to those steam dri­ven espresso machines as “steam toys” as they don’t make real espresso. By steam dri­ven, what I mean is that the water is heated to the tem­per­a­ture of steam and the steam pres­sure forces the over­heated water through the ground cof­fee. That would make the water far too hot for brew­ing coffee.

Cof­fee should be brewed at just below boil­ing point; steam is water heated to beyond boil­ing point. That’s not good.

Proper espresso machines come in three vari­eties, all of them pro­duce water at “brew tem­per­a­ture” plus steam for froth­ing milk, but each accom­plishes this in dif­fer­ent ways.

The most basic machine is called a sin­gle boiler-dual use machine and it works like this: Inside it is a a sin­gle boiler, with two user con­trol­lable ther­mostats, one heats the water to brew temp, the sec­ond brings it up to steam temp. The catch is, you have to wait for the machine to tran­si­tion from one temp to the next, which can take a minute or so, depend­ing upon the machine. You have to time what you are doing very care­fully to get the most out of this machine. These are the least expen­sive as well and include most Gag­gia home mod­els and the Ran­cilio Sil­via I con­tem­plated buying.

At the other end of the scale are dual boiler machines; one at brew temp and a 2nd at steam temp. With this sort of sys­tem, you can pull shots and steam milk at the same time, with­out any wait­ing or tran­si­tion­ing. Most pro­fes­sional machines work this way.

And in the mid­dle, the third cat­e­gory is what I bought, a heat exchanger (HX) machine. These are clever devices, they use one boiler which only comes up to steam temp, and the brew water is flash heated via a heat exchanger that passes through the boiler. This set up gives you con­tin­u­ous steam and brew capa­bil­ity, but with­out the extra com­pli­ca­tion of 2 boilers.

Have I bored the bejeezus out of you yet?
I’ll stop being tech­ni­cal now.

All of these machines are fairly sim­ple to oper­ate, but it takes a cer­tain amount of knowl­edge and as I am learn­ing, expe­ri­ence to max­imise their potential.

By far the most impor­tant info I picked up from my new found cof­fee web­sites con­cerned beans and grinders. You need a seri­ously good grinder and you need freshly roasted beans.

Decent grinders, like any­thing good, aren’t cheap and my cof­fee expert pals all sug­gest you bud­get 50% of the cost of your espresso machine, for the grinder. Espresso machines can be quite finicky about how finely ground the cof­fee is, too fine and the machine will choke and you’ll get noth­ing out of it and if it is too coarse, your shot will pour too fast and you’ll have a cup of sour tast­ing swill.

Being a com­plete begin­ner at this, it took me a cou­ple of hours of exper­i­men­ta­tion before I got my first drink­able shot from my new kit. Thank­fully, the peo­ple I bought it from sent me a free kilo of roasted beans because I burned through half it on that first day and all but the last 2 shots went down the drain.

A proper espresso, sin­gle (1 oz) or dou­ble (2 oz), should take approx­i­mately 20–25 sec­onds to pour. Using lined shot glasses, marked at the 1 oz level and a stop watch, you aim for this magic tim­ing and amount by adjust­ing the fine­ness of your grind. It took me a while to get a feel for all this, but since then I have used dif­fer­ent beans, which required adjust­ments and have been able to fine-tune the grinder to improve my results. Today, I’ve made myself two cap­puc­ci­nos and the espres­sos that went into them were the best I’ve made so far. They weren’t per­fect, but I’m on my way!

By far, what has made the biggest dif­fer­ence to my cof­fee is fresh beans. I really wish some­one share this key fact with me ages ago. Cof­fee beans need to rest for about 2 days after roast­ing, to allow for the CO2 gasses to be released, don’t ask me why. After that, its fresh for around 2 weeks, before it begins to go stale. Oh and it needs to be ground just prior to brew­ing, as its starts to go off within min­utes of being turned to brown dust.

I didn’t know any of that shit! And its all true!

For the last few years, I’ve been using a cafetière, or press pot or French press, if you pre­fer, but I’ve been putting pre-ground, super­mar­ket bought cof­fee into it. Drink­able, but noth­ing like the cof­fee I’ve been enjoy­ing since I bought the new set-up.

Freshly ground beans are a rev­e­la­tion, with flavours so rich and com­plex that I don’t have the vocab­u­lary or knowl­edge to really express it in any mean­ing­ful way. I can say, with­out ques­tion, that in the last week or so, I’ve had some of the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted, anywhere!

Even Mrs. H noticed when I switched to the freshly roasted beans, that it tasted bet­ter. The place I’m get­ting them from is an online shop, which roasts them to order and ships them out, the same day. You receive them the next day, well pack­aged, with the date of roast­ing printed on the pack. And it’s not that expen­sive, either.

The espresso machine I bought is an Izzo Vivi, which is made in Italy, and is very shiny and heavy. The orig­i­nal design of this type of machine was patented in 1961 and it has a very dis­tinc­tive group­head, which if you visit cof­fee bars, you would prob­a­bly recog­nise. It’s called an E61 group­head; the group­head is the bit they lock the portafil­ter into, just before brew­ing. Oh and the portafil­ter is the handle-thing which holds the fil­ter bas­ket, filled with ground cof­fee. I bet you know what I mean!

It took me ages to decide on which machine to buy and while my deci­sion was guided and informed by those web­sites I men­tioned, the per­son who helped me the most was the sales­per­son I spoke to at the online com­pany where I bought it.

I spent nearly an hour on the tele­phone with this sales­per­son, ask­ing as many ques­tions as I could, includ­ing “which one do you own?” and “which one has the least returns?” The Izzo Vivi was the answer to both ques­tions and I was sold. It was one of the mod­els I was con­sid­er­ing, any­way, so it wasn’t a com­plete sur­prise. Actu­ally, the one I was lean­ing towards was sig­nif­i­cantly more expen­sive than the Vivi, but my sales­per­son friend said it wasn’t as well con­structed and it was made of infe­rior components.

The Vivi is based on a com­mer­cial design and uses many of the same parts and com­po­nents as its big­ger, pro­fes­sional broth­ers. That means if and when it ever needs repairs, the new bits won’t be that expensive.

The place I bought it from is really cool, they give you a 2-year war­ranty plus they unbox, check and cal­i­brate the machine, before ship­ping it to you. I was very impressed. They also dou­ble box it, which meant it arrived in pris­tine condition.

I also bought my grinder from this com­pany, a Macap M4D, but I won’t bore you with too many details, except to say it is a pro­fes­sional piece of kit and should last for years, as should the espresso machine. They told me with care and main­te­nance, the Vivi should keep going for at least 20 years.

I’m not going to post a link to this com­pany, as I don’t know if they would appre­ci­ate being asso­ci­ated with some drugged up weird-o like myself, but if any­one is inter­ested in find­ing out more, please email me and I’ll gladly pro­vide you with the link; just don’t tell ‘em the hippy sent you! I am very impressed with them and would heartily pro­vide them with my seal of approval and rec­om­men­da­tion. I don’t think I would have bought a machine in this price range, from any­one else.

Like­wise for my source for cof­fee beans; I would love to throw some busi­ness their way, the cof­fee from them has been orgas­mic and the ser­vice has been first class too, but I don’t want to piss them off because of who I am. I’m happy to pro­vide the link pri­vately, should you wish to try some for your­self and they’ll grind it for you, if you wish.

Some com­pa­nies, like my good friends at EDIT are happy to be asso­ci­ated with me, oth­ers might find me a bit too con­tro­ver­sial. That’s fair enough, I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, or rather coffee.

In my world, cof­fee is a drug, just like any­thing else that effects your mood or cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem. Caf­feine is a seri­ous stim­u­lant and I am very sen­si­tive to it, always have been. That means I have to stop drink­ing cof­fee fairly early in my day, or sleep will be elu­sive come bed­time. It doesn’t mat­ter, because I really love the stuff, never more than I do now!

My cof­fee jour­ney? The title of the this entry, comes from a phrase I’ve seen often repeated, to new­bies such as myself on cof­fee forums and it refers to the route you take to get the best cof­fee expe­ri­ence imag­in­able. With fresh beans, my new grinder and my new espresso machine, my jour­ney has moved sev­eral light years ahead in a very pos­i­tive direction.

Bot­toms up!

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