(upbeat music)
- [Six Million Dollar Man] We can rebuild him.
We have with technology.
- Today we're gonna talk about this espresso machine.
This is simultaneously
both really, really old and brand new,
it's a kind of contradiction.
It is a Faemina from Faema, it was built in the mid '60s,
and I bought it three years ago maybe on eBay, secondhand,
not in great condition.
And I had a vision for it at that time.
Turns out that vision was wrong,
and that's kind of what we're gonna talk about today.
What I wanted to do was take an old, old lever machine
restore it, and then fill it full of modern technology.
And I tasked one particular person for this
that I thought was best suited Gabor
from Smart Espresso Profiler because I, you know,
that was the beginning of the whole thing,
I wanted a smart espresso profiler on there,
track pressure, do that kind of stuff.
And I said I wanted to tear this thing to pieces.
I wanted to cut in temperature control,
PID, all of the stuff.
And Gabor said, "No".
And I said, "Please."
And he said, "No."
Fair enough, he made a good point,
there's a kind of desecration of a beautiful old thing.
You can't buy these anymore,
you know, they don't make them anymore.
What's there globally as stock of these is what's left,
and so he felt very uncomfortable
cutting one of these pieces, damaging it irreversibly.
And so he took a different approach
that is, I think, super interesting,
and has changed the way I think about these things
both on a technical understanding level,
and we'll talk about that
'cause there's some super interesting stuff here.
But also on a kind of philosophical aesthetic level
about how I feel about the beauty
of espresso and espresso making. It'll be more nerd
than dreamy philosophy today, don't worry.
To get the machine to me, Gabor very kindly got on plane
with this in his hand luggage brought it to the studio.
It meant that we could pull a few shots together
and he could teach me a little bit about
what he'd learned about the quirks of the machine.
Let me talk you through
what's been done to this espresso machine,
apart from being de-scaled, cleaned up, re-chromed,
made to look pretty again.
There's a couple of interesting things
that I wanna talk about.
Now, if you're familiar with the Smart Espresso Profiler,
it is a digital pressure transducer.
And here it can read the pressures inside the group
as the shot is pulling,
so I can see this is a spring-driven lever machine,
so you can press the spring to build pressure,
and release the spring
to sort of drive water through coffee.
I can see what pressures it achieves,
and what's happening in that whole thing.
I can also see what's happening during pre-infusion,
which we'll talk about later.
This has been around for a little while,
I've talked about it on the channel before.
I've made a video about it before,
I'll leave a link down in the description below to that.
And a little pressure gauge
just for the classic analog experience.
What he added was really interesting though.
This up here is a Bluetooth thermometer, and it's now able
to talk to the Smart Espresso Profiler app.
And so we could put two temperature probes into the machine
and begin to understand what's going on,
and there were two kind of obvious places to put them.
This probe runs down here
and it runs actually inside the boiler
close to the element where the water's always going to be,
and it tells you the temperature of the water.
When you trap water and you boil it,
and you can raise its liquid temperature
above a 100 degrees Celsius, your create steam as well,
and that's gonna be how this machine
has steam for steaming milk if you ever wanna do that.
And then also builds pressure
if you want to use that for pre-infusion.
The second thermocouple is super interesting,
that runs here down into,
like into the group head itself.
And so that gives you a very clear temperature gauge
for brew temperature.
Like that tells you exactly what's happening
as your shot is pulling, and it's been revelatory.
And up here is my phone running the software,
and I can see on the screen the temperatures, the pressures.
It's connected to this Acaia scale
and Gabor did a super good little 3D print mod
to hold an Acaia scales in the drip tray,
which I think looks really good.
The original drip tray is unharmed,
we will talk more about why, and how,
and all that stuff later.
If you're not familiar with the app,
what you'll see on screen is a red line
to show you the pressure captured at any one time,
it's time along the bottom.
And then also a brown line that'll show you
the cumulative mass of coffee in the cup,
so that'll give us an idea of flow rate.
So while I'm pulling a shot
I can see the pressure in the group,
I can see the liquid in the cup as a profile,
and I can see my temperatures too,
and I can save it, use it as a reference profile
all of that good stuff.
To explain what I've learned
and how it's changed the way I think about this machine
and about lever espresso making,
we should probably pull a shot, so I'm gonna turn it on.
The way the machine works is pretty simple,
it has an on off switch on this side.
And it's got two power switches on this side,
a min and a max.
Now, this has no additional temperature control
from a thermostat kind of perspective.
What it does have is this,
it's an over pressure valve.
And because it has a sort of ceiling on the pressure
that the boiler can reach
before it releases all that pressure,
the boiler technically can never overheat.
You know, it might get to 120 Celsius,
but it can't contain enough pressure
to get any hotter than that.
That originally was actually on the cap here,
and it's been moved a little shelf has been added,
so that my cup can act as a little drip catch point,
and cup preheat, Gabor did some very cool stuff here.
There's water in the tank at the back,
you can sort of see a fill level at the front here,
and you can see a spring there too.
This is such a fun little machine.
I'm gonna turn it on, get it up to temperature,
grind some coffee and get ready to pull a shot
because it turns out
our window for pulling a shot is very small.
So the way the whole machine works is pretty simple,
if you boil the water you build the pressure,
and that's useful.
And that's your source of boiling water for pulling shots,
and that's also your pressure for pre-infusion,
and also to fill the chamber to then press that water
through with the spring as we talked about.
What we learned with this, this is that the way
that the heat spreads through the machine
means you've got a pretty small window
where you're gonna get good brew temperatures.
So this will boil, and it needs to be above boiling
to get the pressure we need for pre-infusion.
And at about 110 degrees Celsius
the group head will be much cooler,
but not that much cooler.
And so as I start to pull a shot in that tiny window
as the water comes out of here, it's 110 Celsius,
it'll cool here but also heat up this chamber here too.
And it means that my brew temp
might be in the mid 90s for the shot.
But if I was to pull a shot straight after that,
this water might be even hotter,
this group head would be even hotter still
and I'd be up at boiling point for my entire shot,
which is frustrating.
So as you're watching this heat up,
you can see on the screen
that the boiler temperatures now at 60,
but the group heads lagging behind like 36 degrees Celsius.
And there'll be a pretty big differential
in temperatures between the two.
I need that temperature here for pre-infusion,
otherwise I have a pretty weak pre-infusion
and I can't pull a long enough shot.
But if I let that go too far,
my brew temp's all over the place,
I'm gonna have a bad time.
And it's kind of stressful,
you get this really small window.
Now, the basket on these things it's pretty small,
so we're gonna be dosing about 15 grams
of coffee into this thing.
It's a double basket, little dosing ring,
also from Gabor, very nice.
And then once we've distributed and tamped
we're gonna put an AeroPress filter on the top,
a sort of a a damp paper filter on top
because the water as it comes out of the shower screen,
it's a bit aggressive.
And so adding that layer of paper
is a bit like a puck screen
to sort of dampen the violence of the water coming through,
so you're less likely to have channeling
and sort of harshness in your shots that way.
As for a tamper, the original Faemina had a tamper built in,
and Gabor again has kept the original,
but modded it to make it better.
I say better, it's still not as good as a hand tamp.
But here at the back he's added a stainless steel piston
and a ring to make sure
that you're gonna tamp level and evenly,
which is appreciated.
If you've ever had one of those grinders
where you had to lift it up to tamp on the front,
the kind of commercial grinders,
they really sucked, it was bad, I don't recommend it at all.
But here I can be confident, I'm level and even,
I'm gonna have a good time.
About 90 degrees Celsius inside the boiler now,
47 in the group head, so there's this weird gap.
But as you'll see when we pull a shot,
that temperature in this group head comes up really quickly.
Now, if you're wondering if the min setting on the element
gives you more control?
Not really, it just seems to stall you out wherever you are,
but understand that while a boiler may not get hotter,
there's still heat transfer going into the group.
So unfortunately that's not a way
to kind of cheat the process much,
though I do tend to turn off max
once I've started pulling my shot because I know
I'm gonna wanna cool the thing down relatively soon
if I want another really good shot afterwards.
So distractingly, now that we're above boiling point,
you can hear a little steam
coming outta the over-pressure valve.
It's gonna be a gentle hiss in the background,
we might tune it down in post
so you can hear can hear me nice and clearly.
So at 102 Celsius in the boiler, 67 in the group,
we're getting pretty close to sort of go-time.
Turn you this way so I can see what's going on a bit more.
Coming up when we hit 110,
pull the lever, start the pre-infusion.
Ugh, there we go.
A little bit of pressure on that pre-infusion, interesting.
I'm gonna run for about 20 seconds.
(espresso machine hissing)
Brew temp 93.
Peaking about five bars,
so older spring, it's not really something to worry about.
(espresso machine hissing)
Look at the ooey gooey espresso.
Now, I have no control over the end mass of this thing.
It's gonna be what it's gonna be,
and typically they're pretty short shots,
less than one to two, with the 15 gram dose,
like 25 grams out has been kind of it.
But the shots have been,
and you nail everything pretty good.
Let me move this away,
so it's a little less hissy, and get a spoon.
Now, I'm not reviewing this machine, not really.
So the quality of the espresso
isn't really super under the microscope here,
but does it make nice shots?
Pretty tasty, nice texture, nice mouthfeel to it,
tastes pretty evenly extracted.
It's a shorter shot and you can taste that in it,
it's a little bit more acidity than I might want.
And maybe next time with a roast like this
I could go a little hotter,
and maybe, you know, brew 95, 96
and balance it out a little bit.
It's a slow shot, you know, it's a 45 second total shot,
maybe 20 seconds of pre-infusion.
So it's a pretty slow drawn out affair,
but the nature of this kind of a brew
is that it's not under pressure like that the whole time.
It kind of works.
I enjoyed that, it was tasty, it was sweet,
it was well made.
I can nitpick it, but that isn't really the point,
and that's not really the experience
of owning one of these things.
So here is the temperature data
for three shots pulled back-to-back.
In between I'm running the boiler
in min mode rather than max,
so that each time the boiler temperatures
are kind of similar,
but you'll see as one shot to the next, to the next.
We go from sensible brew temperatures
up to very high brew temperatures,
up to unusably high brew temperatures.
Now that I know how it works,
now that I know that I've got this really small window
between the boiler getting to the right temperature
and the rest of the machine overheating
and then some having to kind of cool it down
or reset it in some way to pull another shot,
I find the machine more frustrating the more I know.
And I worry about analysis paralysis,
which can totally happen.
Now, I love data, I love getting into it,
but I do wonder if, you know,
getting all of the data out of this particular machine
is kind of good for a brain like mine.
If you just gave me this shot and I drank it,
and I didn't know where it came from,
or how hard it was to pull, or any of that stuff,
I might enjoy it more. Or maybe less,
maybe I'd enjoy it more
knowing that I had had conquered a difficult thing.
But people love these things still,
people have used them for literally decades
despite the fact that they're really fussy in finicky
once you understand
what's actually happening under the hood.
And at the end of it, I can't help but feel that
Gabor's decision to make everything completely reversible
was a brilliant one
because I could see a future for this
where it has none of the bells and whistles,
where you understand it and you've built your workflow,
but maybe you just want to be in the process,
you just wanna make your espresso
and not get all the data out all the time.
And for people like me who wanna play,
and understand, and tweak,
I'm so excited that this technology exists now
and that it is improving and evolving.
But whoever gets this machine, I could understand
if they wanted to take it out after a while,
if they wanted to kind of go back to the bare bones
of just them, intuition, feeling, smell, sight, taste,
all of that stuff and make coffee
in a different kind of way.
And you know, the experience of this machine
has again reminded me that making espresso
is always about more than just the end result.
It's about process, it's about skill and craft,
and all of the stuff in between,
it's about endless gear acquisition
to those of us broken in this specific way.
But this has been a good reminder of the fundamentals,
of what's fun about espresso at the heart of it.
And having the data, having the information,
well, it's let me learn, and I'm grateful for that.
And if you have one of these
then you should know that you've got a pretty small window
after the water boils inside, you've got maybe five minutes
in which you're gonna get a pretty sensible brew temperature
unless you're cool with brewing at really high temperatures,
which I guess historically most people just did.
They would've been running close to boiling point
with probably darker roasts,
and still probably enjoying the espresso.
This will go to one of my Patreon supporters
who helped fund this channel,
and help me go and buy equipment, find it used,
work with people to restore it, develop it, change it,
evolve it into this high-tech supercharged,
very old thing that we haven't desecrated,
which is probably a good thing
now that we know all of the things that we know.
But I wanna hear from you down in the comments below now,
what do you wanna know about this machine?
What's missing?
What do you want to hear more about?
What kind of experiments would be interesting?
Did the philosophy underlying all of this connect with you?
But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching,
and hope you have a great day.