- Today, we're gonna talk about this.
It is the MANUMENT Leva Espresso Machine.
And yes, you read the thumbnail right.
This thing costs, I think, 19,000 euros,
including sales tax,
which makes it, I think, a little over $20,000.
And looking at this and looking at that price,
you've probably got questions.
Well, I had questions, too,
and the only way to answer those questions
was to buy one of these, which is what I did.
Shout out to my Patreon for giving me the funds
to do this kind of work.
I don't have to borrow one, loan one, beg a freebie.
I can buy it, review it,
and give you an honest, unbiased opinion.
Now, I will say
that this isn't going to be a traditional review
because almost everyone watching this
is not really in the market
for a machine at this price point,
but I do kind of wanna walk you through
what you get for your money
and spend a bit more time talking about the tech inside it
that is different and is genuinely exciting to me.
Like, it's changed the way I felt
about making espresso day to day,
and that is worth some discussion.
Also, to longtime viewers of this channel,
welcome to our new home.
This is our new studio.
We'll show you around over this video and others to come.
Back to the machine.
I'm gonna walk you through some of the features.
I'm gonna have to move it, and in doing so, I can discuss
one of the first notable aspects of it.
It weighs 44 kilos.
Now, it's not just heavy to be heavy,
it's heavy because you wanna be able to use this thing
with just one hand, pull the lever forwards with one hand,
without having to use your other hand
to stabilize the machine.
It makes for a nicer experience.
The lever is tall.
The whole machine is, frankly, huge.
I mean, look at the size of this thing, it's massive,
but a long lever is an easier lever to pull.
The shorter the lever is, the more work you have to do
to compress a spring inside.
The lever itself, wood accents, very nice.
Very nice to use. Beautiful design.
The design of this whole thing is kind of crazy.
It falls into the, you know, small subset of coffee machines
that look a bit like microscopes
but are still beautiful with it.
Water tank is next.
This holds about a liter, I think.
Everything is heavy.
It is detachable.
But the lid itself, like this lid, it weighs 700 grams!
Just the lid of the tank!
Coming down here, you've got some LEDs.
You've got this thing, which is a kind of unusual
and unique aspect of the machine,
which is a flow control lever.
On this side, here,
you've got your temperature dial for your espresso.
They say it's accurate to 0.1 of a degree Celsius.
You'll see on the dial it's kind of one-degree increments.
Obviously, you can move the dial anywhere within it,
but you don't really know where you are.
I couldn't say, "I'm definitely at 93.6."
In their defense,
I don't think adjusting by 0.1 of a degree Celsius
is particularly valuable.
If you've done that and your shots tasted better,
you've probably fixed a different variable
that was causing the previous shot to taste bad.
Now, the dial isn't linear.
Around, you know, the kind of typical espresso temperatures,
you've got kind of accuracy,
but you can drop down to lower temperatures pretty easily,
that is kind of cool.
Below that, the main on-off switch.
On the other side is your steam system.
Now, you've got your steam activator, your steam wand,
your temperature gauge, and a manual and auto function
we'll talk about when we get to steam.
Temperature here, again, has a pretty big range
because you can run it below boiling point
and actually have it pump hot water out of your steam valve.
If you want a bunch of hot water for, like,
an Americano or something, it will do it.
It'll heat it fresh, and that's very clever.
The portafilter, here, is one of the first places
that I'm gonna have a little bit of a complaint.
This is a 55mm portafilter,
which is a really weird size.
It makes a bit more sense
if you know the lineage of the machine
or kind of who's building it.
MANUMENT is built by a manufacturing partner, which is TKM,
which is Thuner Kaffeemaschinenfabrik, and they...
Swiss-based, hence the title of this being
"The Swiss Watch of Lever Machines."
They have some connection going back to Dalla Corte,
who liked the sort of smaller portafilter size.
From my perspective,
I genuinely would've preferred a 58mm portafilter
for a few different reasons.
We'll talk about accessories now, actually.
With this machine, I got a double portafilter
and a single-spouted portafilter.
We've got the baskets, the cleaning things.
We've got this tool, which is great.
I'll show you that in a second.
The problem with the portafilter,
it being a weird size, is twofold.
One, they've shipped me a tamper
that actually doesn't quite fit.
(tamper rattles)
It's a bit loose, and that kind of annoys me.
I think it's about 1/2 a millimeter smaller
than the inside of this thing, which is a weird decision.
You don't want it to be identical
because you kind of get an airlock forming.
As you pull the tamper out,
you can suck the puck up out of the basket.
That's definitely bad.
But you just want it to fit a little bit more precisely,
in my experience.
That's certainly my preference.
The bigger frustration for me
is that I like to use a dosing ring
because I like to do kind of a little bit of prep
before I pull a shot.
I did find one from SWORKSDESIGN that I think is nice.
It fits really pretty well.
It's magnetic, that works.
So that's the only place that I found a good dosing ring,
and I kind of expect that to come with this machine,
and I'm kind of annoyed that it didn't.
While I'm here, I'll show you this.
It's a little tool designed
just to drop the block from the middle here.
So you can see there's a little hex nut here.
So all you have to do is kind of put it in there,
line it up, and then unscrew,
(hex nut unscrewing)
and everything comes down.
So this is what you get.
You get a Teflon dispersion block here,
your screw in the middle,
and then this screen, which is an IMS screen,
which is a nice screen.
So it's really easy, actually,
and quite enjoyable to drop this down to clean.
And then, putting it back up is also pretty easy,
you can just do it by your hands
and tighten at the end with the little tool.
(tool clinking)
So it's time to pull a shot.
Let me go and prep some coffee in this portafilter,
and we can explain what's going on here,
'cause it's definitely cool.
Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you might've noticed
that this machine is switched off,
and here is the kind of party trick of the machine.
I'm gonna switch it on down here.
When this light goes green, it's ready to use.
(switch clicks)
That's it. It's on.
It's ready. It's ready to go.
You're probably skeptical at this point, right?
If I pull the lever down,
what happens is I charge a heating chamber
with sort of water, and it begins to heat.
And when this flashes, well, yeah, it's making hot water.
You can see hot, steamy water coming out of here instantly.
It's crazy! It's wonderful.
This seems like a little bit of a party trick.
It's not, it's way more interesting than that,
I promise you.
It basically means that when the machine is on like this,
in sort of standby, nothing is hot, right?
And so you could leave it on all the time if you wanted to,
and your energy consumption would be some LEDs,
which are negligible, shall we say.
It's when you pull the shot,
when you kind of charge the chamber,
then it very rapidly heats that water up.
Now, you saw me open and close the kind of group head
with this valve here.
And this is a kind of distinct piece of tech
to the MANUMENT.
And the way it works
is that you have a lever on the side here
that has five numbers.
Obviously, the zero is closed.
And what you're doing is opening an aperture,
sort of allowing water into the group head to flow.
So the further open this is,
the more water is able to flow into the group head
and sort of onto the coffee,
or out, if there's no coffee in the way.
They told me it was about 2 mLs per second for each step.
My testings had more like 3.8 on average.
So, I tend to keep my flow rates relatively slow here.
What this does is have us think differently
about flow and pressure.
I'm gonna try and do my best to explain this by saying,
imagine the coffee here is also a valve, right?
This valve has a flow rate of two mLs per second,
and this valve has a flow rate
of, let's say, four mLs per second.
What happens here when I begin the shot
is that water can freely fill the space here, right?
Above the coffee until it kind of backs up
and fills the chamber entirely.
Nothing's pressurized,
so you're at kind of atmospheric pressure,
and it's at slow flow rates,
and we call this phase pre-infusion.
Now, once this restricts the flow of liquid
to the point that the flow is slower than the valve here,
well, actually, the pressure
is constant throughout the whole circuit.
And even if I open this valve up more,
well, it's not in charge of the flow rate overall anymore.
The slowest valve is, which is, theoretically, the coffee.
So, what you'll see me do here when I pull this next shot
is pull the lever, charge it.
I'll open it just a little bit.
You'll see the lever begin to raise
as it's able to press water through the coffee.
This light will go blue when pressure's reached,
and, at that point,
I'm just gonna move it to the first setting
because that flow rate is faster
than my coffee flow rate would be.
So it doesn't really matter where my lever is,
as long as it's kind of open above the espresso flow rate.
A lot of talking, a lot of theory.
Does it make tasty coffee?
(portafilter locking in)
Small complaint.
This is a very tall machine.
I would've liked a little bit more height here,
just to get a shot glass or a cup
and a scale on the drip tray.
That would be my preference.
This basket, my preference has been about 16 grams in.
I'm gonna aim for, like, 32 to 34 out.
It's flashing.
Allow some flow.
This will go blue in a second.
It'll slow the rise a little bit too as it hits the sort of-
as the whole system pressurizes.
And then I can just make sure that it's flowing adequately,
and coffee is appearing in our glass below.
It's so delightfully quiet.
Now, this is important.
The blue light's still flashing, it's still at pressure.
I must discharge the rest of the pressure.
In a little bit, the machine will notice there's no flow,
and it will get a bit cross with me,
and it will go red, saying, "There's a flow issue.
"I'm switching off all my heating elements,
"and any water in here that's not been heated
"is not going to be heated."
I need to discharge the pressure,
get rid of the last of the water.
When this goes green, everything's happy again.
How do the shots taste?
They've been very good.
They have had just this texture
that I think is very, very enjoyable.
It's sort of silky and buttery and soft,
and that's across a bunch of ratios.
The springs in here, I think it's a dual spring system,
peak at around nine bars of pressure,
but that will be declining through the shot.
And that's generally sort of a good thing, I think.
It's why people like lever machines
or machines that can do a declining pressure profile.
The theory is that, later on in the shot,
when you've, essentially, eroded
and washed away a lot of that coffee cake,
lower pressures reduce the likelihood of channeling,
and it keeps your flow rate kind of even throughout.
I've had shots that have had really nice sweetness.
The acidity has generally been balanced.
The shots from here have just been really, really tasty.
I will talk, briefly, before I get more into the steaming
and the other tech stuff, about this drip tray.
This is one of my favorite drip trays
that I've used in a really long time.
It's a weird thing to say,
and reviewer brain is definitely a thing.
This drip tray is just great
'cause you've got under the grill
a kind of splash guard ramp thing.
So when liquid hits it, it flows down into this little hole
and then disappears underneath the splash guard.
Now, it's easy to take it out and clean it,
but it means that when this is very full,
there's only one tiny place that liquid can flow out of
on my way to the sink, so I can't make a mess,
even when this thing is really full.
That's like a tiny detail, but it's a great detail.
Now, I previously mentioned
the automatic versus manual switch on the steaming side.
The automatic setting
is so that when you finish pulling a shot,
it will automatically start heating
the sort of steam element, and it will leave it hot
for about 45 seconds after your shot.
That would mean if you prepped your milk
and you're kind of ready to go, you could pull your shot
and then straight away get into steaming milk.
Alternatively, if you have it in manual,
you need to kind of open the steam valve,
get the machine sort of going and hot,
which happens pretty fast, but then you can steam.
I'm gonna switch it to auto,
(switch clicks)
and we're gonna pull a shot.
(milk steaming)
(big steam release)
A little bit dramatic.
Texture-wise, lovely.
Glossy, silky milk. Pretty achievable.
With practice, I think this is a great wand to steam with.
Very enjoyable. No complaints whatsoever.
Which, for me, feels like a rarity.
The area I find myself in conflict
with the manufacturer's sort of recommendations or ideas
is that you can use this as flow profiling
once the shot is kind of underway.
I think it has a big impact on pre-infusion.
But you know, looking at how this is a valve
and that's a valve, kind of talked about it before,
I haven't seen in my testing a change in flow rate or taste
if I have, you know, once the shot is flowing,
maxed out the sort of aperture on here
to allow as much water in
because it's still constrained by the coffee.
(portafilter slotting in)
What I mean by that is if I open this up,
if I start that pre-infusion, once this pressurizes,
once the blue light is lit,
the rate at which this is climbing
is determined by the coffee.
Whether I move this open or closed
does not seem to impact the flow through the liquid.
It's not a bad thing, I just think it's
you know, it's a pre-infusion control,
not an overall flow control.
On that front, one of the recommendations they gave
actually was kind of interesting,
which is, with darker roasts,
do your pre-infusion at the highest flow setting,
and then you can sort of dial it back
or just kind of leave it there.
In my experience, if you have a very rapid pre-infusion
then your overall grind setting for a fixed flow rate,
for a kind of overall shot time,
actually needs to be quite a lot coarser.
There's a bunch of theories as to why,
I don't wanna dive too deeply into it,
but rapid pre-infusion needs a coarser grind.
With very dark roasts, using a coarser grind
and having a sort of matching flow rate
will probably give you a pretty tasty shot,
which is less extracted 'cause the coffee's coarser,
but you'll still have nice texture.
You know, there's still good contact time
between the water and the coffee,
which seems to have a kind of impact on texture too.
And so, yes, I could see that totally being a thing.
But I don't think it's traditional flow control,
and actually, I kind of don't want it to be.
I think really getting into flow control
is quite a technical way of making espresso,
and in doing so, it kind of changes
the overall experience of this thing,
which is something that I do wanna talk about.
Over the time I've spent with this machine,
a creeping change has happened
in my feeling around making espresso.
Now, I know I'm weird, in that I have all the toys
and all the things, and I don't always wanna make espresso
because it's a bit fussy and frustrating and slow,
and heating up is annoying and cooling down is annoying.
And all of that kind of stuff is often a barrier to me
kind of just having a casual espresso.
Now, a lot of people solve the heating problem
by having a machine that is on a timer and comes on,
and so when they come down in the morning,
ready for their espresso,
that machine is heated and ready to go,
and there's no wait time for them.
That's cool.
The thing, for me, is that limits your espresso-making time
to that period of time only.
And if you're gonna leave your machine on all day,
that feels incredibly wasteful, and then you're back to,
"Well, I'll switch it off after sort of morning time.
"But if I want an afternoon espresso,
"well, 20 minutes before I want it,
"I've gotta go and heat my machine up."
The fact that I could walk up to this, flick a switch,
and it was ready to go, made me want to make espresso.
And it could be 11:00 in the morning,
2:00 in the afternoon, whenever, if I was suddenly struck
by the desire to make espresso, I could.
And suddenly, I was like, "Hey, who wants an espresso?"
And we were all drinking more espresso in the studio
because this was here.
And I'm gonna be honest, when this goes, I'm gonna be sad.
I'm gonna miss it.
And to say you miss something like this
is to miss what is, honestly, a luxury.
To have always-available espresso
without the sort of heating requirement,
without the power consumption, feels like a luxury.
And the price point of this
kind of ties with that experience.
It feels luxurious in every single way.
Whether you think that's good or bad is different.
But the idea that the tech in here
could go into other equipment in the future
makes me very excited.
Nespresso has had a bunch of advantages over the years,
one of which is a cold machine
will happily make you coffee in about 25 seconds.
Same thing, tiny little heating unit.
They're not aiming for the same high temperatures.
But it's on quickly, it's available quickly.
If you just fancy one,
the machine sits off most of the time,
and you just walk up and have an espresso.
You can't do that with most espresso machines.
But imagine if you could, and the results were,
well, so much better than Nespresso.
Like, real great espresso whenever you want
without the kind of burden on your power supply.
Now, I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna say
that that makes this more sustainable
because I imagine whatever carbon cost there is
shipping 50 kilos of machine wherever you are in the world
is gonna take a long time to kind of,
you know, equalize with your lower power consumption.
But the tech inside makes me excited.
It's tech that I would love to see go into other equipment.
I know some people will be worried
about temperature stability.
If you are, you could use a naked portafilter
or, essentially, preheat the portafilter
by kind of pulling a blank shot through it first.
One fascinating additional advantage the machine has
is that because nothing's held hot,
you can do shot-to-shot adjustments in temperature
really easily, in a way that almost no other machine can.
Is it worth 19,000 euros?
That's a question, isn't it?
That's a difficult question to answer.
When it comes to price, inevitably,
you have to ask the question,
well, what's 19,000 euros worth to you?
And for most people watching it, it's so much money
that it's inconceivable to spend on a coffee machine.
And like it or not, there are people in the world
for whom that is not that much money.
They are propping up
the kind of innovation that's happening here,
that I think is kind of a good thing.
These are built in small quantities in Switzerland.
They're built very well, very beautifully.
No expense feels like it's spared in this thing,
that makes it a luxury item.
I hope the technology goes into other products
that do not have the price point of this.
But as a kind of proof of concept,
of a way of making espresso,
it genuinely - it makes me excited.
Now, you're probably thinking I'm gonna say,
"This is gonna go to one of my Patreons."
I'm not gonna say that.
It's already gone to one of my Patreon supporters.
I didn't wanna use this as a kind of reason
to encourage people to sign up to support my Patreon,
so it's already been given away
to one of my Patreon supporters
because I'm so grateful for the support they've given me,
especially as things have been a bit quiet
on the channel recently,
as we've been building out this place
and other stuff's been going on.
So, thank you, again, to my Patreon supporters.
They have been amazing.
Before I wrap up, as we're in the new space
and there's a new print, I do just wanna tell you about it.
Can I tell you about this print?
A little while ago, we made a video
that was the ultimate moka pot guide,
and we felt it would be only appropriate
to make a poster of it.
And I'm really pleased with how well this turned out.
It's a beautiful piece of art, and at the bottom,
there are the key steps to get great coffee
from a moka pot.
It's available now. Link down in the description below.
It's available for a limited time,
as all our prints are, ultimately, limited run.
But now I wanna hear from you, down in the comments below.
Firstly, do any of you have one of these?
How's your experience been? Have you enjoyed it?
Are you pulling shots with it every day?
Has your experience matched mine?
Secondly, does the tech make you excited?
Does it just seem like a little bit of a party trick
and a weird thing?
Or do you get the excitement that I feel
from having something instantly available like this
to pull great shots of espresso?
Do you love how it looks?
What color would it be in?
I think it comes in black and white,
but I feel like you could do a lot with this thing
in terms of customization, too, that would be super fun.
Let me know, down in the comments below.
But for now, I will say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.