Hi there.
Today we're going to be talking about this.
It's the 9Barista Espresso Machine.
It's like a stove top mako pot
that actually makes espresso.
This was created by a guy called William Playford.
His background is a jet engineer.
That's his bonafides.
It's beautiful.
And it's very clever.
It has three pieces.
The top one, probably the least interesting.
We'll come back to that in a second.
The main body is two parts.
One of which is a water chamber at the bottom.
Initially, you might think this looks
just like the base of a moka pot.
There's a pressure release valve, necessary and safe
but it's more than that.
It's actually two water chambers.
And this is the first point
at which this thing is pretty clever.
Now you'd fill this with about 110 to 120 mils of water.
Cold water as recommended by the manufacturer.
And while I like to use boiled water in a moka pot,
I've done as they've asked in this case here
but all of the clever things are here
in this part, in the middle.
Now you'll see that this little piece
has two little red gaskets here
and they are what divide the two chambers.
So when you screw it in,
there is a chamber below this gasket.
And one above this gasket.
The bottom chamber is where water is boiled
and it's trapped until it reaches very high pressures
until it reaches nine bars of pressure.
I think that's about 179 degrees Celsius
but I could be wrong.
The upper chamber here is quite clever.
It's going to act as a cooling bath.
This is gonna be confusing when I tell you
that the water in that cooling bath
is gonna be 100 degrees Celsius
or it's going to be at whatever temperature water boils
wherever you are.
Here, I'm at sea level
so it's 100 degrees Celsius.
The way this thing works
is that you have this water trapped, boiling away madly
in the bottom section.
When it reaches nine bars of pressure,
it opens a spring release valve inside this unit
allowing water to flow into this coil.
Now this coil is surrounded,
it's jacketed by this boiling water,
which is much, much, much cooler than the water
going into that tube is.
It's kept at 100 degrees Celsius
because this chamber is only at atmospheric pressure.
There's a little chimney here on the side
that allows water to sort of boil, thus keeping it
at a fixed temperature.
In flowing through this coil,
it should drop from 179 down to
about 100 degrees Celsius,
it's still a little bit hot,
before entering the final section of this part of the body
which is an additional heat sink.
That's what these fins are for.
Therefore it should exit the shower screen effectively
at about 93, 94 degrees Celsius.
That's the theory.
What you have on top
is basically an upside down portafilter.
I mean, it's exactly a portafilter.
There's a basket here, it comes out.
There's a little handle, it's a portafilter.
But by having it upside down,
the pressure comes from underneath,
it's dispersed through a little dispersion block
that sits on top of the coffee,
I'll show you that in a minute, and then flows
into this little collection chamber where you pour it
out and drink your espresso at the end of it.
It's ingenious, to be honest,
it's a fascinating solution to the problem
of how do I generate nine bars of pressure on a stove top?
We'll brew some coffee, taste it, talk about it.
And then afterwards, I'll give you my overall thoughts
about how this works and ultimately, who is this for?
So I have everything
amongst this chaotic collection of things
in which I need to make espresso with the 9Barista.
Now, when you buy it, it comes with this.
It's an adapter desk for gas or induction.
So this on its own does not work on an induction hub.
So I've got a small little gas burner here
and it works for these as well
just to disperse the heat a bit more evenly
and make it so it fits safely on top of any sized ring.
It does also come with a very cute little tamper,
which is nice and obviously necessary.
So let's make some coffee in here.
I have my cold filtered, delicious water,
a little bit below the suggested level for reasons
we'll talk about in a second.
Now, when you put this together,
you'll see this becomes submerged
and the water begin to cover this section of the chamber.
If you overfill, you will make a mess.
With anything where you're going to be
generating high pressures, you want to make sure
your gaskets are properly seated
so this is nice and tight.
Don't make it impossible to undo later.
You won't thank yourself for that, but make sure it's tight.
So now to prep the basket.
Now they recommend 20 grams of coffee.
That's probably a pretty good catch-all dose, but for me
I certainly prefer slightly lower doses.
So I'm kind of in that 18 and a half, 19 range
with this, I think it's 'cause the coffee
I'm using is perhaps a touch lighter
and therefore a little bit harder to extract.
And as we know from the video
on starting dose for espresso dialing in, which is up here
if you want to watch that, then if you have a lighter roast
that it helps sometimes to use a lower dose.
And tamp.
One last piece to go on
is this sort of dispersion screen
that does two jobs, it disperses water
and also keeps the coffee in
when you turn it upside down,
both fairly important things.
Lock in the group head
and we're ready to make some coffee.
Now, the one challenge of this unit, I suppose
is that the dialing in process
if you're trying to brew coffee after coffee
after coffee, after coffee, it's pretty slow, actually.
Their ideal brew time
from going on from cold is six minutes.
And you kind of want to hit that brew time.
So brewing back to back,
certainly when you get the unit for the first time,
it's gonna take a little while to really
kind of dial in your process.
And that six minute time is kind of important, actually.
If you miss it then a couple of bad things can happen.
You can either potentially evaporate
all of the water in your upper chamber
because it will boil.
You could boil it so dry
that you end up insufficiently cooling your brewing water
and having an aggressive, steamy brew.
I've certainly done that when trying to find
that kind of right heat setting
for this particular unit.
You kind of want to work out and tweak and aim
for a six minute brew by testing.
You're gonna make some bad coffee when you get this.
You're unlikely to nail it out of the gate.
If you did well, well done you.
You're aiming for six minutes
and the trouble with that in some ways
as part of the dialing in process,
is that you don't know if it's gone wrong
until you get to six minutes and nothing's happened, right?
If you're heating it too slowly, at six minutes
you find out things have gone wrong.
That's a bit frustrating for me.
The dialing in process has definitely been
a little bit too slow and sort of drawn out.
And then you've got to cool it down,
take it to pieces, refill it.
It's not a back-to-back unit.
And certainly, it's not going to be great at producing lots
of coffee for lots of different people quite quickly.
This is something that you buy for you.
So now we're starting to hear some boiling
and that boiling is the upper chamber.
This is where I've had a couple of issues
and it's an issue that they know about.
And we'll talk a little bit about the fix afterwards
but that bubbling can be a little bit too angry,
a little bit too intense.
It coincides typically with the unit
really coming up to pressure and coffee happening
as long as you've got the heat right.
And at this point,
you kinda want to pay attention to what's going on.
You can have some issues
with water spitting out of the chamber
which is obviously bad, but coffee is now happening.
And it looks very good.
I have made some espresso.
Oh yeah.
So let's taste it in a second.
I'm just gonna put this in the sink,
cool it down a little bit.
So how is it?
Did it make delicious coffee?
Well it's pulled a decent size double.
It had some nice crema.
It's pretty good, it tastes like the coffee that went in.
Texture's nice.
You don't need to stir the shot because it's been stirred
by that kind of pouring action out of the 9Barista.
It would certainly work well as the base
of a milk drink if that's what you were interested in doing,
though obviously it has no method for heating milk.
As a straight shot though, pretty good.
I might drop the dose, tweak the grind a touch finer.
It's on the border of under extracted,
but that's on me and not on the machine so to speak.
Ultimately, it makes good tasting coffee.
It's certainly capable of producing the temperature
and the pressure that you would want.
It doesn't taste like a super hot shot.
You know what I mean?
When brew temperatures have gone a little bit too high,
it doesn't have that particular kind
of harsh bitterness that you get sometimes.
Pressure wise, it's hard to really know.
The physics, all that kind of stuff behind it
certainly make sense but I have no way
of measuring that effectively
so there's a bit of trust there.
What I will say is that it needs
a slightly courser grind than a traditional espresso machine
for the same kind of dose to flow normally,
which suggests possibly a slightly lower pressure.
It might be that the shot starts at nine bars
but obviously as pressure is released from the system,
that pressure may decline towards the end of the shot.
In order for this to appeal to you,
I think what you need is very limited space.
It is a good grinder for sure.
And no interest in milk drinks.
It's 295 pounds, which is expensive.
You can see where your money is going
in terms of design and build.
It's a small company, but I think that's probably
a fair price to achieve what they've achieved here
but it's still more expensive
than some traditional kind of lever machines.
Something like the Flair where, you know,
you're going to be adding the hot water
and the pressure yourself.
This is at least doing some of those things
for you and doing it in a controlled, repeatable way.
If you have a moka pot that you wished made espresso,
this is for you, but just you.
Again, it's not good at making multiple coffees
for multiple people
and it doesn't work particularly quickly.
But if you wish you could put
on a moka pot in the morning,
have a genuinely delicious espresso at the end of it,
this may be something for you to consider.
That doesn't mean I'm not without
some small criticisms of it.
It's a very well machined thing.
It seems to be done within very tight tolerances.
Though, I will say that locking in
the portafilter, there's just a little bit
too much play here as you lock it in.
I wish it was a little bit more tightly machined
from that perspective.
I've never had an issue with a seal not forming properly.
It just doesn't feel in line
with the rest of the machine as a whole.
It's just a funny little detail like that.
I do need to talk about the issue
with water exiting the chimney towards the end
of the brew or towards the beginning of espresso flowing.
They've addressed this in a blog post.
If you're getting very large bubbles of water,
it's because you potentially lack nucleation points.
Inside here where the water is boiling
in that secondary chamber,
everything's too smooth.
They discovered quite recently that if you
just sand a little bit just to rough up
some of the surfaces in there, that issue goes away
which I think is kind of interesting.
And also they've had people just use a little bit less
than 120 mil inside of the machine,
more like 110, and had no issues either.
As you saw, I had a little tiny issue,
but not a significant one.
I haven't done any roughing up inside of here.
I think they're going to change that
for future production runs.
This is number 278,
so it's still pretty early there
but I'm glad they addressed an issue
and I'm glad they've worked out
the problem and got a fix for it
even if it is something as simple as a piece of sandpaper.
The last criticism or thing to note is
that you don't have a ton of control here.
It's gonna do what it's gonna do.
You're not gonna be able to manipulate pressure
or temperature in any way.
And if you like coffees that brew
with ideal temperatures that are outside
of the kind of range it produces,
there's not much you'll be able to do.
I guess you could probably try something
inadvisable like dosing a little cold water
in to sort of drop the temperature
of the heat jacket just before it starts brewing.
But the timing on that seems like a chaotic thing
and I'm certainly not recommending that.
I'm just sort of thinking out loud.
As fixed as it is, it at least does
the things that it's supposed to do.
It produces consistent temperature and pressure
and it does it in an ingenious, clever,
and frankly, beautiful way.
The details on this are nice.
The wood handles are nice, it feels solid.
It feels well built.
It does have a couple of gaskets in there.
And to be honest, I did break one of them.
I'm not sure how, it's not shocking.
I can perhaps be a little bit rough with equipment at times.
I'm not like Casey Neistat with cameras,
but you know, I might be a little bit rough sometimes.
Just be aware that there are parts
that will wear over time.
So just two gaskets inside the machine,
they are what you will replace potentially longer term.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed.
I think it's clear.
I think it's beautiful.
I think it makes good tasting coffee.
I don't think it's for everybody
but if you've ordered one of these
because it fit the way you want to make coffee,
if it fits your life, I think you'll have a good time.
Now, I don't get to keep this.
This is going to go to one of my Patreon backers.
I'm very grateful that I have a Patreon
that gives me a budget to go and buy these things
and so I can make independent,
honest reviews of them and let you know what I think.
But you know, I'm a little bit sad to let go of it.
I wouldn't use it all the time,
but it would be a fun thing to show other people.
It would be a fun way to get people excited about coffee.
Seeing the kind of upside down
naked, portafilter things,
seeing the espresso fill from the bottom is unusual.
It's interesting.
It's beautiful, again.
Overall, it's expensive.
It's a little bit niche, but it does what it set out to do.
But now I wanna hear from you.
There's probably at least 300 of these in the world
if this is number 278.
So how are you getting on with it?
What kind of experience have you had?
How does the coffee taste?
Are you happy with your purchase?
Are you waiting for one of these?
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below
but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.