- On the previous episode.
Not far from here is the workshop of Enrico Maltoni.
(dramatic music)
This is the taste of history.
I have to convince Enrico to sell me something.
(In Italian)
(dramatic music)
- And when you see it again in a future video,
you'll see the after, you'll see the restored version.
And I'll tell you if you're around London,
maybe how you can drink some coffee.
(intense dramatic music)
It's finally here!
It has arrived.
The machine from 1958 has been restored,
Enrico has shipped it inside this crate.
It's time to open it up and have a look.
(Whirring)
Let's go straight up.
Up, up, up, up, up, up.
Now you probably think it's a bit harsh of me
to pixelate it, and being a tease.
Fine, I'll turn the pixelation off, but honestly,
did you think I was gonna show you the finished machine
at this point in the video?
No, no, no, we need to get this installed at Prufrock,
and that's gonna take a while.
Enrico's gonna come over and join us
for some installation, some training, some fun.
In the meantime, I wanna talk about the coffee
that we wanna serve from this thing.
Okay, first I need to make what might sound like
a contentious statement.
I'm gonna kinda throw myself under the bus.
I don't think specialty coffee roasters
really, really know all that much about blending.
That might seem hard to defend.
I don't think it is.
I will say this.
Blending specialty coffees is just kind of like
making a fruit salad, like as long as you have
good tasty ripe fruit in the mix, it's pretty good.
Sure, some mixes, some salads are better than others,
but really we're just kind of focused
on getting the best tastiest, ripest fruit into the mix.
The tradition of kind of blending to an end goal
of kind of crafting something
that maybe stays consistent over time,
all of that kind of stuff, I don't think specialty roasters
know that much about.
And I think our lack of experience
really showed up in this particular project.
When you're trying to work out what to serve
on an old espresso machine,
it doesn't feel right to serve modern espresso.
That's kind of built and benchmarked
against modern espresso machines.
We needed something different.
And so we decided to kind of go back to the drawing board,
or go back to the origins in a way.
And we bought a bunch of old school
traditional Italian espresso and we tasted it.
The goal for the tasting was this:
taste a bunch of coffee and just describe
the things that you really like.
Ignore the things that you don't.
And then by collecting the words that we liked,
we kind of built a brief for a blend.
Like what kind of textures,
what kind of flavors were we chasing?
But I think we underestimated how difficult that would be,
but along the way, you know, I think the roasting team
especially learned a ton about kind of roasting
for this style of espresso,
as well as blending for this style of espresso
and I think it's really interesting.
I don't generally like talking about
the coffee we roast on this channel.
I kind of really go to great lengths to avoid it.
I feel like I have to talk about it
'cause it's part of the entire experience
that we're trying to kind of make for somebody,
kind of the fun of the whole thing.
But just know that I don't really wanna do that.
I'll talk about the end result briefly
a little bit later on.
I'll probably be awkward.
We'll see.
Anyway, anyway, enough about that.
Let's go and talk about getting the machine
live, installed into a public place
where people can drink coffee from it.
And so for the second time in two days,
we are on our way to Prufrock,
and we're going to Prufrock for a tasting event tonight.
Last night, we were installing the machine.
So Enrico and Matteo had come over from Italy
to make sure that the install went really well.
And there's two reasons for that.
Firstly, most of the restored machines like this
don't go into working cafes, not busy cafes.
And secondly, using one of these as a barista
is really, really different,
and there's a kind of safety aspect that is a concern.
But tonight, we're doing a kind of practice tasting
for the Square Mile team actually to come down
and do the side by side tasting that we do.
Just to kind of give a sort of soft opening.
But when I get into Prufrock,
I'm gonna get behind the machine
and I'll show you the controls and the way it works,
and why people might need that little bit more training.
So this is the business end of the machine.
This is the barista end of the machine
you can see right here.
And in terms of things that are stressful,
we'll start right down here
with this little lever here, right?
Like this is a fill or empty kind of a thing here
because the machine is a manual fill machine, right?
There's a boiler inside that you have to fill.
And you know how full it is because over here,
you've got a level, right?
So that's the water level inside the boiler.
And if that runs low, you would expose the element,
burn it out, and it's dead.
It's just done.
So while you're working, all of the water from the machine
comes from that main steam boiler.
So you're constantly throughout the day
filling it back up again over and over and over again.
You don't want it to be too full, that's bad,
but you don't want it to be too empty.
So in working this, you certainly have to pay attention
to something you've never had to pay attention to before.
Hot water tap in the middle.
And that's if you lift up this valve,
that's where you would get hot water from.
This is so good.
Steam is what that says,
and it's one valve for both steam arms,
and the the steam arms are fixed steam arms here.
The way this works is you take this valve.
If you twist it that way, steam would come out of here,
and if you twist it this way, steam would come out of here,
which is frankly - which is a lot.
As for the lever grips themselves,
they're pretty standard if you know levers.
Portafilters. Weirdly small.
I've gotta say like I have big hands,
but it's like a weirdly small portafilter.
If I go and get like a modern portafilter,
that's like normal size.
Let me get them side by side.
There you go, there's a little side by side.
So it's weirdly small.
We put VST baskets in there
'cause we want the coffee to be as tasty as possible.
If you were running this thing on gas
as you might have done back in the day,
that was the gas input line.
Obviously, we're running this on power.
It's only a two kilowatt element in the back there
so it's not huge.
We're gonna start, you know,
getting coffee ready for the team.
Cups are ready.
Coffee is ready.
We're gonna be serving the coffee on these little trays.
Here you go, which I'll explain a bit more in just a second.
It's a little noisy inside,
and I just quickly wanna talk about the coffee
that we're gonna serve on the machine.
We made a limited edition blend called Il Grifone.
It's kind of a love letter to Italian espresso.
So aiming for the things that we like about
classic Italian espresso.
Texture, sweetness, chocolate, like genuine chocolate.
All of those things should be in there, and it's fun.
Got the machine in the bag.
It's kind of a nice thing.
And we feel like that's the kind of right thing
to serve on a lever machine
so you can have this contrasting experience
between like the new school
of Red Brick on a Black Eagle with all the technology,
versus this on a lever, which is very old school.
And if you get the tray, you can scan a QR code
you can tell us what you think of each coffee,
tell us your preference, that kind of stuff.
It's just, I hope just fun.
That's the point of this.
This will be quite hard to get 'cause it's really limited
and it's really only available here and online
in very small amounts.
So I'm gonna give away 20 bags to anyone that wants it.
Click the link in the description down below
for the giveaway.
Sign up, it's free to enter to anyone anywhere in the world
that we can ship coffee to.
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But now, I suspect you want something
that involves me just being quiet and letting you see
this beautiful espresso machine making some coffee.
(upbeat bright music)
And so it's live.
It's live now behind me over there.
I think it's over there.
Yeah, we're serving coffee.
It's happening.
It's gonna be happening for about six weeks
from when this video goes up or until we run out of coffee.
The machine's beautiful.
Like, Enrico did an amazing job with this thing.
It's like having a brand new machine, but from the 1950s.
Oh, and the machine historically
was hanging out in Lake Garda.
So maybe it served fancy coffee
to fancy people a long time ago.
And that's it.
I'm kind of curious to talk to the baristas after this
to see how they feel about having to sort of drive a car
without power steering for six weeks.
Do they miss all of the mod cons
of like a modern espresso machine?
Or is it just a very enjoyable,
very slow, deliberate experience?
We'll find out.
You're gonna ask me what am I gonna do
with the machine next?
I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
I don't feel like this is gonna be the end of its journey,
but I don't really know where it goes next.
If you have any ideas, leave them down in the comments below
and I'll update you on what happens at the end of this run.
That's it.
I hope you enjoyed this episode,
this little piece of the journey
of this very old machine.
And yeah, let me know your thoughts.
Let me know what I missed.
Let me know what you might wanna see in the future
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.